Sunday Times 2
Who can stop Trump? Republicans may have little choice but to vote Clinton
Anti-Trump protesters demonstrate outside a center at Salt Lake City in Utah just before Trump held a campaign rally there on Friday. AFP
Just a few steps from the White House, the latest secret gathering of Republicans seeking an answer to the question of who can still stop Donald Trump reached a demoralising answer for their party on Thursday night: Hillary Clinton.
A bleak mood has swept over the Grand Old Party in the past 24 hours as the multiple implications of Trump’s latest victory in primary elections on Tuesday have slowly sunk in.
The first realisation came quickly, as Marco Rubio’s chastening defeat in his home state of Florida forced him to join Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Chris Christie on the heap of discarded alternatives.
These once-promising candidates were meant to provide the answer to a problem that has dogged the party for a decade – how to appeal to a US electorate that is growing less white and less traditionally conservative.
Instead, the brutal cull of wannabe nominees has led to a final three who could hardly be less suited to this challenge: the achingly conservative Ted Cruz; a 63-year-old former Lehman Brothers executive called John Kasich; and a frontrunner whose calling card is a war on Latino immigration.
But the second, even more uncomfortable, realisation has taken longer to internalise. Even if Cruz and Kasich could provide an answer to the demographic conundrum, they barely stand a chance of beating Trump to the nomination.
The reality television star is already more than halfway to the 1,237 delegates he needs to win outright, and while he may yet fall short of crossing the finish line, Trump has already warned there could be riots if party leaders try to rig the process against a clear frontrunner.
Many establishment figures have reluctantly begun to concede that it is a non-starter to entertain the idea of bringing in an entirely new alternative candidate at a contested party convention in July.
This theoretical option first gained traction when Trump began to wobble against Cruz under an onslaught of attacks led by former party nominee Mitt Romney.
Delegates sent to the convention by their states are initially bound to vote according to the wishes of their primary electorates and, under current rules, can only select a candidate who has won eight states.
But the delegates can also vote a week before the convention to change the rules, something which could allow them to waive the current rule which says a candidate must have won in at least eight statesto be considered for the nomination.
Such a change would permit a fresh figure like Romney or the House speaker, Paul Ryan, to parachute into the contest once the nomination process moves to a second round because no one has reached the magic 1,237 delegate number on their own.
Several other recent meetings of anti-Trump activists have led to wealthy groups such as Club For Growth spending heavily on attack adverts in upcoming primary states like Utah. These are designed not to defeat him, but prevent him from reaching 1,237 before the convention so that such a floor fight can begin.
Yet, after Trump’s latest resounding election successes, former House speaker Newt Gingrich spoke for many in the party when he warned that Thursday’s meeting in Washington – convened by conservative activist Erick Erickson at the Army & Navy club – risked splitting the party by promoting the idea that Trump could be derailed by anyone other than primary voters.
“It is really damn simple,” responded Erickson in an open letter to Gingrich on Thursday night. “There’s no reason for you or anyone else to complicate it. Donald Trump’s nomination will give you Hillary Clinton’s presidency.”
The problem, according not just to Erickson, but almost every conservative not directly involved in the Trump campaign, is that the billionaire’s uncompromising rhetoric has alienated a staggering percentage of the people he would need to vote for him in a general election.
Among Latino voters – the fastest-growing block in America – Trump trails Clinton by 65 percentage points, and he is an average of 10-13 points behind the former secretary of state overall.
Clinton has her own likability problem – polling suggests her 41.6% of voters view her favourably, while 53.65% view her unfavourably.
That is simply eclipsed by the unpopularity of Trump. Pollsters currently peg Trump’s overall unfavourability rating at a historic 62.4% – nearly double the share who view him favourably.
How one of the world’s largest exercises in democracy can leave Americans facing two of the least popular candidates in a generation may seem strange, but the realistic alternatives for Republicans look less attractive still.
Even if he faced better prospects in the remaining primary elections, there is lacklustre support for Cruz, the Texas senator who has collected an unusual amount of public criticism from his own peers during his three-year career on Capitol Hill. Only two senators have yet endorsed him and one of those, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, described the choice between him and Trump as akin to deciding whether to be “shot or poisoned” to death.
Kasich is more widely supported by the establishment and many of the donors who have been pouring money into anti-Trump adverts, but he has only won a single primary election – in his home state of Ohio – and would be considered lucky if he manages a couple more.
Erickson and the few dozen other activists meeting this week put a brave face on the crisis, arguing it is about more than just winning the next election or preserving Republican unity.
“We believe that the issue of Donald Trump is greater than an issue of party. It is an issue of morals and character that all Americans, not just those of us in the conservative movement, must confront,” they wrote in a joint statement.
“We call for a unity ticket that unites the Republican party. If that unity ticket is unable to get 1,237 delegates prior to the convention, we recognize that it took Abraham Lincoln three ballots at the Republican convention in 1860 to become the party’s nominee and if it is good enough for Lincoln, that process should be good enough for all the candidates without threats of riots.”
But even getting to the point of having these options when the party meets in Cleveland in July remains far from certain.
Trump is expected to triumph in another big winner-takes-all primary next week in Arizona and, despite Kasich’s temporary speed bump in Ohio, could indeed reach the magic 1,237 before the convention.
It will be a nail-biting finish either way. No one may know for sure until the giant California primary on 7 June, which offers 172 delegates in a single night.
Yet rather than simply awarding all of them to the winner like Florida or Ohio, this largest GOP primary allocates delegates to the winners of each of its 53 congressional districts.
This means Trump and his many opponents in the party will not know whether he is their unquestionable nominee until results are in from every corner of this diverse state: from the conservatives of Orange County, to the Latinos in Central Valley and the libertarians of Silicon Valley.
By this stage, however, it will be far too late to pursue the only other option available to the stop Trump plotters.
This extreme idea involves bringing in a third-party candidate, to run as an independent and avoid the Republican nomination process entirely. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was once considering this, but would have taken votes mainly from Clinton, not Trump, so there is a search for a more conservative alternative.
The catch, according to a confidential study commissioned to examine the idea, is not just that few have come up with good names, but that such a candidate would need to gather thousands of signatures to get his or her name on general election ballot papers in time.
The study points out that 80,000 signatures are needed by 9 May alone in Texas – and all from people who did not vote in the state primary. A third-party candidacy that launched on 1 April would have just 106 days to find 460,000 such signatures across the 11 states with tough ballot access rules.
Even then, an independent conservative would probably just split the rightwing vote – saving neither the party from Trump, nor the country from Clinton, if they were the twin intentions.
Instead the many mainstream Republicans who are appalled at Trump’s antics are now realising they could have little alternative but to vote for Hillary Clinton or not vote all.
Courtesy the Guardian, UK