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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
I don’t have near the experience of Walker, but Perry is a people person. He campaigns and interacts well.
I didn’t see Perry (other than CPAC), but I have seen other undercard campaigns. Campaigning to small half empty rooms of unenthusiastic folk is less fun than being a winner. It’s hard to maintain dignity.
I was being mildly sarcastic… I don’t mean that either of them didn’t want to campaign. Just that neither of them wanted it so badly as Kasich evidently does.
Either he is deliberately running for VP, or he is willingly existing in a fantasy world in which he won’t be president, but he and the people around him imagine he can, and he can soak in their admiration and a whiff of the aura of the presidency. I really don’t know which. But neither Perry nor Walker would do either one.
I saw a comment from some smart observer (don’t remember who) just after Walker dropped out. Something like “the order of withdrawal does not correlate with actual chance of winning the nomination.” In other words — just because Walker dropped out first didn’t mean he had less of a chance than someone else. Just that he figured out first that his chance had failed, and chose to go do something else. Kasich is ignoring that his nonexistent chance failed.
If Kasich somehow became the nominee it would mess up the primary system forever, because nobody would ever drop out ever again.
The speculation falls on Ryan because he’s a dream pick for the Establishment, and it’s only in their wildest dreams that a contested convention leads anywhere but Trump or Cruz.
Do you think it plausible that a contested convention leads to Trump? Can you paint a picture of the delegates that vote against Trump on the first ballot, but for him on a later ballot?
He is deliberately running for VP.
Fwiw, I think he’s running for President. I think he wants to come third this time (which might happen) and be the next in line in 2020. If that is his plan, this cycle has gone quite close to perfectly for him so far.
I don’t think so. He’s already 63. Gonna be too old with Rubio, Ryan, Sasse, and Cotton all in the mix. I suspect – may the convention prove me wrong – that he’s already made a deal with Trump for the VP spot.
All three candidates mathematically capable of winning a major party nomination are older than Kasich will be. It’s clearly not disqualifying.
I don’t think any of this matters. If Trump is not the candidate then he will run third party or encourage his supporters to boycott the GOP candidate (if not riot). Sober evaluation of electoral strategy is good. But this time around, it is also meaningless. Trump has already insured a Hillary victory. That is a done deal. The best we can hope for now is to hold on to the Senate and/or the House, and try to mitigate the long term damage to the Party.
By July it will be too late for Trump to get on the ballot in most states.
It doesn’t matter. He’ll run a write-in campaign. Or just encourage his voters to stay home. Or to vote for Hillary. If Trump has proven anything, he has proven that he is congenitally incapable of responding to any slight in any way other than lashing out as viciously as he can. He will happily destroy the GOP if he decides he has been treated “unfairly.” And he has enough followers to do it.
Again, billy, you are applying a rational approach. Trump is not rational, and the usual rules don’t apply to him.
The one thing that may save the election is Trump’s ego. He really doesn’t want lose in a humiliating landslide to Crooked Hillary.
How much electoral history do you read? There are plenty of elections that seem certain to go one way in May that go the other way in November.
What do you even base your assertions on? Polling doesn’t suggest a Clinton certainty. If polling showed her consistently winning, which it doesn’t unless she’s up against two of the least popular figures in the party (everyone else beat her), then I guess you’d have something. Instead, you have your gut certainty which….
Is apparently not certain of anything except “something will happen and it’ll be a death knell”. I could buy “I’m certain Trump will run a write-in campaign”, although I’d think it was wrong. I could buy “I’m certain he’ll encourage his followers to vote for Hillary”, although I don’t think that that would be so bad for us (Clinton would either have to reject or accept his support, and both choices are helpful).
A lot of the usual rules don’t apply, and Trump’s choices aren’t always good choices, but they’re also not always catastrophically terrible choices. His businesses aren’t all that successful, but he’s not lost all his money; he could be worse. He’s on course, more or less, to win the primary outright, which suggests that he’s capable of making decisions that work for him.
When trying to predict Trump’s behavior, one does have to remember that he doesn’t think like you or I do. One shouldn’t fall into his follower’s practice of thinking of him as a colossal genius either. It’s also, wrong, though, to think of him as a force of pure chaotic darkness. He’s a human who puts his pants on one leg at a time and who has interests and concerns that he responds to.
Yeah. This seems like one of the most likely reasons for him not to run a third party campaign to me. It doesn’t seem like a reason that he wouldn’t want to run as the nominee, but he’d be wiped out as a third party run.
If the nominee is someone he likes and who takes a one term pledge, I think Trump’s belief in Trump’s learning curve is such that he’d have a reasonable degree of confidence that building bridges with the establishment and becoming the 2020 nominee with better favorables and maybe some experience in office was the way forward.
James, I think you are missing my point. All polls show Hillary beating Trump decisively, and I can’t see any way for that to change because I can’t see any way for Trump to change. Trump is who he is, as I wrote here. Public perceptions of both Hillary and Trump are pretty well set in stone.
If the nominee is anyone other than Trump, then I firmly believe that Trump will try to sabotage that nominee, and that he has enough followers to succeed. Trump believes he is entitled to the nomination, and has all but promised what he will do if he doesn’t get it.
Well, okay. I disagree with this; Clinton is uniquely good at making people feel looked down upon, Trump has had patches where he’s been winning in swing states (national numbers don’t mean all that much), and no one knows how elections will turn out ahead of time, particularly not this far out. I’d say Trump easily had a one in four chance of success.
Well, of course Trump promises to do that; it’s the only serious cudgel he has to beat the RNC with, and among his chief electoral assets in the primary is beating on the RNC. I see no reason to believe that he would continue to take this position after it ceased to benefit him, just as I’d be surprised if Cruz came out with a lot of moments in which he analogize do his colleagues to Nazi appeasers and Copperheads. Stances that are adopted for short term benefit tend not to be long term stances.
One way that you can tell that what you’re saying isn’t true is that you don’t know what he would do. Rioting at the convention is a possibility. Running third party is a possibility. Endorsing Clinton is a possibility. Telling people to stay home is a possibility. A position of “I don’t know what he’ll do, but I know it’ll be terrible” isn’t a position of considered principle, it’s just a statement of loathing.
I think a contested convention favors Cruz heavily. However, should Cruz fail to win on a second ballot, or a third, than I think momentum would certainly slip back Trump’s way. No one else has a real shot at it, and neither front-runner will give up their delegates. So it will become a question of who makes a deal with the Establishment first.
Cruz is smart, and he’s already courting the Establishment (this, more than anything, doomed him in this primary), but the Establishment is just using him as an anti-Trump stop-gap. They’ll betray him and the conservatives in a heart-beat if they think they’ve got a chance to lose to Hillary.
Trump is actually more in line with them ideologically, and is better prepared to make a deal with them. He’ll probably have to make some promises (that he will definitely break), but I could see him getting a surprise victory on the fourth or fifth ballot.
No one else is popular enough to make a run for it. 70+% of the party hates the Establishment and their voters and would cross over to secure a Trump or Cruz victory just to spite them.
Interesting.
A lot of people don’t like Cruz too much–he has burned many bridges. A lot of those people see the only advantage to Cruz as being the guy who can defeat Trump. If Cruz doesn’t get over the finish line by the second ballot, I think the ball could absolutely go back onto Trump’s side of the court. A lot of people are looking at Trump for the first time as a serious candidate because they are unhappy with Candidate Cruz. If the excitement over these two candidates is about the same, people–delegates–will pull out their shopping list of issue positions and pick the one who has the most check marks. That could be Trump.
I would put Kasich supporters in the Trump column, not Cruz. Kasich supporters hail from an earlier era of Republicans–points-of-light, kinder-gentler, compassionate-conservative era. Trump’s remarks to the effect that “we don’t want to see people dying in the streets” put him much closer to Kasich than to shut-down-the-funding-for-ObamaCare-or-else Cruz.
How could Trump get a lot of Kasich delegates? Making Kasich his VP. And it wouldn’t surprise me. I read somewhere that in one of Trump’s political books (The America We Deserve, 2000), he says some nice things about Kasich.
Thus Trump could win on the third ballot.
All this time I’ve been going with the notion that if he didn’t win on the first ballot, he’d be out. But that’s not necessarily so.
I am saying it is impossible for him to run third party because of ballot access. And if he is the GOP nominee, he would be wiped out. Polls aren’t much use this far out but approval ratings are and Trump’s are awful. This is before the media smear machine turns on him. Given how hard it is to turn those numbers around when you’re as well known as Trump…
“I don’t know what he’ll do but I know it will be some form of retribution” is not a statement of loathing. It’s just recognition of a consistent pattern of how Trump responds to what he perceives as any insult or slight. If you can give me an example of any situation where Trump has been treated unfairly (in his own opinion) and has not lashed out in retaliation, perhaps I will reconsider. Any example, in Trump’s 40 years of public life. Any example at all. Take your time. Using google is entirely fair. Any example at all.
One way to keep Trump on the reservation is appeal to his vanity and his name branding instinct – offer to start grooming a Donald Trump for the White House in 2034. Donald Jr. appears to be a fine young man, if Cruz or Mitt offered him a spot on the White House staff with a chance to move on in the future it might give The Donald pause.
It’s true that he often complains, but he has a pretty short attention span and generally seems happy to roll with things and move on when he doesn’t have much to gain by dwelling. If you want a specific instance of Trump being treated unfairly and being fine with it, you might enjoy this story.
While his general views of the media are shameful, he still deals with more or less everyone despite having been insulted by more or less everyone (it’s the media’s job to report vaguely factual accounts, which means accounts unflattering to Trump).
I think it would be very important for Priebus, Cruz, and such to be nice to Trump at the convention, but since it appears that Trump has essentially no chance of winning on a second ballot, I don’t think it would be hard for them to manage that. He has a lot of time between then and now to work out his anger and frustration over the delegate selection process. He works in two fields (reality TV and massive real estate construction) where losing some bids and preserving relationships to get the next one is a core competency, and I believe that he’s pretty good at that part of the job.
That’s very clever, although I think that it would be too heavy a lift for Cruz or Mitt. It also almost certainly goes against Lee’s approach to life. I can see it being a sound way forward for Carly, though, or Priebus on behalf of someone else.
James, Interesting article that you linked. I believe every word of it. It was smart of this lady to play on Trump’s ego to counter his theft and dishonesty. But it seems to me that she was too much of a small fry for him to bother with. He didn’t so much walk away from a fight, as not bother because there was nothing much he could do. Neither of those things are true of the Presidential nomination. It is not small fry stuff, and there’s a lot that Trump can do to retaliate.
I urge everyone reading this to click through to that article. It is a damning indictment of Trump’s character and dishonesty. For anyone who is impressed by Trump’s money, you should know how he makes it.
My take away was more that he views cheating his business partners as a sort of game. It means that he wasn’t offended when someone else cheated him. I suspect that he thinks of the election in similar terms; he’s suggested as much when he discounts his pedophile comments about Carson. At the moment he’s ranting and moaning about the election being stolen because that’s working incredibly well for him (Cruz is particularly vulnerable to his charges), but if it wasn’t, he’d move on and talk about something else.
He’s got approximately zero self control, and he does bear the occasional long term grudge, but one of the reasons that he’s been as successful as he has despite the colossal character flaws (i.e., why he hasn’t been dramatically less successful than the average person would have been) is that he’s fairly comfortable with networking with people who’ve screwed him. He’s happy, for instance, to say nice things about Rubio, who cost him more favourability than anyone else has, and who spent more of his own personal support in attacks on him than anyone else did.
I think that you mistakenly attribute sincerity to Trump.
Trump/Cruz is the price you are paying for Romney in 2008/2012. He isn’t unifying anybody.
Not sincerity. Monumental, out-of-control narcissism. A character so deeply flawed and so amoral that he can reasonably be expected to do the wrong thing in almost any situation. That’s a long way from “sincerity.”
You’re quoting what he says as the basis for your argument. That’s an appeal to his sincerity. A statement that he’ll choose to end his relationship with the GOP rather than grow it on the basis of his innate character is different. I think it’s also wrong, but less obviously so.