And On That Note

imagesWe’re just hours away from polls closing in the key battleground states of Florida and Ohio, along with North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri.  This will be a turning point in the election for all the obvious reasons, and for many unseen as well.  I’ve tried to resist hyperbole in my analysis of this race, but for Republicans, I do expect tonight’s results to answer the billion dollar question – Will Donald Trump ultimately be the 2016 Republican nominee?  If Trump holds onto his significant polling lead in Florida (which he is expected to do handily), and if he eeks out win in Ohio over Gov. John Kasich, then the answer is a resounding yes.  He will net those winner-take-all delegates, and I assume will win or come in 2nd in North Carolina and Illinois and Missouri, and likely split most of those proportionally allocated delegates.

If Trump should lose Ohio, however, then we are all but guaranteed a once(maybe twice) in a lifetime contested convention.   Trump will end the night with a strong lead, but will face an uphill battle attempting to reach the 1,237 delegates necessary to win the nomination outright.   John Kasich’s win will likely give him just enough juice to push forward into more favorable primaries in the Midwest and Northeast.  Ted Cruz can’t really win tonight, so he can’t lose either.   He’ll continue forward, losing states, winning delegates by apportionment, making the case that when the dust settles, he will have been the only candidate competitive with Donald Trump.  (This argument is about as asinine as it gets….like Oklahoma City Thunder saying they should represent the west in the NBA Finals because they’re the team that came the closest in repeated losing efforts against Steph Curry and the Warriors.  But that won’t stop the Texas Senator from making the argument anyway).   But under the Buckeyes-Hate-Trump scenario, while Trump could be denied delegates to win the nomination, it becomes mathematically impossible for the other candidates.   Cruz would need to win 80% of the remaining delegates, John Kasich would need to win 112% and well…Rubio would need to win every GOP primary state two times, and would probably need some of Bernie and Hillary’s delegates, the few that Carson and Jeb! are holding, and even then, he probably would still lose.

Trump still has the strong hand, but he has to close early….like…Today!  Why?  Simple.  Trump has relied solely on his national market domination, with little effort being put in his ground game which relies on volunteers to phone bank, canvass neighborhoods, focus on previous voter data and target likely Trump voters to maximize your voting bloc.  In all fairness, to date, he hasn’t really needed to, as he has won the majority of primaries already with the shock value of good ‘ol fashion hatred, bigotry, sexism and misogyny, xenophobia, Islamaphobia, Mexiphobia, black peoplephobia, factphobia, and logicphobia.   But if any candidate can’t win the delegates outright through the primary and caucus system, they would need to win the delegates over at the holy grail of modern political junkie-ism – the contested convention, where multiple candidates show up with varied numbers of delegates, none with enough to meet the magic number of 1,237 (a simple majority), and they have to lobby the delegates to abandon their original allegiance and move over to the candidate with the hot hand.   The convention will hold a ballot of the delegates, until one candidate has enough delegates to win.   During the first round of voting, the delegates are obligated to support the candidate from their respective state primary.  Fairly predictable.   But on the second ballot, those delegates are free to vote for whoever they want – they can remain with their original candidate, or they can move to someone who has presumably been wooing them with fancy dinners, nice gifts, and empty promises of job and campaign opportunities.  Movers, shakers, and Republican dealmakers will be working hard to sway these delegates in any number of directions.  The problem for Trump – to be successful in a contested convention scenario, the campaign would have to develop an unprecedented level of coordination on the ground, literally knowing where each of your 1,000+ delegates are at every moment, and staying in constant communication with each of them in order to maintain their support.   This level of coordination and sophisticated strategy, well….it’s over Trump’s head.  I’m not saying it’s beyond his capability – after all, he’s rich.  He’s funding his own campaign, sorta, and if he wanted to allocate significant resources to ground games in each state, ground games which would quickly coalesce into a convention ground game, he could.  For whatever reason, perhaps ego, perhaps ignorance, perhaps frugality, he’s failed to create that kind of ground game.   Which means one thing – he’s got the ball in the fourth quarter and he’s down 2, and he’s shooting from behind the arc – he’s not going for the tie, he’s not prepared for overtime – he’s going for the win.  Tonight is his shot.  Trump wins in Ohio and Florida and doesn’t get massacred anywhere else, and he’s on track to win and it’s mathematically impossible for any candidate to catch him.  Trump wins in Florida but loses in Ohio, then he simply won’t have the delegates to win it outright (though he will still get damn close), and it’s on to a contested convention, where not only is Trump not the favorite, but he is all but hated by the GOP Establishment and they will be done playing fair…they’ll be out to end Trump’s candidacy once and for all.

 

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