FIVETHIRTYEIGHT
Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday delegate haul was no blowout. He won 254 delegates, Ted Cruz won 217, and Marco Rubio took in 97. But Trump beat FiveThirtyEight’s delegate targets, which estimate the number of delegates each candidate needs to win in each contest to be on track to win the nomination. If Trump continues to meet or exceed those targets through the remainder of the primaries, he’ll end up with just enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination.
It’s true, as The Associated Press reported, that Trump hasn’t won a majority of the delegates awarded so far; he’s won about 46 percent of them. But when you look at the states that have voted, that’s about 5 percentage points better than he should have done, based on polling data, demographics and social media data, which factor into our delegate targets.
How do they work? We know, for example, that Trump pulls a disproportionate share of his support from voters without a college degree, so he tends to do better in contests with less-educated electorates. Our targets take these kinds of demographic dynamics into account. Looking forward, Trump should win more delegates in states with fewer college-educated voters. If Trump hits his targets in the remaining contests, he’ll end up with 1,276 delegates out of 2,472 — 52 percent.
Being on track for a 2 percentage point majority of delegates doesn’t give Trump much room for error. Slip-ups in the winner-take-all states of Florida or Ohio on March 15 would knock him off track, as would even a slight underperformance in states that allocate their delegates proportionally.
And Trump could fall short on March 15. Those winner-take-all states are the homes of two of his rivals: John Kasich (Ohio) and Marco Rubio (Florida). Although FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast gives Trump a 68 percent chance of winning Florida [He leads by about 6%] and its 99 delegates, Rubio is expected to focus his efforts there in the next two weeks. Expect a barrage of anti-Trump ads on Florida television sets. In Ohio, which will award 66 delegates to the winner of its primary, our polls-plus forecast gives Kasich a 41 percent chance and Trump a 39 percent chance of winning.
Super Tuesday’s results suggest a strategic shift: The effort to stop Trump may no longer call for consolidation around one alternative; it’s now a multifront war led by multiple candidates and disparate factions of the party with the singular aim of preventing Trump from winning 1,237 delegates.
WASHINGTON POST
The Republican Party was in a state of pandemonium Wednesday as a clutch of independent groups scrambled to throw together a last-ditch effort to deny Donald Trump the presidential nomination, even as some party figures concluded it was now too late to stop the billionaire mogul.
The decentralized and desperate stop-Trump campaign found a possible new leader in Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, who is expected to deliver a forceful, top-to-bottom indictment of Trump in a speech on Thursday.
In a flurry of conference calls and meetings, top Republican donors and strategists laid plans for a multimillion-dollar assault on the front-runner in a series of states holding contests on March 15. Ground zero is Florida, where home-state Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading establishment candidate, is going all in to defeat Trump, who leads in the polls there.
The non-Trump candidates hope to prevent him from acquiring the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. That would push an ultimate decision to the Republican National Convention in July, potentially turning the Cleveland showcase into a hothouse of intrigue, mischief-making and chaos.
The emergence of Romney as a leading Trump antagonist stoked speculation that he might offer himself as a consensus candidate at the convention. But loyalists were adamant that he has no plans to run. He continues to be skeptical about the prospect of success.
Other operatives worked behind the scenes Wednesday on plans for a ruthless ad blitz to discredit Trump by attacking his business career and character. It marks a dramatic escalation of an anti-Trump campaign that until recently had little firepower. Conservative Solutions PAC, a super PAC allied with Rubio; dropped nearly $3 million worth of new anti-Trump ads this week, largely in Florida, Michigan and Illinois, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Our Principles is also launching a new ad in those states, part of a seven-figure buy that will also air on national cable.
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What Rubio, Cruz and Kasich now are counting on most is depriving Trump of enough delegates that they could force a convention showdown. The prospect of a brokered convention probably overstates what would unfold, in part because there is no sign of the ability of a few power brokers to have their way.
“This is a political marketplace with a set of structured rules,” Leavitt said. “Whoever can get 1,237 delegates will be the nominee. There is a lot of maneuvering within those rules that can occur. But there is no smoke-filled room.”
Watching Trump talk on Tuesday night about unifying the party, Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign, said: “I was struck that he was doing smart things, saying the right things. . . . He has to keep that sort of thing up. Look presidential. Don’t go back into the gutter.”
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| Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202
Many readers would probably be stunned by some of the people who are secretly supporting Trump and don’t want to admit it on the record. His coalition includes not just rock-ribbed conservatives and God-fearing evangelicals but Ivy-League-educated professionals. Some realize he’s not actually that authentically conservative and look the other way. Some, who fancy themselves moderates, admire the businessman’s malleability...“It’s like Dr. Strangelove,” said a tip-top Republican who is closely aligned with the GOP establishment and supported Chris Christie until he dropped out. “People are saying, ‘I’m not gonna tell my friends and family I’m voting for Trump,’ but then they’re pulling the trigger for Trump. I might as well be like Slim Pickens at the end of the movie and just ride the atomic bomb down and see what happens.”
