Thank you!

Absolutely! The delegate tracker is already updated with last night’s results: http://www.jamesjheaney.com/2016/03/14/the-de-civitate-poor-mans-stop-trump-delegate-tracker/

I’ll put the tracker in the sidebar so people know where to find it.

We are quickly approaching the point where Kasich actually NEEDS to get out, which is scary. Fortunately, the primary calendar slows waaayyyyy down now, so maybe we can leverage him out in the next few weeks without losing any delegates because of him.

That is a question I ask myself every day.

It’s funny; I’m a Brit, and all I did was read the amendment, which is not very long. Why have other political commentators not noticed this highly amusing possibilities?

Oh, that delights me. That genuinely delights me. And it’s the Senate that chooses the Vice President at that!

More divided government! Every faction with a political gun to every other faction’s head! What a weird amendment the Twelfth is.

Here’s another tweak: if we did get to the House of Representatives choosing, they get to choose from the top three for president – so if it’s Trump, Clinton and some Republican convention stitch-up, they can choose that person. But they only get to choose from the top _two_ for VP – so you have the prospect of a Republican-chosen president alongside either a Democratic or Trump’s choice of Vice President!

>Is it possible that the Republican establishment have decided they actually hate Cruz a little more than they hate Trump who, after all, is famously a man you can make deals with?

I think that is a distinct possibility. I mean, several major establishment figures said as much before Iowa. My heart has been gladdened by none other than Lindsey Graham leading by example and endorsing Cruz, but plenty of others have not followed suit.

Even if it is not the case that the establishment actively desires Trump over Cruz, I think it’s very possible that they hate Cruz so much they simply aren’t willing to swallow their feelings and lift a finger to help him. Perhaps, moreover, they are desperate to believe that Kasich (1) has a decent chance and (2) won’t nominate Trump in the process. People who are desperate to believe something usually find a way, and I must say I sympathize with the Acela Corridor this year; as much as my understanding of politics has been shattered by the events of this year, as a “movement conservative” with some Tea Party sympathies, how much more shattered and confused and shell-shocked must *they* be feeling? I sympathize. But we don’t have time for them to get over it — we need to act against Kasich right quick.

>Some Convention-based hackery might just hand Clinton the presidency as all the undecided voters turn away in disgust at an obvious stitch-up. But the other option is that they do that anyway, force Trump 3rd party in a wave of indignation, end up with no-one being elected president because no-one gets enough votes, and Paul Ryan gets to choose whoever he wants. Is that right?

I have a lot more to say about this in upcoming posts. My “conventional chaos” series got shoved aside by the drama surrounding March 15th and the various spoiler candidates we’ve seen, but, after the 22nd, we enter a lull in the primary calendar and I should hopefully be able to get back on track.

Bottom line, though, is that I think Trump runs in the general no matter what. If he wins the convention, he runs as a Republican. If he loses the convention — either because it was “stolen” from him or simply didn’t have a majority — then he runs as an independent. Even if he loses the traditional way — Cruz just plain wins a lot of races and gets a majority of the delegates pre-convention — I think Trump is too invested at this point to step back, and will make an independent run. That is pretty bad news, as I don’t think he can win a single state in a three-way race (he is less popular with general election voters than Mondale ’84), but could spoil Republican wins in various battleground states. Perhaps he can also spoil Clinton wins in some “blue wall” states by drawing off blue-collar Democrats.

But… I just don’t know. A race with a serious third-party candidate with crossover appeal hasn’t happened in decades, and a race with a serious third-party candidate who bolted his own party to run as an independent hasn’t happened since the Bull Moose insurrection of 1912. We have no good electoral models for this. Nor do we even have a clear idea of who’s going to be running, or under what parties (will Erick Erickson start a conservative-party-in-exile and run a candidate?). We can say a great deal about the race up until the GOP convention, but the convention represents a great disturbance in the Force. The Dark Side clouds everything. Impossible to see beyond it, the future is.

It is worth noting that, if the election does have three parties running, and nobody gets a majority of electoral votes, and the election is thrown to the House, the House can’t just pick anyone: Amendment XII specifies that the president must be chosen from among the top three vote-getters in the electoral college. So Ryan would potentially have his choice between Trump, Clinton, and (say) Ben Sasse, but no one else. Also, I’m not sure how much control Ryan would really have over that process, because the Amendment XII House procedure is WEIRD — all representatives group with their individual states, each *state* gets a single vote (based on majority support from within the state caucus), and the winner needs 26 states. Might be fun to go dig up the House rules on Amendment XII proceedings sometimes. ’cause holy cow.

Anyway, always nice to see you, gerv. Thanks for the questions. Hope these answers seem non-crazy.

If this election has taught me one thing, it’s that I don’t understand people as well as I thought I did! So my speculations must be taken with a grain of salt.

Deep down, I think Kasich knows he cannot win, but he has refused to admit this to himself. He is well-known in D.C. circles for being high-strung, high-handed, and just plain arrogant. (Consider the Kasich Traffic Stop video that surfaced recently. This is the sort of thing I hear about a lot.) I think he has convinced himself, in his arrogance, that he can win in the Northeast states (which vote on April 19th and April 26th), because he has positioned himself as a moderate Republican and the conventional wisdom has always been that moderate Republicans do well in the Northeast. He’s clinging to that.

On its face, it’s not an insane strategy. If Kasich swept the Northeast, it would put him in striking distance of passing the “Rule 40(b)” threshold, so he could get his name into nomination, and it would block Trump from securing the nomination on the first ballot. It wouldn’t get Kasich anywhere close to Trump’s delegate total, but it would force the issue to go to a convention.

The problem is that it seems impossible this year. Firstly, Trump really has shaken up the electoral map; his appeal to blue-collar whites has changed the Northeast from Moderate Republican Country to Trump Country, as Nate Cohn has shown here.

Secondly, even if Kasich could potentially overcome Trump’s blue-collar legions with a strong campaign and the sheer power of his charisma in a two-way race (and, yeah, I think Kasich believes he has a whole lot of charisma), Kasich is in fact in a three-way race. We know from the polls that Cruz and Kasich draw more from each others’ voter bases than either does from Trump. That means they will split their voters and — perhaps not in every case, but certainly in most cases — they will lose any contest that would have been even remotely close in a head-to-head matchup to Trump’s bare plurality. With Cruz in the race, Kasich might win Delaware and Maryland, but he ain’t sweeping the Northeast. Not without a miracle. (Which I am praying for!)

Kasich might then try to turn this whole article around and say that Cruz, not he, is the true spoiler. But Cruz has a stop-Trump strategy that isn’t pure self-centered theory. Cruz has in fact won contests all over the country, has run closer to Trump in losing contests than any other candidate, and has enough delegates to overtake Trump. Cruz also beats Trump in head-to-head polls; Kasich, as far as I am aware, does not. (Rubio only beat Trump sometimes, and Kasich is even more alienated from the base than Rubio turned out to be, so this seems right.) Cruz has a clear and unambiguous claim to being the party’s chosen anti-Trump, which makes Kasich the clear and unambiguous spoiler.

And thus the subject of this article!

All that said, I do think there’s a corner of Kasich’s brain that knows all this, because it is really not that hard for a presidential candidate with a four-person delegate strategy team to recognize these realities. And I think that corner of his brain is thinking, “Hey, well, vice president isn’t so bad.” I mean, that’s the only way I can understand Chris Christie’s Trump endorsement, too.

Some Convention-based hackery might just hand Clinton the presidency as all the undecided voters turn away in disgust at an obvious stitch-up. But the other option is that they do that anyway, force Trump 3rd party in a wave of indignation, end up with no-one being elected president because no-one gets enough votes, and Paul Ryan gets to choose whoever he wants. Is that right?