POLITICO
Some in the anti-Trump movement now concede that the push to defeat him hasn’t worked — and may be backfiring. In the final days leading up to the critical Florida primary, outside groups devoted to defeating Trump, including Our Principles PAC, spent more than $10 million against him only to see him notch a double-digit win and knock native son Marco Rubio out of the race.
While the anti-Trump groups have outlined a state-by-state bid to deprive him of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination and to force a contested convention in Cleveland — what would be the GOP’s first since 1976 — there’s growing worry that such an event could be traumatic for the party. Trump has said there could be “riots” if he’s denied the nomination — and while many Republicans, including Kasich, have condemned those remarks as inciting violence, many also fear the consequences if he is right.
“If it’s not close, how much stomach do I have for a contested convention?” said Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America,
The mogul is poised for another strong performance on Tuesday, when he’s seen as the favorite in the winner-take-all Arizona primary. He also is expected to rack up a number of delegates in Utah, which votes the same day.
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WASHINGTON POST, EUGENE ROBINSON
We can no longer pretend this isn’t happening. Donald Trump will very likely be the Republican nominee for president, and there is a non-zero chance he could win in November.... Cruz and Kasich are his only remaining rivals — all others have been vanquished — and Trump has won more primaries and convention delegates than the two of them put together.
If we were talking about a normal candidate, rather than a dangerous demagogue, we’d say he had pretty much sealed the deal for the nomination. But otherwise-sensible people seem to be gambling on some kind of miracle — rather than focusing on what needs to be done to keep Trump out of the White House.
The stop-Trump “movement” in the Republican Party has been, thus far, a pathetic joke. The fecklessness of the whole endeavor was encapsulated by Mitt Romney’s performance earlier this month: He told voters why they should not vote for Trump but stopped short of endorsing an alternative.
The party establishment has no hope of defeating Trump if it is not willing to coalesce around one of his opponents. I understand that Cruz — the logical choice, since he has actually beaten Trump multiple times in primaries and caucuses — is widely disliked and almost certainly too conservative to win the general election. I understand that Kasich is seen as too moderate and has not demonstrated much appeal to the base. But if party leaders can’t bring themselves to choose one or the other, Trump will continue to roll.
Big-money GOP donors seem stunned into paralysis. Many of them supported either Jeb Bush, who bowed out last month after a drubbing in South Carolina, or his fellow Floridian, Marco Rubio, who withdrew Tuesday after being routed in his home state. No politician is invulnerable; a massive, sustained, well-financed media campaign against Trump in the states yet to vote could hurt him. But no one seems willing to coordinate or fund such an effort, and time is fast running out.
It looks increasingly possible that he will arrive at the convention in Cleveland with the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination. But it will be close, and he may end up with just a strong plurality, not a majority. This opens the possibility of a contested convention, which could, after several ballots, give the nod to someone else.
In typical strongman fashion, Trump ventured that “I think you’d have riots” if the party did such a thing. Given the tension that surrounds his rallies, he may be right. But I have a hard time believing the GOP establishment would even attempt such a maneuver, let alone pull it off.
Snatching the nomination from a candidate who has demonstrated such popular appeal with the party base would be an act of self-sacrifice by the establishment. It might be the right thing for the nation as a whole, but it would fracture the GOP and all but ensure defeat in November.
There are signs that some leading party figures are becoming resigned to the prospect of Trump as their candidate. Uber-strategist Karl Rove, who has been a loud and steady anti-Trump voice, had a column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday in which he offered Trump “ten bits of unsolicited advice” to help “raise your game.” The first suggestion was laughable: “Change your tone.” Where Trump is concerned, that’s the same as saying: “Become a different person.”
Some establishment Republicans will decide it’s better to let Trump suffer a crushing loss and rebuild the party afterward, rather than tear it apart at the convention.
WASHINGTON POST, Fareed Zakaria
Marco Rubio has called Trump a “con artist” and compared him to “third-world strongmen.” He has said Trump has “no ideas of any substance,” “has spent a career sticking it to working people,” is trying to “prey upon people’s fears,” and encourages violence at his rallies. But, “at this moment,” he says he intends to support whomever emerges as the Republican nominee. So do John McCain and Paul Ryan, who has taken the rare step of intervening in the campaign three times to reprimand Trump for his ideas and rhetoric. Even Lindsey Graham, who has called Trump “the most unprepared person I’ve ever met to be commander in chief,” will not say he will not vote for him. Indeed, there is currently just one Republican senator who has committed to not voting for Trump.
Ironically, conservatives today are in something of the same position that Republican moderates were in 1964, as Barry Goldwater steamed toward the nomination. It is difficult to understand today how dramatic a break this was for the Republicans. As Geoffrey Kabaservice documents in his illuminating book, “Rule and Ruin,” the party had prided itself on its progressive stand on race from Abraham Lincoln onward. Goldwater, on the other hand, opposed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to integrate schools in Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights act. A hundred years of Republican work on these issues would be thrown away, the moderates felt, were they to nominate Goldwater.
Trump marks, in many ways, an even larger break from the past than Goldwater. The modern Republican Party has been devoted to free markets and free trade, social conservatism, an expansionist foreign policy and fiscal discipline, especially on entitlements. Remember that the speech that launched Ronald Reagan’s career was an attack on Medicare. On every one of these issues, Trump either openly disagrees or — as with abortion — has a past track record of disagreement.
Over the past decade, Republican support for immigration and free trade has been collapsing. But Trump’s nomination would transform the party into a blue-collar, populist, nationalist movement with a racial element — much like many others in the Western world. This would be a very different party from Reagan’s or Ryan’s.
When I was in graduate school, we were told to study carefully a seminal 1955 essay on American politics by the scholar V.O. Key on critical elections. Key’s thesis was that every generation or so, there is an election that changes the preexisting groupings of voters in a way that endures for years, even decades. Scholars debate which elections were ones that realigned American politics. Most generally agree that 1932 was one, bringing together Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of northern liberals, urban ethnics and Southern whites to form a Democratic majority.
2016 might well go down as another such election, one that scrambles the old order but perhaps without setting up a new one. In this respect, it looks like 1964, also an election that realigned politics, shifting Southern whites to the Republican Party ever since. Then , too, there was enormous energy, new voters and a candidate who thrilled his supporters. Then, too, the establishment could not muster the courage and unity to oppose the front-runner, scared to push back against the energy and devotion of the new populist forces.
Or Republicans Can Stop Trump By Voting For Clinton.
THE GUARDIAN
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.
The only other option available to the stop Trump plotters[is] bringing in a third-party candidate, to run as an independent and avoid the Republican nomination process entirely.
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 at all.
Half of Republican voters tell pollsters they do not know yet whether they could bring themselves to back Trump if he wins their party nomination.