Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced last Sunday that they would team up to stop Donald Trump, adopting a last-ditch philosophy that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Well, kind of.
The two candidates’ main purpose in joining forces was to divvy up three of the remaining states where they might have a shot at winning in a head-to-head against Trump. Kasich will give up Indiana to Cruz, and Cruz will give New Mexico and Oregon to Kasich. Or, at least, that was the plan for about five minutes.
It doesn’t appear that either candidate will actually push for the other in any of these states. According to The Washington Post, Cruz told reporters that it was “big news today that John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump.”
This phrasing seemed to make Kasich a little nervous, because he told reporters, “I never told ‘em not to vote for me” (meaning his supporters). He added, “They ought to vote for me. But I’m not over there campaigning and spending resources.”
Truthfully, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for either candidate to try and endorse the other to his supporters. Despite their common enemy, Kasich’s positions are to the left of Trump, and Cruz tries to pin himself as the true conservative, farther to the right than Trump. Unless, as Matthew Yglesias of Vox pointed out, one of them is willing to say that anybody — including Hillary Clinton (!) — would be a better president than Trump, there’s little point in this make-believe alliance.
Donald Trump himself was quite unimpressed with the partnership, as he so eloquently outlined in a tweet, “Wow, just announced that Lyin’ Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. DESPERATION!”
In Trump’s business world, collusion is an illegal practice of conspiring, often to cheat others. In politics, it’s just called forming an alliance. It is often a very smart move. But here, the Donald may actually be correct: This joining of forces is really desperate.
The two candidates are putting on a front to pretend there’s some kind of party alliance, but who are they fooling at this point? It’s almost May, and Trump has almost 50 percent of support from voters in the Republican Party, according to national primary data. This alliance is too little, far too late.
In terms of the math, Kasich would need 158 percent of the remaining delegates to take the nomination, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post reported. Cruz would need about 110 percent, according to Linda Qiu of PolitiFact. Of course, this race hasn’t been about hitting the “magic number” for a while — just about stopping Trump from getting to it, an effort that has gotten progressively feebler as time goes on.
Theoretically, a better move might be for one of these two to drop out and actually throw their full support behind the one remaining candidate who isn’t Trump. But, one, that will never happen, and two, most of the people supporting Cruz or Kasich list Trump as their second choice, according to one Public Policy poll. So even if one of them were to drop out, a lot of work would have to be done to make sure those supporters wouldn’t just back Trump in the remaining contests.
In all likelihood, this drama will play out to the convention. There’s no way Cruz or Kasich can earn enough delegates to hit the magic number before then, and it’s relatively unlikely that Trump will either, although he will easily be the closest.
I, for one, am exhausted. Remember when Jeb Bush was the presumptive Republican nominee? What easy days those were. Now here we are — probably headed for a brokered convention, something that hasn’t happened in 40 years. It’s quite possible another candidate will emerge as a contender there — the rumor was Paul Ryan for a bit, although he has said he would not accept.
Whatever happens there, and however long that takes, we’ll just be at the end of the primaries. There’s still a whole general election season ahead. I’d like to believe that it won’t be as full of twists and turns as the primaries, since there will only be two major candidates.
Or will there? The whispering about picking a third candidate if Trump actually becomes the Republican nominee is still alive and well. There’s no easy end in sight.
Is it November yet?
