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Why the Convention Draft Would Not Be an Establishment Figure
Que Katy Perry
Sometimes, I write about stuff that I really know. Here, I’m not. I’m writing without particular knowledge, about betting markets, Nate Silver, and Jonah Goldberg being wrong. Since I think Nate and Jonah are, indisputably, the smartest guys in politics, I’m really asking for people to explain the errors in my thinking.
When pundits talk about a convention draft, they most often raise Speaker Paul Ryan as the example. This just seemed nuts to me (the odds have changed substantially while this is being drafted, but the larger point remains). In good ways and bad, Ryan is at the opposite end of the conservative Republican spectrum to Cruz and Trump. Fivethirtyeight used Ryan as an example of someone that Cruz could beat at the convention; I agree that Cruz could beat him, but I’m not sure why that would be the question. Likewise, Jonah conflated “convention draft” with “establishment figure.” It reminds me somewhat of the “if you’re not with Trump, you’re with Jeb!” claims from earlier in the cycle, except that Nate isn’t a Cruz supporter. PredictIt gave me a bet based on the claim that Ryan had a 15 percent chance to be the nominee, and Romney 5 percent. In the spirit of financial interest declarations, I took out bets against Kasich and Rubio, as well as Ryan and Mitt.
So I have two big questions. Firstly on why am I wrong, such that Ryan is the most likely convention pick if Trump and Cruz fail? Secondly, who do you believe to be the most likely candidates to prevail if Trump and Cruz do not? I should clarify that I’m neither stating that Trump will not make it on the first ballot, nor that Cruz will not make it on the second; there’s a reason that I’m not putting money either way on either of their candidacies. This is just about the “what if” of a potential third ballot. In normal election cycles when there is essentially no chance of a contested convention, there is still speculation about what candidates would emerge from such an outcome. This time, when a contested convention is likely, there appears to be little discussion of possible dark horse candidates.
The rest is my theory of the race, but you can skip it if you’d prefer to explain your draft picks than to read about mine.
Getting to the Drafts
If Trump doesn’t win on the first ballot, I don’t think he’ll be president. He’s not the second choice of any of the Kasich or Rubio delegates I’ve spoken to, and I’d be surprised if he were the second choice of many Cruz delegates. Cruz has apparently successfully worked the system in many states such that states that voted for Trump delegates will have anti-Trump delegates on the second and subsequent ballots. Perhaps more importantly, the RNC delegates are free agents from then on, too, which will reduce Trump’s total significantly. It seems likely that Trump supporters will behave poorly and sour his chances yet further. Even if Kasich came to a deal, I don’t think he could bring many of his delegates with him.
Should Trump fail on the first ballot, it’s an open question whether Cruz will have separated the superficial democratic outcomes (first ballot) from the more involved democratic outcomes (delegates) enough that he wins on the second. If Cruz doesn’t win on the second ballot, it’s still possible that he will win on a subsequent ballot; even if some other candidate comes forward — and it seems likely that any such candidate would capture a substantial portion of the non-Trump, non-Cruz delegates — Cruz could easily be more appealing to some Trump delegates than most others, and he wouldn’t need all that many Trump votes to add to his own. Set against that, many of his late-stage delegates are NeverTrump rather than CruzCrew. Still, it seems very possible that the third or subsequent ballots will see the race go to someone else.
Rule 40 is often presented as preventing this, but that is a misreading of what it says. To get on the ballot, you have to have the support of a majority of delegates from eight states. It should go without saying that if you do not have the majority of delegates from eight states, you’re probably not going to win anyway. You do not have to have the first ballot majority of delegates from eight states. The rule is not intended to select a candidate, but to mitigate the convention vandalism of the Ron Paul crowd. Anyone with a plausible chance should be on the ballot, but if you’re not on the ballot, there should be a limit to how much noise you can make.
The Draft
Unless there’s a massive effort underway to subvert the delegate selection away from both of the leading candidates — which would be hard to keep secret and does not appear to be public — the convention will be dominated by Cruz and Trump delegates, who would be unlikely to pick Ryan. The second most frequently voiced candidate is Romney. Romney and Ryan have both repeatedly disavowed interest in running, but their lack of interest is far from being the most important reason that they ain’t gonna make it. We don’t know the players yet. It seems likely that, if it makes it to the third round, Trump has somewhere between 1000 and 1150 second round delegates (his first round total minus RNC delegates, excepting the sole Trump-supporting RNC delegate, and the anti-Trump delegates elected as Trump delegates) and Cruz has somewhere between maybe 850 and 1236, while there are 168 RNC delegates and a variety of others (Rubio, uncommitted, Kasich, Santorum, etc.). Still, it seems logically necessary that any third or subsequent ballot outcome will involve a nominee who can draw some votes from multiple camps. For party unity, it still seems possible that this would involve an endorsement from candidates who had given up on being the candidate themselves.
Ideally, if it becomes clear that a candidate will win on an upcoming ballot, all the other candidates will endorse them, getting ahead of the story. I’ll continue to hope, although it would be kind of funny if the party ended up better at party unity this cycle than it did last time round.
Carly Fiorina
Pro: Fiorina is an exceptionally popular figure, particularly with the delegate class. She’s purchased a lot of influence through her presidency of the ACU. She’d be likely to beat Clinton. She’s tough, an outsider, and a business leader, which might help her gain some Trump delegates (she has at least one Trump delegate supporter, but I don’t know if my anecdotal evidence here represents something wider). She was the only candidate that the March For Life permitted to speak at their event, and she’s very good at those sorts of set piece speeches. She’s been perhaps Cruz’s finest surrogate, which should help her with Cruz delegates. She’s what passes for moderate in today’s GOP on policy: she was the biggest immigration squish and fence opponent in the primary, which should help her with Kasich delegates.
She’s well liked by the establishment and the support of her biggest fans (McCain, Graham, etc.) could easily make a difference with the RNC crowd. Ryan and Priebus both say, ridiculously, that the race should go to someone who filed for the primaries. Since this has never been the rule with previous contested conventions and only appears to make it more likely that we’ll have more ridiculous candidate filings in the future and hence more 17-40 man fields, I’m led to believe that either Priebus and Ryan are Fiorina fans or they know more about the hopes of the Santorum candidacy than I do.
On a personal note, Fiorina’s manager called me before the Kansas City meetup and left a lengthy voicemail; I gather he got my number off a Ricochet post. I’m not a Fiorina fan, and I never got round to getting back to him before I accidentally deleted the mail, but I was impressed by the level of hustle involved. I’ve had other activists say that they were contacted personally, too, which I haven’t heard from any other campaign.
Con: She hasn’t run a successful race, and it would be difficult for her to win the hardliners while appealing to the moderates. She didn’t particularly shine in the primary. Claims that she’s not invited to Georgetown cocktail parties are weaker than for other candidates.
Senator Mike Lee
Pro: For the Ann Coulter Trump supporters, Lee’s opposition to Trump might be less important than his having been clear and non-slippery in his opposition to amnesty. For Cruz delegates, Lee is almost certainly the most common second choice and was so way before he became the only senator to genuinely endorse Cruz (Graham’s constant stream of insults and total lack of positive statements make his “endorsement” less than genuine).
He’d receive the strong support of Senators Paul and Rubio. Of all the candidates, Lee seems most likely to represent the views of a plurality of voters as expressed in a large Trump/Cruz turnout while being acceptable to non-Trump, non-Cruz supporters. [While this was in draft, Senator Risch endorsed Cruz, but since few have heard of him, I don’t believe the analysis changed].
Con: We’re going to have a problem with conspiracy theorists after the convention because you don’t get to be a convention pick without actual conspiracies. How much worse does that become when the candidate is the second Mormon to be run in a row? Also, Lee has no experience running for anything outside Utah, which isn’t just among the reddest of states, but is also among the most idiosyncratic of states in its incestuous politics.
Perhaps more importantly, Mike Lee has been particularly relentless in his opposition to Trump; the success of any convention draft will depend in part on their ability to gain the endorsement of at least a portion of all the major factions and ideally the candidates. If Trump endorses Lee, I expect that the establishment will have given him something of very great value, and I’m not sure that the establishment likes Lee that much.
Rick Scott
Pro: He’d likely get just about every Trump delegate vote if Trump endorsed him. He’s got a record that appeals to many non-Trump supporters from just about every delegate block. If it looks like he’d be likely to win, I could imagine Cruz endorsing him. I don’t understand the Rubio-Scott relationship, and I don’t know how likely Kasich would be to endorse him, but I’d imagine that they’d both be supportive even if they didn’t explicitly endorse. While Lee seems like the closest thing to a unity candidate in substance, Scott seems like the most likely candidate to be a unity candidate in process, although Carly could get there.
Con: He endorsed Trump. Florida has a lot of crazy stories. He doesn’t have enormous name recognition, so the billion dollars that Clinton would have ready to drop on him would mean that there was a very real risk that he would be defined quickly and effectively as Trump-lite (where “lite” means “with an education that appears visible on TV, some sense of policy language, and such”).
I’d have thought that Governors Pence, Martinez, and — if Kasich does reasonably well — Hogan and Haley, were also more likely than Ryan. Who am I missing? Who shouldn’t be on the list? Why does anyone think that Ryan is plausible?
Published in Politics
Why isn’t Walker in the mix?
Overall though, I think that if Trump is not the nominee, (and please God, don’t let Trump be the nominee) then Cruz would be the best bet to win the general.
He will have campaigned in almost every state and has the infrastructure in place to compete.
I think that Walker would make the best President out of those who ran, and the most likely to defeat Clinton (I moved to Wisconsin to support his campaign), but his was a quiet voice, he got the least time in the debates, and he was drowned out by the Trump/ Cruz noise. It’s my sense from talking to Cruz and Trump activists that he was too quiet, too establishment, and/ or lacking a strong position on immigration. Some were also bothered by his alleged flip flop on ethanol.
He’s one of the least popular candidates available; he makes Clinton look good. The national polls paint an ugly picture (Clinton wins in head to heads, Cruz has a favorability spread of -21.2%, etc.). This gets worse when you get more specific; Cruz stacks up big numbers in the red states, but he’s generally been less popular than Trump, or any other candidate polled, in the swing states. This is without a substantial amount of negative advertising; he’s never been the primary target for a campaign that spent much on that. As such, I think Trump is more electable. I believe state polling has generally suggested that, and I think Trump’s negatives are better known.
All that said, I’d prefer this thread to be about the draft candidates. Make a case for Walker, for instance, but this probably isn’t the best place to sort out Cruz’s chances in the general.
Those were the days, weren’t they? It seems like ages ago when we conservatives could write off someone like Scott Walker because he kinda, sorta flip-flopped on ethanol subsidies.
Seriously, I think anyone other than Trump (again, please God don’t let it be Trump) or Cruz just won’t have enough time to build a national campaign.
But what do I know, I still can’t figure out why Romney lost in ’12.
I’m not sure how big a deal that is; the ground game is going to be run by the RNC whoever the nominee is. The call lists and such can be purchased from the primary campaigns. It’s easy to overestimate how much campaign presence there is right now; I was in four contests where Rubio spanked Cruz (NV, VA, DC, FL), and the organization that did that was never more than a handful of paid staff and a little more in the way of volunteers; so far as I know, Cruz has never had a meaningful presence in a swing state. In Florida and Nevada, Trump did have a ground game that worked pretty effectively, with lots of volunteers and relatively few professionals, but he’d need to build a pretty completely different organization for the general. Whoever is the nominee would see their campaign transform.
What does alarm me is that a draft candidate wouldn’t have the national attention. I just finished a book on the McGovern/ Eagleton affair, the last time we saw a convention pick, and it kinda filled me with dread. Palin, likewise, was ill served by the late point in the race at which she got into national politics.
Obama was still pretty popular, and King of Bain wrecked Romney’s favorables (not to Cruz levels, but still). This time, Clinton is far less popular and far less trusted. So long as we don’t pick someone even more hated and even less trustworthy, it seems to me like we have every reason for hope. Sadly, that may be an exception that swallows the rule.
It seems to me that an outside candidate will have to have Trump and Cruz’s endorsements in order to win. The Cruz endorsement would be easy enough- there is an open seat on the Supreme Court to offer him.
Trump would be harder. An appeal to his vanity? Let him be the man who steps aside and “saves” the Republican party instead of being the worst thing in the Trump lexicon- a loser.
Worse yet, a man who loses to a woman.
I only followed halfway through your post I am afraid, however it was because I do not exactly see what your question is. Are you looking for betting advice?
Cruz will be the nominee or Trump will be the nominee or there will be a circus in Cleveland and absolutely anyone could become the nominee. Well anyone minus Ryan, he is consistent and resolved in his actions.
My personal preference is to have him made a wall czar. He has a lot of credibility with significant chunks of the base on that issue, he has expertize in building (not in the same kind of building, but it’s an area where he wouldn’t be totally ignorant), he’d be able to claim it as a success (building a wall is the most important thing that’s going to happen in the next administration). I don’t think the public would be tremendously opposed to it. It’s an easy job and one that he’d probably be fairly good at (the fence is already built, so the real job would be being a reality TV star showing how he was improving it and adding to it).
Perhaps most importantly, it’s the area where any candidate is most likely to be distrusted (particularly Fiorina, the only candidate opposed to the wall in the 2016 Republican field).
For both Trump and Cruz, I suspect that a key promise would be the promise not to run for a second term.
I don’t think that Cruz is easy to buy with a SCOTUS nod; it seems highly unlikely to me that the Democrats would confirm him. If a candidate looked like they were going to win regardless of his support, though, I’d have thought that he’d endorse without being bribed. He has a future to think of, and there’s every chance that he could enter the next race as the presumptive nominee, with all the funding and some of the endorsements that that brings.
I’m looking for specificity or speculation on “anyone”, and I’m wondering if anyone knows why speculation fell on Ryan rather than Scott. It seems to me that the all out Cruz backers and the all out Trump backers I’ve spoken to have not generally had the other camp as its second choice, so I don’t know why there hasn’t been a bunch of speculation about who could draw votes from both camps (and from the others).
I suppose this comes down to a difference of perspective, that you would even suggest Scott amazes me.
Ryan has been suggested because he is known nationally and is a unifier within the party. The GOP is not unified party, the only one detested by the base more than Bohner is McConnell. Ryan bridged that gap and became Speaker. That many view him as a compromise candidate seems entirely obvious to me, Scott on the other hand would begin from nothing. How many voters outside of Florida even know who he is?
I still do not follow your line of reasoning.
Not sure how you came to this. Trump is the most liberal Republican we’ve seen in a long time and Cruz is among the most conservative.
Ryan isn’t on the opposite end of the conservative spectrum from Trump or Cruz. Trump and Cruz do not inhabit the same area on the conservative spectrum and as time goes on there appears less overlap in their support than amateurs like me originally thought.
This is especially so after Trump has managed to piss off everyone and the Pope with with his rhetoric including the Lyin Ted and Little Marco BS. Neither of them rate that kind of treatment and it clearly violates Reagan’s 11th.
I view the Ryan (and Romney), Cruz, and Trump spectrum more as a triangle with Ryan and Cruz inhabiting their own separate areas of conservatism and Trump somewhere in the populist/nationalist/’conservative’ forest on his own depending on what day of the week and where he is speaking.
Before predictions I think we need to address the rules committee and if the 8 state requirement from 2012 is reinstated this year that limits it to a cage match to the death between Cruz and Trump.
That may make the most sense going in, but given the poisoned stream between them it is hard to see some kind of reconciliation.
If it isn’t Trump or Cruz I am not sure it matters. The party may survive and beat Hillary without some of Trump’s supporters/enthusiasm or without some of Cruz’s supporters/enthusiasm, but I don’t see Republicans surviving and winning absent some of both those camps.
Kasich is the next logical choice because he has been out there running and putting the time in though I think he could potentially be more damaging than Trump <straps on Rico armor, because here it comes>.
After that it is just finding someone to be the fall guy for the end times of the party and I don’t know who signs up for that. Certainly not anyone hoping to have a future in presidential politics.
It would be better to look back and survey the ashes of 2016 than to be mixed in with them.
Regarding your predictions. I think they are sound, but do not think those scenarios defeat an HRC.
If Trump is not the nominee, does he just go quietly into the night? I don’t think so. He has stated that he will run as an independent, and I see no reason to not take him at his word.
They’re both ex-moderates now “very conservative” running on being anti-establishment candidates with the central planks in their platform being absurd tax cuts (the details of the fantasies differ, but for the most part defenses of one could be mistaken for a defense of the other), fairly similar gun platforms, spending cuts that vanish when you look at the small print, the wall, all other politicians being liars, a security policy that involves stopping being nice to gentile allies, hinting at committing war crimes, and referring to radical Islamic terrorism (that’s what it takes to win, you see), and a trade policy that involves stopping making trade deals and imposing vast new tariffs.
Cruz uses longer words, and there are differences; Trump is a caricature of SoConservatism when he suggests punishing women for abortions, Cruz when he says that there’s a government interest in reducing interest in autonomous sex. Cruz has a creepy moment with his daughter when he tries to kiss her, Trump when he suggests he’d date his. They both run as politically incorrect and friendless truth tellers.
Reagan’s 11th is a good example of what I mean by the Cruz/ Trump end of the spectrum. Even running against Trump in a two man race, Cruz has a total of two genuine senatorial endorsements and one nominal one. Even running against Cruz, Trump has a total of one senatorial endorsement. That’s genuinely unprecedented.
If you want to view it as a triangle, that’s fair. Either way, the vast bulk of the delegates are going to be on the Trump/ Cruz side of the triangle.
Point is, to get nominated after the first ballot, you probably need some Trump delegate support and some Cruz delegate support. There’s a range of choices for who might get that, and that might be Cruz (I don’t think it’s Trump), but it might also be someone who is not Cruz, and I’m keen to hear people’s thoughts on which not-Cruz they think is most likely.
Where did you take out said bets? Asking for a friend…
Who the heck are you, and can you get me an invite to a Georgetown Cocktail party? Assuming those cocktails are free of course
I addressed that. My understanding is that the RNC thinks that you need 8 states’ support before an individual round of voting, and that anyone who might win will, by definition, have that. The point was to stop Paul or other factional candidates from causing trouble, not to affect the outcome.
I agree that winning probably means having the support of Cruz and Trump (as I suggested in the post).
I haven’t heard this argument. I’ve read his books and listened to him speak (public event) and I think he’s kinda dumb (I don’t think that of any other candidate), and kinda personally odd, but his policy stuff is as close to generic republican as one can get. Electorally, I’d have thought he’d be pretty fantastic; he might even win if there was a Trump third party. On policy, I think he’d sign the Ryan Plan; he failed to get his expanded version of Walker’s Act 10 into law, but he tried. The Medicaid expansion is genuinely ugly, but most of what’s wrong with him is just stupid rhetoric; given the candidates running in the swing senate races, I think he’d be good downticket.
Is the argument that he’d cause a lot of heads to explode? I agree with that; we’d lose a lot of party members permanently, likely create a significant permanent third party and do a lot of long term harm like that.
I didn’t list him because I don’t think that many Cruz or Trump activists like him and the dislike only increases when people hear him talk.
Well, not to go on about having written stuff in the OP, but I don’t think that any of the three I suggested have much of a chance of getting a nomination under other circumstances, and I don’t think a failed bid would cut off their statewide efforts. Carly, obviously, would benefit the most in terms of future appointed office (I don’t think that Fiorina will ever win an elected non-national office). Lee has the humility to go for a one term pledge and mean it. I think Scott could plausibly talk about wanting to go back to Florida afterwards.
To answer your question, you’re thinking about the delegates. Think about the candidates: assuming Trump doesn’t win on the first ballot and Cruz doesn’t win on the second, the delegates will want a “white knight” candidate supported by Trump, Cruz, and Kasich. They would certainly vote for anyone if all 3 men came out and said “we’ve agreed, this is our unity candidate.”
Kasich would support anyone who promised him either a VP slot or cabinet post. Cruz would hopefully settle for a SC seat/VP slot/ control of judicial appointments. Trump is the belligerent frontrunner who would have to be pacified. Is there anyone other than himself that Trump would support for the nomination? I’m skeptical, but assuming he got a prominent cabinet position, some longshots:
Rick Scott
Rudy Giuliani
Newt Gingrich
Other Trump surrogates…
PredictIt.org It’s a great site for betting. If it’s a contested convention I’ll lose a bet, which would mean that I’d be 10/11 for this cycle. I don’t think any other betting site is as reliably dumb, although most of them are pretty easy to make money off if you have any knack for spotting news that will cause the markets to overreact.
That was my only contact with the Carly campaign, and the guy only heard about me by reading Ricochet. So, the answer to the question of how to get people to reach out to you (which has happened to me, once, in a minor way, but more excitingly to Majestyk by FOX, and to many people by the Federalist) is to post lots on Ricochet, I guess. I never advanced to the cocktail party level of things, but if you campaign hard for a candidate, you can often get invites to pizza parties, where the pizza and the drinks are free. In my experience, you’re more likely to get free alcohol from Mormons than from Gentiles, because they overcompensate.
I don’t see how the party gets out of this election in one piece. I’m willing to vote for almost anyone over a Democrat, but others aren’t as easy. I have a Trump-supporting relative. Here is her take:
Cruz is not eligible to run. He was a Canadian/Cuban citizen, not a natural-born US citizen, and she will not vote for anyone who is not absolutely qualified by the rules in the Constitution.
She says that Kasich is, “like Christie, a Republican-governor of a mafia-controlled Democratic-run state.”
She wouldn’t vote for either, and if Trump does not get the nomination, it will be because “Lyin’ Ted stole the delegates.” It will not be because The Donald did not pay enough attention to the process. She will either vote third-party or sit out if either Cruz or Kasich gets it.
I don’t know how many others are like she is, but I know from Ricochet that she is not an unusual example of a Trump supporter.
If Trump wins the nomination, we might survive as a party, sort of. We might lose to Hillary, though. If Cruz manages to take it on a ballot subsequent to the first, we can look forward to a major split. Kasich even more so.
So, another? Whoever it is would have to be a real knight in shining armor to rally the troops. Good luck to us with that.
Eugh. It hadn’t occurred to me, but, yeah, Newt’s bipartisan praise for Trump and Cruz (and support for Kasich earlier in the primaries) might actually have been a brilliant strategy. Obviously, I agree with you about Scott, and I also agree with your Christie omission.
I don’t think that the delegates would back Giuliani even if he got the endorsements; he’s not pro-life, the delegates are overwhelmingly pro-life, he’s moderate and establishment on all kinds of things. I could see him getting hundreds of votes, but I can’t see him winning. More likely than Ryan, though.
Lazy explains it well above. Scott is a competent conservative who would attract non-Trump votes and he’s possibly the most attractive viable candidate to Trump. If it’s a personal friend of Trump’s running and he gives Trump a wall promise and/ or (eugh) the promise of the US Trade Representative job, I think Trump would be down with that, and most of his delegates would go with him. He thus wouldn’t need that much support from the rest, and I think he’d get it.
I think Ryan was picked as a unifier in 2012, but those days were over shortly after he was picked.
He bought off the Freedom Caucus with promises of consultation that he followed through on. I don’t think…. You know, it hadn’t even occurred to me that promises of offices for delegates were likely to be a thing, but now I feel even worse about a convention. Still, he can’t bribe all that many of them, and he’s now pretty close to the paradigmatic establishment figure (after McConnell).
I noted that his name recognition isn’t terribly high, and noted the risk (it means that he’d be easily defined by Clinton). Still, I think there’d be a lot of “he’s not Trump” goodwill, by the time of the election he’d be well known (Palin wasn’t famous before she was). It’d be a short runway to take off from, but he’s a straightforward seeming guy who’s clearly smart. Running against Clinton, that could easily be enough.
I wish it could be Rick Perry.
If it was a buddy of Trump’s, like Scott, do you think that that would change her mind? If Trump retracted the unkind things he said about Carly, would that help? I’ve certainly spoken to Trump supporters who would be there. I’m not suggesting that they wouldn’t be angry about Lying Ted’s delegate theft, but if Trump’s response was to pick up and move on to support someone he could claim was an ally, I think that a large portion of his support would go with him.
Not impossible. He’d get a lot of Cruz’s support, and maybe add RNC, Rubio, and Kasich support. You know, I don’t remember what his relationship with Trump was like. Is that a burned bridge?
I largely agree with the main analysis -if the delegates go outside the top two, I don’t see them going to Ryan or Romney, and I don’t see them going to other candidates (Kasich or otherwise), so I think that scratches Fiorina. So they will be going to outsiders.
A look at previous Dark Horse candidates is instructive. Pierce was drafted by the New Hampshire Democratic Party on the grounds that they were the most loyal democrats. This might indicate a Texan or other Southerner -just not Cruz. If the Texas delegation wanted to draft, say Greg Abbott or another prominent leader in the Texas GOP.
Rutherford Hayes and Warren Harding actually did actively campaign, with the Ohio GOP advocating for them, so this might again indicate a loyal state -Texas, the South, the Midwest but not Plains -but it would have to be someone who is actually pushing for it -and I don’t think anyone meets that requirement.
James Garfield and William Jennings Bryan were nominated on the strength of speeches defending one part of the party coalitions against another -Garfield defending the anti-Grant faction, Bryan the Free Silver Faction. So a potential dark horse here would be the person who, after the loss of Trump, rises to defend the Trump faction, if not Trump personally. I don’t know who meets that requirement -which might be an opening for Lee, Scott, or someone we haven’t even thought of.
As our token progressive, it kind of makes sense that you wouldn’t see a good reason not to trust that Trump would maintain a consistent, principled, position.
Trump is principled when it comes to enhancing the image of Trump.
Perry was my first choice and I still like the idea.
Perry declared Trump to be a “cancer on conservatism,” so that bridge probably can’t be unburned.
True, but is it any worse than the criticism leveled at Trump from the other candidates?
I think that they don’t go to the people who’ve had bruising interactions; one of a number of reasons it couldn’t be Rubio is that there are too many Cruz activists ticked off that he didn’t drop out early, or who believe that if his Super PAC hadn’t spent money on Texas (the campaign didn’t), Cruz would have won a majority, and Trump supporters ticked off by the hands stuff. Likewise for other candidates. I don’t think that Carly ever really stung; she had the “would you vote for this face” thing, but Trump supporters I’ve spoken to didn’t mind that. I think her mostly undercard performance may not have risen to the level of counting as a candidate for those purposes.
I agree that Texas pride is a big thing, and I don’t think it’s impossible that Perry might get it (or Abbott, sure), but Pierce worked because he was a supporter for the dominant faction in a different part of the country to that faction’s base; he was thus supported by Southerners and New Hampshire. I’m not sure what issue could play a similar dynamic and most Texans seem to me to be really Texans, rather than transplants.
I agree. I think this is partly why the lack of news stories suprises me; this seems like it’s obviously the best chance for all sorts of people to try to be President, so why aren’t they trying? Or, if they are, why isn’t it in the media more?
Bryan stands out as encapsulating one of my key fears; like I say, I just finished a book on Eagleton, and it seems all too possible that someone could make a really great speech at the convention at a point when everyone was tired and afraid and emotional and that they could sweep the convention as an unknown. WJB was singularly talented, but the convention had no way of knowing that (they knew he could give a great speech, but there’s more to campaigning than that, not to mention the question of actually governing).