Anti-Trump Republicans have gotten their wish: the 2016 GOP presidential contest has become a race between Donald Trump and Not Donald Trump.
There's just one problem: Donald Trump is winning.
It is by no means a clean sweep. Trump lost Ohio's winner-take-all primary to Gov. John Kasich by a bigger than expected margin in perhaps the clearest example of strategic anti-Trump voting seen yet. Trump barely leads Ted Cruz in Missouri and left some delegates on the table in Illinois and North Carolina.
Yet Trump won three and probably four out of the five states that voted Tuesday. He destroyed Marco Rubio in Florida and knocked him out of the presidential race. Barring a reversal in Missouri due to recount, the only candidate to beat Trump last night is one with no path to the nomination through the primaries.
While Cruz hasn't been mathematically eliminated from meeting the 1,237-delegate threshold for winning the nomination outright, Republicans against Trump face long odds unless they can force a contested convention and beat him there or bolt the party in large numbers.
That last bit may not be such a farfetched scenario. The exit polls found that 37 percent of Republican primary voters who turned out Tuesday would be open to voting for a third party against Trump: 30 percent in Florida, 40 percent in Illinois, 42 percent in Missouri, 39 percent in North Carolina and 41 percent in Ohio — and these are mostly states Trump won.
The early data found that two-thirds of Republicans voting against Trump would entertain a third-party vote in November if he was the nominee. Seven in ten Republicans overall would still probably or definitely vote for Trump and the percentage of people who say they'd consider a third party is usually much larger than those who actually vote for one.
Still, that shows a lot of discontent with Trump, whose favorability numbers aren't getting any better.
But Trump regularly racks up pluralities of GOP voters in a diverse range of states, from Arkansas to Massachusetts to Illinois. Cruz talks about beating Trump "again and again," as he's managed to carry a few of the states he was supposed to win and occasionally outhustle the billionaire in the caucuses.
On the other hand, Trump has generally beaten Cruz throughout the South, which was supposed to be the Texas senator's strongest region. He has competed with Cruz for evangelical and conservative voters, who were supposed to be the Texan's base.
The theory has always been once the field winnows, Trump is toast. Maybe. But the field didn't winnow quickly enough to prevent Trump from amassing a large delegate lead and Trump keeps winning as it shrinks.
Trump's surviving challengers have tried to come to terms with the reality TV star's success in different ways. Kasich positioned himself as the rhetorical anti-Trump: the man who will bring people together rather than pull them apart, the wonk who can govern with a servant's heart rather than the inflammatory and narcissistic political neophyte whose rallies degenerate into fisticuffs.
Kasich is so in love with the democratic process it makes him want to cry. He is the son of a mailman, the grandson of a coalminer and he wants to carry on the traditions of the father of our country. Get it?
Cruz is trying to simultaneously be the practical and ideological anti-Trump. Ideological because he was a true believer in conservative causes while Trump was bankrolling liberal ones, the reliable movement foot solider on issues where Trump is either a very recent convert or still suspect to this day. Practical because he is the only candidate within a mile of Trump in the delegate count and also the only one to beat Trump under less than perfect circumstances (with apologies to Rubio's wins in Puerto Rico and D.C. or Kasich's in his home state).
But the candidate whose Tuesday remarks may have best reflected the party's challenge in dealing with Trump is the one who won't be there anymore. As Rubio ended his campaign, he told supporters that the anger voters feel is understandable, it was predictable, it was fanned even by the conservative movement but has most of its roots in a party establishment that has lost touch with its voters.
Rubio demonstrated a level of understanding about what motivates Trump supporters that exceeded almost anything we have heard from his rivals during this campaign. And yet even his swan song showed no hint of knowing how to offer competing alternatives or otherwise do anything about it.
Thus Trump continues to win.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/why-anti-trump-republicans-are-losing/article/2585953
