This, in the end, was the story of the entire Brexit results night. Areas that were expected to vote for Brexit by a narrow margin voted for it by a large margin; areas that were expected to oppose it by narrow margins ended up supporting it by narrow margins. There were a few places where the anti-Brexit “Bremain” vote did better than expected, as there always are… but not many. By the time the results were tabulated in England’s version of  “battleground states,” the result was fairly clear on the strength of the vote totals in the “safe” constituencies alone.

Lesson for Americans: you can infer a great deal about the state of the presidential race from even early results in small geographic areas.

We talked this morning about the fact that Donald Trump needs to beat his polls, Brexit-style, in order to win the election, while Hillary Clinton only needs to match her polls to beat Trump. That’s why Clinton is a 2-to-1 (nearly 3-to-1) favorite to win. Let’s take a look at three different ways we can find out quickly which story is the true one:

State-Level

FiveThirtyEight has a very good Election Night Viewer’s Guide that goes through each battleground state, hour-by-hour, and explains the significance of each. I’ll focus just on a couple of very early states (poll closing times in each state in parentheses, all times EST):

Trump Must-Wins: Georgia (7:00), Florida (8:00)

Clinton Must-Wins: Virginia (7:00) , Pennsylvania (8:00)

Bellwether: New Hamsphire (8:00)

Early States: Kentucky, Vermont (both 7:00)

One of the interesting things about this election is that the candidates are competitive in so many places that there are very few true “must-wins”; there is almost always a plausible path for either candidate to recover if they lose one of their key states.

But the four states I’ve listed here really are “must-wins” — without them, there is almost no visible path to victory. Trump has a narrow lead in Georgia and is narrowly behind in Florida. Clinton is comfortably ahead in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. You might say, “That’s not fair to Trump! His must-wins are harder than hers!” Well, that’s because Trump is currently losing the election.

Results in these early states will give us a good idea of how things are going to go. If Florida goes early for Clinton, then she is beating her polls and the race is pretty much over. But if Virginia or Pennsylvania are looking like close races, then Trump is beating his polls, and there’s good reason for Clinton fans to take a few drinks and settle back for a long night.

Most interesting will be New Hampshire, which has been running very close to the exact center of national opinion. An early call for either candidate there is a very good sign for that candidate (though it doesn’t mean the end of the race, since New Hampshire only has 4 electoral votes).

Keep your eyes on the early states, too. Both Kentucky and Vermont should be called immediately for Trump and Clinton, respectively, but keep an eye on the margins in each state: if Trump is going to win the election, he “should” win Kentucky by about T+22 points, and, if Clinton is going to win the election, she “should” win Vermont by about C+57 C+27 points. (UPDATE: +57 was a pretty serious typo! Sorry!) Of course, you should ignore the early counts, when only a few precincts are in, but, by the time each state gets to 60% precincts reporting or so, we should have some idea whether either candidate is having a “Newcastle-upon-Tyne” moment.

North Carolina is a really important state in this election (Trump probably has to win it to win the election), but the vote counting there was a little erratic in 2014. Early N.C. returns showed a near-certain win for Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan based on early voting, which is what the polls had said, but Thom Thillis dominated Election Day voting, and ended up pulling out a squeaker. So just ignore North Carolina until the networks officially call it. (A Clinton win in North Carolina is a very bad sign for Trump, but, because North Carolina relies so much on early voting, it’s not necessarily fatal: Trump could recover with wins in Pennsylvania or Michigan, neither of which have much early voting.)

The problem with state-based forecasting is you have to wait ages for entire states to report in. Let’s drill down to a more granular level.

Congress-Level

Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for election this year, just like every year. Republicans are expected to lose seats but keep their majority, but the number of lost seats depends largely on how many people turn out to vote for Trump and Clinton. (The course of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s future may well be determined by how large his Congressional majority is, since the GOP caucus is already so deeply divided.) If Trump supporters turn out, iffy Republican seats will be saved, and iffy Democratic seats will be lost. If Clinton supporters show up, the opposite will happen.

So here’s another chart from FiveThirtyEight (the whole article is worth reading), which gives us a really good way of tracking which side showed up:

My take:

If Democrats have a “good” or “very good” night by the standards of this chart, Clinton will win the presidency.

If it’s even (with maybe one or two surprises), Clinton is very likely to win the presidency, but it’s not quite a closed book.

If Republicans are having a “good” night, then the presidential race is a tossup.

If Republicans are having a “very good” night, then Trump will win the presidency.

That may seem unfair: the Democrats only need to run even in the House to have a strong chance at winning the presidency, while the Republicans have to have a “very good” night to have the same chance. That’s because Trump is currently losing in the polls, and requires a strong Republican showing across the board just to pull even in his race for the White House.

And, of course, as in every election, there will be upsets — possibly even multiple upsets on both sides of this chart. When you’re looking at small districts rather than huge states, things go against the trend a little more frequently just because of the greater variability.

So if the race in the 9th Indiana Congressional District (Trey Hollingsworth vs. Shelli Yoder) looks close, don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it’s all over and Clinton won. But if Democrats go on to win all four seats in Florida… then yeah, it’s probably all over and Clinton won.

But there’s still one more way we can track the trends in this presidential election: county-by-county.

County-Level

This method is simple: find a county where 100% of precincts have reported results. Let’s say rural Boone County, Kentucky, at the very tippy-top northern part of the state. It’s an extremely safe county for Trump, and their polls close at 6 PM Eastern — less than an hour after this post is published — so I expect them to report fairly quickly. (Kentucky’s polls overall don’t close until 7:00, so don’t expect results to be released until after that.)

You can find detailed county-by-county results in each state in many places around the Internet. I like to use Politico’s user-friendly results report. (Click the state you’re interested in, then click “detailed results” to see a county-by-county map.)

Remember that you’re looking for counties with 100% or very nearly 100% reporting. Figure out who is winning and how much they’re winning by. Great. That’s step 1.

Step 2: go to ShareBlue Benchmarks. Find that same county. Hover your mouse over it. You’ll now see a (decent) estimate of who will win the county and by how much, based on statewide polls and demographic information about the county.  (Boone County is Trump +38%.)

If Trump is beating his ShareBlue benchmarks in a lot of counties in several states, he’s got a really good shot at winning.  If not, or if Clinton is beating her benchmarks, then he’s pretty much going to lose.

There’s going to be a lot of random statistical noise down here in the weeds, so don’t invest too much faith in any one county. Remember that, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Brexit beat its polls by 10 points, but only won nationwide by 4 points.  That’s going to be true here, too: Trump will beat his benchmarks by wide margins in some areas, Clinton will do the same in others, and the question is whether Trump is able to do it consistently enough, in enough places, by large enough margins (2-3%) to come from behind and win the election.

Although I caution you against reading too much into this, I think it is also the fastest way to draw useful inferences about what’s happening in the presidential election, so it’s what I’m going to be focused on during the early part of the evening.  You can do a lot by comparing actual results to benchmarks.  I would much rather have results from 100% of precincts in rural Boone County than from 5% of precincts in the entire state of Florida. 5% of Florida is way more people than live in Boone County, but, because I don’t know where those votes are coming from or how they’re being mixed with the early vote, I can’t draw inferences from them.

UPDATE: The New York Times Upshot blog will be doing a lot of this automatically tonight, which will save us all a great deal of work. Tune in there for rapidly estimated early results, complete with statistically-reliable margins of error!

The Bottom Line

The odds are, this election will be over early. The networks won’t call it until Clinton officially has 270 electoral votes, but Clinton is going into this thing with a comfortable polling lead.  We should know after a couple of states whether the polls were basically on-target, and, if they were, Clinton is almost certainly going to win.  Trump needs to beat his polls, which is doable, but we should know fairly soon whether he actually is. And there are plenty of reasons to think he won’t.

Those of you following the election with this blog, then, have a very good chance of knowing the outcome of the election by the time polls close in Minnesota (9 PM Eastern), before — perhaps long before — the networks call it.  I’ll be staying up late to see who wins the Senate — which is a genuine nailbiter according to the current polls.

On the other hand, Trump could beat his polls, and, if he does, you will be among the first to know that it’s going to be a long night.

Either way, I’ll be watching Gods of Egypt (as promised) after the final results are known. Expect my review by the weekend.

I may or may not post further updates tonight, but I can tell you I’ll be following FiveThirtyEight’s LiveBlog, the Upshot’s projections, and I’ll probably be tweeting a bit as the spirit moves me, so tune in there if you want to know what’s up.

May God bless America. Vote SMOD 2016.

One of the things I hear a lot from committed #NeverTrumpers is something like, “I won’t vote for Trump, but, if you decide to, that is okay.”  This has always made sense to me, even though I’m not committed to #NeverTrump.

However, I recently realized that, to those on the #TrumpTrain, it looks like madness at best, moral relativism at worst.  As one of my favorite Facebook friends put it last night:

“It is curious to me when people say ‘I think it is wrong for ME to vote for Trump, but not for others.’ [T]o suggest… that there is no right or wrong choice seems wrong to me. And not to engage that question in a community where we are all struggling to do what we can to stem the tsunami of destructive consequences for this great nation also seems somewhat irresponsible to me.”

In other words, there must be an objectively correct choice among the awful choices we have.  As moral voters, we have an objective duty to discern the correct choice and act accordingly.  Avoiding the question, or answering it indefinitely, is thus a form of moral cowardice.

Fair enough.

I agree with my friend. I think there is an objectively right or wrong choice in this election. God can see the possible world that unfolds if I vote for Trump (and encourage others to do so), and He can see the world that unfolds if I do not vote for Trump (and discourage others from doing so). One of those worlds is objectively better than the other. The choice that leads to that world is therefore objectively the right choice.*

So I agree that there is an objectively best choice. However, I do not know what it is. I am not God. I cannot see both possible future worlds. I have to guess at the future, based on my prudential judgment.

In a typical American election, there’s not a lot of space for prudential judgments. If the Republican candidate is anti-abortion and the Democratic candidate pro-abortion rights, that is typically enough to determine the objectively correct moral choice with a very high degree of confidence.  The evil of legal abortion† is vastly disproportionate to all other issues. Affairs like health care and taxes and religious freedom and even poverty and war are nearly moot in the face of a million babies (babies! killed at a rate faster than Auschwitz!) torn limb from limb for money every year. A voter who does not become (in effect) a single-issue voter in the face of this evil is not acting rationally or charitably. Because legal abortion is very vulnerable in the United States (it is sustained, since 2006, almost exclusively by just five Supreme Court justices, one of them wishy-washy about it), and because creating legal barriers to abortion (including prohibition) is the most effective policy measure for reducing the number of abortions, honest, informed, moral prudence can reach only one conclusion: it would be best to elect the Republican.

Moreover — and I think people miss this too often — the very fact that the pro-abortion candidate is pro-abortion renders the candidate fundamentally unfit to hold authority over anyone. Abortion-rights supporters find their judgement and values fatally undermined on every issue by their willingness to sacrifice an entire class of human beings to Moloch.

(This is but a brief sketch of an argument my father has made more diplomatically and more effectively elsewhere.)

Finally, in a typical election, a vote is unlikely to have repercussions beyond the election.  Your vote for John McCain simply expresses a preference for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama; the vote carries few practical consequences beyond that, and is not widely understood to signify much else.  This closes off one of the few practical avenues of escape for the voter who would rather vote for the abortion-rights candidate with a clean conscience.

I think the argument for voting pro-life in a normal election is so obvious and so overwhelming that doing so is morally compulsory, and that those who support pro-choice candidates will be called to account . I mention this to show, beyond a doubt, that I completely reject moral relativism at the ballot box. I do not treat the phrase “prudential judgement” as an infinitely malleable excuse for any old evil I want to promote; I treat it as a serious burden that must be convincingly answered — and, in most elections, I think there’s only one convincing answer available.

But this election is different in important ways.

Having studied Mr. Trump closely for the past year, I think he is pro-choice. I think he is a liar. I think the odds that he actually appoints good justices to the Supreme Court are around 50/50. I would not be even the tiniest bit surprised to see him get elected on the backs of social conservatives’ votes, then turn around and appoint Peter Thiel to the Court. I think there is strong evidence for all these contentions. Trump has STILL never renounced his support for unrestricted abortion-on-demand throughout the first trimester, which is, y’know, basically indistinguishable from Harry Reid’s position. This casts large chunks of the standard argument for voting Republican into grave doubt.

People of good conscience may disagree about the evidence (though, to be sure, plenty of Trump people are plainly arguing in bad conscience on this), but it must be conceded that, if one judges Trump to be lying through his teeth about the whole abortion-and-religious-freedom thing, it must follow that the clear-cut prudential judgment that obtains in normal elections suddenly becomes really cloudy.

But it gets worse for Mr. Trump. In this election, with the future of the imploding Republican party quite clearly on the November ballot, my vote is going to have consequences beyond the election itself, breaking another of the supports that sustains the clear-cut argument for Republicans in normal elections. By voting for Trump, I appear to validate the new shape of the Republican Party. What long-term effects does this have? How does it shape our politics in 2020 and beyond — particularly if I go ahead and validate TrumpGOP but he still loses (as he very probably will)?

Relatedly, as Rachel Lu often asks, what does this do to the credibility of our movement long-run? Let’s imagine:

I cast my vote for Trump. Months later, I’m at a campus protest, trying to convince a college pro-choicer that I and the rest of the pro-life movement really do care about women. She asks whether I voted for Trump… and stops listening when I honestly admit I did. And I can’t even blame her, because I did actually vote for a candidate who manifestly believes women are objects for his personal use. (This goes double if Trump loses, as he very probably will even with my help.) Multiply by 50,000,000, rinse, and repeat. Was it worth it, casting a vote that might, with considerable luck, elect a man who might, with considerable luck, do what is necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade?

Maybe so! People can reach different conclusions about this in good conscience. It’s impossibly difficult to predict the future, especially in the middle of a party realignment like the current one. It’s credible for someone to think we can all vote for Trump and everything will work out just peachy. But it’s also credible for someone to think that our personal and collective support for Trump will do more harm than good. Since we’re not God, and can’t look into the worlds where we made different choices to compare them, this is ultimately unprovable and unknowable; we have to take the evidence available and go with our best guess.

In short, this election is full of prudential judgments that are an order of magnitude more difficult than the ones we’re used to dealing with in elections. It is therefore entirely possible for one voter to make one prudential judgment (Trump is a good, honest man who will appoint good judges and not discredit our movement) and for another voter, who shares the exact same principles and has seen the exact same evidence, to make another prudential judgment (Trump is a liar who will appoint Hillary-esque judges and all we’ll have gained by voting for him is deeply undermining ourselves), and thus draw absolutely different conclusions about this election. Each voter must do what he thinks is right, but, since the underlying propositions involve predictions about the future and are thus by their nature unprovable, what is morally right for one voter might not be morally right for another voter.

Thus, a #NeverTrump voter can quite reasonably say, “I think voting for Trump is wrong, but you might reach a different conclusion, and that’s okay.” It’s not moral relativism or cowardice. It is appropriate humility in the face of a bewilderingly cloudy future.

The one good thing about this election is that we’re all going to get a bunch of great papers published on voting ethics in the next two years.

*I think this is an oversimplified model of voting morality, because it reduces voting to an absolutely utilitarian act, and stark utility is almost never the sole measure of morality… but this utilitarian model is how most people think about voting, it’s at least close to how I think about voting, and it will do for our purposes in this post.

† Those who are not regular readers of De Civitate should be aware that “unborn child = person” and “abortion = murder” are generally taken for granted around here. If you disagree, you may reach very very different conclusions about moral voting behavior. Fair enough! Frankly, while I think your pro-abortion position is clearly incorrect, I think your arguments are much stronger than the absurd position I’m arguing against here: that abortion is murder and should be outlawed but it’s still okay to vote for people who support keeping abortion-murder legal.

UPDATE: My Facebook friend — whom I may now reveal as the learned Doctor (and national treasure) Janet E. Smith — has replied to me here.  Take a look!  Weigh the arguments!

Technically, it’s still not too late.  The process takes 40 days at least 10 days and must be completed by the time the Electoral College meets on December 19th.

Will it happen? No. But we should be very clear that, if it doesn’t happen, it is because the leadership of the Republican Party chose to stand by Donald Trump.

That’s all! Good night!

UPDATE 9 October 2016: I’ve learned that the 40-day process could possibly be short-circuited by a motion to suspend the rules.

This post was updated on 9 October 2016. Updates are at the bottom.

Since winning the nomination, Donald J. Trump has done all of the following: insulted the family of a man who died in service of his country; kicked a baby out of a rally; failed to rebut evidence that he was a draft dodger; embraced the opponent of the sitting Republican Speaker of the House while refusing to endorse the 2008 GOP nominee for president; attacked fire marshals at his rallies as “political” for enforcing occupancy limits; driven his staff and the RNC to despair; and denied the (very real) Russian conquest of Crimea.

I’m sorry, did I say, “since winning the nomination”?  Actually, that was just the past 36 hours (as of this writing). By the time you read this, no doubt Trump will have disqualified himself from the nuclear suitcase many more times – and it’s not like Trump was an angel before August, either.  Trump should not be the Republican nominee for president.  He should not even be the Republican nominee for Secretary of Transportation – 13^th in the line of succession is far too close for a man of his low character.

Fortunately, he doesn’t need to be.

The More You Tighten Your Grip…

Just a few weeks ago, at the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee crushed an attempt to stop Trump and reform the rules of the RNC.  As a result, the RNC was able to pass a renewal of Rule 12, the infamous power-grab that seized control of the party from the grassroots.

Historically, the Republican Party was governed by the delegates to the national convention, who would debate and pass rules for the party organization. The RNC existed and operated at the pleasure of the delegates. Rule 12 turned that on its head: yes, the convention still meets every four years, but Rule 12 allows the RNC to amend the rules of the Republican Party between conventions without input from the delegates.  As was pointed out at the time, this permits the RNC to completely disregard the results of national conventions: if the convention passes a measure the RNC doesn’t like, the RNC can simply pass a new rule at the next meeting to undo the convention’s decisions.

There was hope this year that Rule 12 would be removed as part of a conservative reform package spearheaded by Morton Blackwell and Sen. Mike Lee.  However, the Trump campaign closely coordinated with the RNC to destroy that package, bragging about their victory afterward on Twitter.

It would be poetic justice if the Trump campaign were hoisted on its own petard.

…The More Star Systems Will Slip Through Your Fingers.

No presidential nominee has ever died on the campaign trail before, but it could happen.  William Henry Harrison could have caught pnuemonia in October.  In 1912, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, James Sherman, actually did die less than a week before the election.  Both major parties have rules governing what to do if that happens.  The Republican version is called “Rule 9: Filling Vacancies in Nominations”.  It has not changed during the 2016 cycle.  This is what it says:

(a) The Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States or the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, as nominated by the national convention, or the Republican National Committee may reconvene the national convention for the purpose of filling any such vacancies.

(b) In voting under this rule, the Republican National Committee members representing any state shall be entitled to cast the same number of votes as said state was entitled to cast at the national convention.

(c) In the event that the members of the Republican National Committee from any state shall not be in agreement in the casting of votes hereunder, the votes of such state shall be divided equally, including fractional votes, among the members of the Republican National Committee present or voting by proxy.

(d) No candidate shall be chosen to fill any such vacancy except upon receiving a majority of the votes entitled to be cast in the election.

Many commentators are hoping that Mr. Trump will drop out of the race, creating a vacancy for the RNC to fill.

Some rather more daring commentators believe that the RNC is already empowered, by simple majority vote, to declare Donald Trump’s candidacy vacated by “death, declination, or otherwise” (strong emphasis on the “otherwise”) thanks to his shameful misbehavior on the campaign trail. Personally, I don’t believe that a unilateral declaration of vacancy by the Republican National Committee qualifies as a “vacancy” within the ordinary English meaning of the word.  Of course, the RNC and the Trump campaign have never allowed the actual text of the rules to stop them from doing whatever they want, rules of order be damned, so maybe the RNC will do it anyway.  However, I don’t believe that Donald Trump should be stripped of the nomination by cheating. That would be unfair to Mr. Trump and his many enthusiastic supporters.

Instead, Trump should be stripped of the nomination fair and square, by a clear action under Rule 12 – the very same Rule 12 Mr. Trump himself has so fiercely defended.  Rule 12 provides:

The Republican National Committee may, by three-fourths (3/4) vote of its entire membership, amend Rule Nos. 1-11 and 13-25. Any such amendment shall be considered by the Republican National Committee only if it was passed by a majority vote of the Standing Committee on Rules after having been submitted in writing at least ten (10) days in advance of its consideration by the Republican National Committee and shall take effect thirty (30) days after adoption. No such amendment shall be adopted after September 30, 2018.

This sets out a clear, incontrovertibly legal mechanism for stripping Trump of the nomination:

1. Any member may propose an amendment to Rule 9 and submit it in writing to the Standing Committee on Rules. It would contain a simple morals clause, like that contained in many employee contracts. It could read something like this:

Rule 9 is amended by the addition of a section (e), which reads as follows:

(e) If the Republican nominee for President or Vice-President commits an act of moral turpitude which is shocking to the nation’s sense of decency, the full Republican National Committee may, by three-fourths (3/4) vote of its entire membership, vacate that nomination.

2. After waiting ten days, the Standing Committee on Rules must vote to approve the amendment by a majority vote.

3. The Republican National Committee may then immediately vote to approve the amendment by a three-fourths supermajority.

4. Thirty days later, the new clause goes into effect. The Republican National Committee may meet at that time. and, by a three-fourths supermajority, terminate the misbegotten candidacy of Donald J. Trump for his many acts of moral turpitude – his fight with the Khan family being only the most prominent.

5. The RNC would then be free to immediately select a new candidate under the terms of Rule 9.

6. The new Republican nominee, whoever it is, would easily defeat Hillary Clinton, the least popular nominee in history (except for Donald Trump). That’s not wishful thinking: almost any Republican, from John Kasich to Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz — or even David French! — could beat Mrs. Clinton. This is the most winnable election in history, and Trump is doing the impossible by losing it.

Just Crazy Enough to Work

By the time the new nominee is selected, forty days after the initial submission of the amendment, many states will have locked in their ballots for the November election.  Trump’s name will still appear on those ballots.  However, this is hardly the first time in American history such a thing has happened. In Minnesota’s 2002 Senate race, Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane accident less than two weeks before the election. He was replaced by Walter Mondale, and, although the ballots all said “Wellstone,” Mondale would have gone to Washington had he won.  More notoriously, in 2000, Sen. John Ashcroft actually lost an election to his deceased opponent, Mel Carnahan. (Carnahan’s widow, Jean, served in his place.)

Trump, for his part, will be unable to mount an independent “spoiler” campaign, precisely because those ballot deadlines would have passed him by. Though he could mount a court challenge or write-in campaign, he would have little time and no help from the RNC apparatus that he depends on for his ground game. Meanwhile, the Republican electorate has already demonstrated that it will unify behind literally anyone in order to stop Hillary – after all, Republican voters were willing to unify behind Trump.  The Republican nominee would thus enjoy a clear path to a November 8^th victory.

Presidents, of course, are actually elected by the members of the electoral college.  The members of the electoral college are selected by the winning political party in each state. Generally speaking, they are both pledged by their party and bound by state law to cast their electoral vote for the candidate of the party that appointed them – regardless of which candidate technically appeared on the ballot.  (A few states appear to legally bind them to the candidate on the ballot, but all such laws are likely unconstitutional.)  Since electors are well-vetted partisan loyalists anyway, they can generally be counted on to support the party’s nominee, regardless of pledge or legal constraint.  Certainly no Republican elector would ever vote for Hillary Clinton, and many of them already disdain Mr. Trump.  Therefore, we could reasonably expect all Republican electors to vote for the party’s new nominee, whomever that may be.

Even if some faithless electors still cast their votes for Trump, this would not change the final outcome of the election: even if there were enough faithless electors to deny the new nominee a majority in the electoral college, all this would do is throw the election to the House of Representatives, where the entrenched GOP majority would easily put the new nominee into the Oval Office.

Indeed, thanks to the electoral college, it would seem that the Republicans do not even need to complete the entire re-nomination process by Election Day.  As long as the Republican nominee has been formally changed by the time the electoral college meets (December 19, 2016), Republican electors can be relied upon to vote for the new Republican nominee.  That means the deadline for starting this process is technically November 9th… although, if Trump is still the nominee on election day, it is highly probable that Hillary Clinton will be elected and this will all be moot.  The sooner we start the process of vacating the nomination, the better.

In short: despite some minor complications, if we replace Trump, our new nominee will be the next President of the United States.

The Fallout

This is hardly the ideal mechanism for defeating Hillary Clinton. It would have been much better to nominate a good candidate back at the convention. A last-minute switch like this would make the primaries a farce (though they already are), shatter the Republican Party (though this has already happened), and create a major political hubbub.  These are very bad things.

But the election of Hillary Clinton would, without serious question, destroy the American experiment forever with a single appointment to the Supreme Court. The election of Donald Trump, the misogynist draft-dodging anti-veteran Russian pawn, would not be much better for America – and is appearing less and less likely anyway, as Americans wake up to Trump’s moral turpitude.

The Republican National Committee, then, has the power to stop Trump. They now face a simple choice: save their party, or save their country.

Guess which one they’re going to pick.

UPDATE 9 October 2016:

The idea of vacating the Republican nomination has suddenly picked up steam in the wake of Trump’s favorable comments about sexual assault, and that has led to some extra traffic to this blog.  I want to add three thoughts to what I said above back in August:

1. If only we’d done this ten days ago…

The process I sketched out above takes forty days to complete. November 8th — the day when voters in each state cast ballots to elect a partisan slate of electors to the electoral college — is only thirty days away.  This means that, even if the appropriate motion were filed with the Rules Committee right this moment, it would still take until ten days after Election Day for Donald Trump to be formally stripped of the nomination.  It would have been much, much easier to vacate the nomination if Pussygate had happened on, say, September 26th.

This doesn’t mean the process to vacate the nomination is impossible. Heck, given Trump’s free-fall in the polls since the first debate (he is on track for a landslide defeat), forcibly replacing him is still probably the RNC’s last, best hope for winning this election. But the late timing does make the process a lot trickier: you would, first and foremost, have to convince voters to cast ballots for Trump with nothing but a promise that Trump will soon stop being the nominee.

This may be a bridge too far.  Voters have a hard time remembering who the vice-presidential nominee is, still less how their vote connects to the electoral college. It is for this reason that, when I spoke to Gwynn Guilford for her article this morning, I was fairly pessimistic. I still think this is a possible path to a Republican in the White House, not just a symbolic repudiation, but, as I told her, it is… tricky.

2. Can we speed this up by suspending the rules?

Late in the day, Politico reported that the RNC is actively looking into this option. Well, guys, welcome aboard.  Better late than never, right?

Politico’s piece also contained this juicy tidbit, which caused my jaw to drop:

One option might be invoking Rule 12 — which gives the party the authority to amend its own rules — but that would also be problematic because it requires at least 40 days to take effect. However, the committee — which operates under Roberts Rules of Order — also appears to have the authority to suspend those restrictions with a two-thirds vote.

Well, heavens to Betsy, I think they might just be onto something!

Let’s go back to our trusty copy of the Republican Party Rules.  Rule 7(a) provides:

(a) The current authorized edition of Robert’s Rules of Order: Newly Revised (“Robert’s Rules of Order”) shall govern in all meetings of the Republican National Committee and its committees insofar as they are applicable and not inconsistent with these rules.

I’m a little surprised I never thought of this myself! Robert’s Rules of Order allows a body, such as the RNC, to “suspend the rules” by a supermajority vote.  Suspending the rules allows the RNC to clear procedural obstacles that are getting in the way of doing business.  If you’ve ever been at a political convention at any level, you have almost certainly participated in a parliamentary action to suspend the rules. You can’t use rules suspension to grant yourself additional powers or violate your organizational constitution and by-laws, so the RNC couldn’t just vote to suspend the rules and declare that Mike Pence is the new GOP nominee.

However, you can use rules suspension to clear procedural roadblocks.  And what’s the biggest obstacle to replacing Trump right now?  That darned thirty-day waiting period mandated by Rule 12 before any rules changes passed by the RNC can take effect.

It may be possible, under Robert’s Rules, for the RNC to suspend that waiting period.  As I read Robert’s, it would require a two-thirds majority vote — which is actually easier than changing the rules in the first place (which requires a three-quarters majority).

If this is correct, then the RNC could meet as soon as October 19th, vote to amend Rule 12 as I described in my original post, and then attempt to proceed immediately to a vote on vacating the nomination. This would be ruled out-of-order, thanks to the 30-day waiting period. Any RNC member could then put forward a motion to suspend the rules and proceed directly to the vote on vacating the nomination. With two-thirds support, the motion would carry, the vote to vacate would be held… and Donald Trump would cease to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States by the morning of October 20th.

However, it might not be correct.  I am not up-to-speed on the vagaries of rules-suspension motions, and am seeking the advice of an experienced parliamentarian as to whether the waiting period is considered a parliamentary rule suspendable under Robert’s Rules.  (It could be seen as a by-law, thus not suspendable.)  I will keep you readers posted.

3. Trust nothing you hear.

Jim Bopp, a noted RNC lawyer, is running around telling everyone who will listen that this whole thing is impossible.  Jim Bopp is a warrior for life and free speech, whose credentials, experience, and genuinely wonderful accomplishments eclipse my own.

He is also completely out to lunch.  Cozy with Trump since Day One, Bopp is editing his own reality to only see the parts that support Trump.

Does that sound familiar?  It should: Jim Bopp was the star of my 2010 blog series, Why Personhood is Right for Wisconsin, and, as I showed at great length there, Bopp twists and sometimes outright lies about the law in order to bolster his own sheerly political conclusions. He didn’t think Personhood was an electoral winner, so he invented a reality in which Personhood endangered other pro-life achievements in Wisconsin, regardless of the actual law of Wisconsin.  He thinks Trump is an electoral winner, so he’s inventing a reality in which Trump is the only possible GOP nominee, regardless of the Rules of the Republican Party he himself helped craft.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to see this happen, you should share this article on social media.  I love each and every one of you, my readers, but none of you are voting members of the Republican National Committee.  Nobody who has the power to vacate the nomination will consider it unless they see it, through social sharing.  And they probably won’t anyway.  But we should still try.

“If Trump wins every single delegate of the night, that’s unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. Tonight’s tactical voting is to minimize the damage, not to actually make any gains. Indiana is the race that matters, and they’re on May 3rd.”

–Me, April 26th

“The time to panic is on May 2nd, if Kasich is still in the race the night before the pivotal Indiana primary and splitting the anti-Trump vote.  That could easily hand Trump the nomination.”

–Me, April 19th

“Thus, I expect Trump to win virtually all the delegates in those primaries; so do most analysts. This wouldn’t be all that bad, either, as long as it drives Kasich definitively out of the race before the pivotal (and very competitive) Indiana contest on May 3rd.”

–Me, April 6th

“As long as Trump is denied delegates in Wisconsin, Indiana, and most of California, and Cruz takes the states he’s already expected to take (South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, etc.), Trump will not have 1237 bound delegates going into the convention… even with the whole Northeast under his belt.”

–Me, March 25th

“By this point, if Rubio and Cruz are both still in the race, still splitting their vote against a 40% popular Trump, it’s probably too late to stop Trump.”

–Me, February 27th, speaking about a field that remains divided against Trump through Indiana. I had the identity of the spoiler wrong — it ended up being Kasich — but not the importance of Indiana.

There are ten contests left in the 2016 GOP primary season, but two states matter more than all the rest: Indiana, which votes May 3rd, and California, which votes June 7th.

Why these states? They both award large numbers of bound delegates (which Donald Trump desperately needs and which his opponents desperately need to deny him). More importantly, both states award their delegates on a winner-take-nearly-all basis (“winner-take-all by district and statewide”, if you want to get technical), so the winner can really run up the delegate count even with a narrow plurality win.  Most importantly, both states appear to be competitive, unlike the “safe” Trump states (West Virginia, New Jersey), the “safe” Cruz states (South Dakota, Nebraska), and the “safe” Kasich states (hahahahaha). Most simulations that show Trump winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination on the first convention ballot have him winning most delegates in Indiana; virtually all realistic simulations that lead to a contested convention have Trump losing those delegates to Ted Cruz.  Play with the numbers yourself over at 538, taking note of the underlying demographics of each remaining state, which have been a surprisingly useful predictor of Trump’s vote share so far (especially in the absence of much polling), and you’ll soon recognize what this blog first noted in February: if we can’t unite to stop Trump by Indiana, then it’s probably too late to stop Trump.

Indiana is thus a do-or-die state for anti-Trump forces — the first time we’ve face that stark situation… and, possibly, if we lose there, the last time, too.

Once you understand the importance of Indiana, many of the events of the past few days make a great deal of sense:

The Kasich-Cruz Truce

If Donald Trump becomes the GOP nominee, there is every chance that John Kasich will be the single person most responsible for it. Kasich has steadfastly refused to follow Marco Rubio and honorably depart a race he cannot win (even at a contested convention), and his division of the anti-Trump vote could easily deliver not just Indiana, but otherwise-strong Cruz states like South Dakota and Montana, into Trump’s waiting hands. This would directly cause Trump to win the nomination. Unfortunately, even Kasich’s humiliating, devastating defeat on his “home turf,” the Northeast Acela Corridor (in which he failed to win even a single congressional district), has not driven the arrogant, delusional son-of-a-mailman out of the race.

Cruz, who has proved throughout the year to be an excellent tactician, is thus forced to face what I literally termed a “nightmare scenario” back in February: a three-person race going into Indiana, with Trump holding 40% of the vote and his opponents splitting the 60% anti-Trump vote and thus losing. It was imperative that Cruz mitigate that threat, or face likely total defeat.

Kasich faces the same imperative, with the same stakes, but, as with so many imperatives, the Kasich campaign is ignoring it.  Perhaps because the Kasich campaign already has virtually no chance at winning the nomination (thus has less to lose), or perhaps because the Kasich campaign is simply bad at math, Kasich has campaigned in Indiana even though doing so decreased the chances of Kasich actually winning the nomination. (Kasich needs a contested convention to have even a slim shot, and, if Trump wins Indiana, there’s very likely no contested convention. Kasich needs Cruz to win Indiana as much as Cruz does.) In essence, Kasich strapped on a suicide bomb vest and gave Cruz a great big hug.

Thus, on Monday, Cruz and Kasich announced their “truce.” Kasich agreed to pull out of Indiana. In exchange, however, Cruz ceded to Kasich New Mexico and Oregon. Combined, the two states have 51 delegates to Indiana’s 57, which makes them appear about equal. However, they are far less important than Indiana, since they award delegates proportionally. Kasich gains very little of practical value from this exchange. As far as I can see, Kasich’s main gain here is legitimacy: Cruz had to publicly deal with Kasich as an equal, despite the fact that Kasich today has fewer delegates (and fewer victories) than Rubio, who dropped out a month ago.

Cruz, for his part, cannot possibly have desired this, which explains why he put it off so long. For one, granting Kasich a clear shot in a couple of states gives Kasich more reason to stay in the race longer, which is just the opposite of what Camp Cruz (and any serious anti-Trump campaigners) want right now. For two, the overt collaboration between the two candidates feeds directly into Trump’s “the system is rigged” narrative, which had already been paying dividends for Trump before the Cruz-Kasich armistice was announced. There is no question that making a public pact with Kasich damages Cruz, who is in no position to take on damage right now.

But it also clears Kasich out of Indiana, consolidating the anti-Trump voted behind Cruz. This is so essential to defeating Trump that Cruz really had no choice but to take it or watch his campaign die in the Hoosier State. When a suicide bomber is hugging you, your only options are to give in to his demands or die stubborn.

Unfortunately, within about two hours after the pact was announced, Kasich himself sabotaged it, saying that his supporters in Indiana ought to vote for him anyway. This, of course, defeats the whole purpose of the alliance, which was to stop Trump in (hopefully) all three states but (at least) Indiana. It is also the opposite of what the infinitely more honorable Marco Rubio said prior to March 15th, when he instructed his supporters in Ohio to support Kasich.  (Then, too, Kasich refused to say the same to his supporters in Florida.) After Kasich’s public retreat from the brand-new alliance, the Cruz campaign immediately fired back by saying their supporters in Oregon and New Mexico should still vote for Cruz, and both campaigns are now pretending that this whole truce was only about how they would “deploy their resources” (which makes no tactical sense unless the goal is to change vote totals!). It is unclear who exactly is to blame for this, but the truce has, for the most part, failed, and all the public evidence, anyway, points to Kasich as the culprit.

So Cruz ended up with a very bad situation here: he was damaged by making the deal, and the benefit he sought from the deal — assistance from Kasich in Indiana — has largely failed to materialize. (Some of Kasich’s Indiana supporters may defect to Cruz to stop Trump anyway, though Kasich himself has been little help in that.) It was the right decision under the circumstances, and I would have made it in his position, but it was always an ugly choice, and it’s playing out worse than expected.

The silver lining: Cruz and Kasich announced their arrangement the Sunday before the April 26th delegate massacre. Cruz knew that massacre was coming, and knew Trump’s Northeastern triumph would knock the Cruz/Kasich collaboration out of the news cycle within 36 hours of its announcement, minimizing the amount of damage it could do to him among the public. That’s exactly what happened: Cruz is reaping whatever slim benefits the collaboration brought, but nobody’s really talking about it to his detriment.

Fiorina’s Vice-Presidential Bid

The sad truth is that Cruz had a terrible night on Tuesday, knew weeks in advance he was going to have a terrible night on Tuesday, and needed to do something big to change the headlines to something less bad.

This is a tactic Cruz borrowed from Trump: throughout this campaign season, whenever Trump has a bad day (because he lost a debate, or Maine), he prevents it from sinking in by changing the headline, whether by saying something outrageous or by deliberately provoking a minor riot in Chicago (which was the post-Maine strategy).

So, Cruz knew that the media was going to come out of April 26th hailing Trump as the conquering juggernaut who cannot possibly be stopped. (This was a correct prediction.) What could  he do to shake things up? There’s a well-known media double standard about Trump (throughout this campaign, Trump has gotten more media coverage about less important things than all his competitors combined), but Cruz had an ace in his pocket: he could announce his vice-presidential pick. Even the TrumpTrumpTrump media would have to pay attention to that.

So Cruz leaks that his campaign is vetting Carly Fiorina on the day of the massacre, then announces her as his veep choice the day after, doing his darndest (with a morning announcement just to tease the afternoon announcement) to dominate the news cycle.

This probably sounds cold-blooded and cynical. All tactical decisions do, when they’re laid out for their tactical worth. Reagan did something similar in 1976 by naming Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican, as his running mate. Reagan did this to reassure the party establishment that he could create a big-tent conservatism, despite the fact that he shared very little in common with Schweiker. (It didn’t work, at any rate; Reagan lost the nomination at a semi-contested convention.)

Cruz’s decision to name Carly as his running mate isn’t nearly as cynical as that. Carly endorsed Cruz months ago, and they’ve been enthusiastic collaborators ever since. She shares Cruz’s outsider credentials and his core conservative platform, without falling apart under scrutiny the way Sarah Palin did. She has a lot of the charisma Cruz lacks. No doubt Carly would have appeared on the Cruz VP shortlist no matter what the timing was.

However, if we pick at it a little further, the tactical advantages to naming Carly are obvious. First, she doesn’t compromise the Cruz “brand.” It is traditional for presidential candidates to pick running mates who “balance the ticket,” as Lincoln picked Johnson and Reagan picked Schweiker, but, in this hotly anti-establishment year, doing so would have gone directly against Cruz’s own rhetoric against the “Washington cartel” and fueled charges of hypocrisy. If Cruz had named, say, Kasich as his running mate, it’s easy to imagine a bunch of Cruz supporters (who support Cruz because he is a conservative, principled outsider) pulling up stakes and going to Trump, because Kasich is neither conservative (at least, not to the extent these Cruz fans are) nor principled nor an outsider. There are very few credible people who wouldn’t hurt Cruz’s brand like this; Carly is one of the few.

Second, Carly’s message complements Cruz very well: she’s a woman, which makes her a potent defensive weapon against Hillary Clinton’s gender-warfare campaign (ugh, I know, I hate identity politics, too), and — far more importantly right now — Carly is one of the few people, of any sex, who have landed a clear and damaging blow on Trump during this election cycle, with her retort to his comments about her face in an early debate.

Beyond this, conservative women love Carly. The last poll on her I can find that broke out by gender and ideology found her at 60% favorable / 22% unfavorable among Republican women — 9 points better than she performed among Republican men. My sister, who has been profoundly skeptical of Cruz throughout the cycle, actually clapped and cheered when she heard the news. She is not the only conservative female I know to have had this reaction. Nor is this a reflexive, identitarian response to a “woman candidate.” Conservative women don’t go in for that Gloria Steinem nonsense. If anything, my female conservative friends dislike Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin more than my male friends do. What resonates with them is Carly’s ability to passionately articulate the moral truth of the conservative position, especially her fierce honesty about what it is Planned Parenthood actually does (hey! they kill fully-formed babies and harvest their body parts in exchange for money that they claim isn’t profit!). Since Cruz is weak with conservative women (the same poll had him at 56/28 with Republican women, 4 points worse than he does with Republican men), having Carly Fiorina on the ticket shores him up.

Third, Carly is popular among Republicans in California, where she ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2010 but is still well-liked by the base voters who almost got her there. You may recall that California is the only state left on the calendar even more important than Illinois Indiana. Fiorina could be a potent weapon for Cruz there.

Unfortunately, I don’t see how Carly helps Cruz much in Indiana, which is our area of immediate focus.

Even more unfortunately, the Cruz campaign’s attempt to use the VP nomination as a distraction from the Acela corridor massacre on Tuesday largely didn’t work: headlines played it up as a desperate move from a campaign on the rocks, and frequently didn’t give it much coverage at all; CNN.com considered the Sanders campaign’s big layoffs a bigger story. I’m compelled to quote a passage from FiveThirtyEight’s chat about the Carly nod:

Nate Silver: My contract requires me to complain one more time about how Trump-centric the media coverage has become. It’s actually become moreTrump- centric as the campaign has gone along. While Trump could command a 13-person roundtable on CNN by inadvertently farting during a press conference, Cruz has to do something actually newsworthy — and risky and “desperate” — to get the same treatment.

Clare Malone: To Nate’s point, it was just amazing to watch MSNBC last night, anchored by Brian Williams, cut away from most of the candidate speeches but just hang onto Trump’s forever and ever. It hits you over and over again. In a lot of ways, you can’t blame Cruz for wanting to wrest our attention away for a media moment or two.

So Ted Cruz has made two major strategic gambles this week in order to secure Indiana. Both were reasonable gambles, well-founded on the available data and both seemed likely to succeed at the time they were made.

However, neither has paid off as expected, and Cruz enters the most crucial days of the entire 2016 GOP primary little better off than he would have been without these gambles… and perhaps even a bit worse. If you don’t want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee, then it’s not time to panic, but it’s time to be awfully nervous.

Indiana votes next Tuesday, May 3rd.

So, if you support Ted Cruz, John Kasich, a convention dark horse like Paul Ryan, or simply oppose Donald Trump, here are the votes I think you should cast tonight in order to maximize your chances of winning (and mine).

PENNSYLVANIA: Cruz. Cruz and Kasich are close in the polls, but Cruz has the edge and a superior ground game, which will help him convert polling support to actual support more efficiently. Still, Trump is far enough ahead that this is likely to be a bloodbath. Only question is how well the Trump slate does among the unbound delegates. (PA has an unusual hybrid primary; don’t ask.)  I expect Trump to win the statewide vote (17 bound delegates) and about 45 of the 54 unbound delegates, plus or minus 8.

RHODE ISLAND: Cruz. The state’s proportional, so it *shouldn’t* matter which non-Trump you vote for (there’s no spoiler effect in a true proportional race), but Cruz needs to stay above the 10% viability threshold (he’s currently on the bubble at 13%), or the delegates he would have won go to Trump instead. Trump should get 8-12 delegates here.

Original post 14 April 2016 – Last updated 1 May 2016 – Spreadsheet here

You’ve seen in a lot of places, including De Civitate, that the Republican race right now looks something like this: Trump 761 delegates, Cruz 540 delegates, Kasich 144 delegates. Different sources have slightly different numbers, but the basic message is the same.

What if I told you that, as of today, Cruz actually has 276 delegates, Trump 181 delegates, and Kasich 105? (UPDATE: These figures are from April 14th; current figures below.)

Well, that’s exactly what I’m about to tell you.

We at De Civitate have argued recently that it is not delegate bindings, but delegate loyalties, which will decide the outcome of the GOP 2016 convention. Supporters-in-name-only (or “SINOs”), who are bound to vote for one candidate on the first ballot but hope to carry a different candidate to victory on a later ballot, could dramatically change the terrain of the convention.  For example, a bunch of delegates bound to Trump but loyal to Cruz could throw their support to Cruz on the second ballot, swinging the nomination to Cruz.  Or a bunch of delegates bound to Kasich but loyal to Trump could, with a clear conscience, cast their votes for Kasich but consistently vote to sustain existing convention rules (namely Rule #40(b)) which would prevent those votes from actually being counted for Kasich.

Our position seems to have been borne out by events. Since we started writing about this, we’ve seen story after story about the Cruz campaign out-organizing both campaigns (making much better deals, you might say) in the delegate-loyalty battle. Cruz is securing the loyalty of his own bound delegates while getting loyal Cruz supporters into bound delegate slots for Trump and Kasich… which places Trump in a very tough position on a second ballot and may well make a Kasich nomination totally impossible.

We have also argued that it is nearly impossible to track delegate loyalties, because delegates do not step up to a big ledger at the end of an election to mark down their loyalties.

That turned out to be true, too. Tracking down the loyalty of each individual delegate to Cleveland is really hard work. In the end, though, that didn’t stop us. Here are our results:

Original post 14 April 2016 – Last updated 1 May 2016 – Spreadsheet updated continuously

The state-by-state data, along with links to all the online sources used to put it together, are in this Google spreadsheet.  Most delegates are chosen in April and May, so we expect to see a lot of fresh developments in coming days. We welcome corrections, comments, arguments, and improvements; putting this together and double-checking it solo has not been easy!

As far as we know, De Civitate is the only place on the web tracking this information systematically. Judging by how this election season has gone so far, we expect FiveThirtyEight to have this idea independently and launch a much cleaner and more graphically attractive version of this tracker in about two weeks. Until then, though, you’re stuck with De Civ!

(UPDATE 4/21: Maybe you’re not quite stuck with us after all! We owe a very large debt of thanks to @TodayInTheZach, whose incredible spreadsheet, which we discovered this week, filled in a great many holes in ours, as well as showing us a much saner way of organizing the data.  We were also able to fill in a few gaps in his — with hopefully more to come!)

(UPDATE 4/30: I was out of town during the Tuesday Trump Romp, so wasn’t able to stay up-to-date. Another thanks to @TodayInTheZach, who did the legwork, which I promptly expropriated to my spreadsheet.)

According to exit polls, if John Kasich dropped out of the presidential race, 45% of his voters would stay home.  37% would vote for Ted Cruz.  18% would vote for Donald Trump.

These are the numbers FiveThirtyEight computed last week, which I then used after the March 8th primaries, and which were confirmed, broadly speaking, by exit polls after the March 15th primaries. Today, I am using them once again. After all, it is now mathematically impossible for Kasich to actually win the nomination during the primary season, and, thanks to Rule 40(b) of the Republican Party (which I’ll be discussing a lot more in the upcoming parts of Conventional Chaos), it is almost impossible to foresee him even winning enough states to have his name entered into nomination, and even less possible to foresee the convention changing Rule 40(b) to help out Kasich, given that the convention will almost certainly be controlled by a mix of Cruz and Trump supporters, both of whom want Kasich out. By any rational measurement, Speaker Paul Ryan has a better chance at the GOP nomination than John Kasich.

So the only effect of continuing the Kasich campaign — and Kasich surely knows this — is to take votes away from Ted Cruz, allowing Donald Trump to win an outright majority of delegates and win the presidential nomination.  (In fact, because staying in reduces the chance of a brokered convention, Kasich has a better shot at the presidency if he drops out!) One wonders: is Kasich simply so overconfident about his appeal to the Northeast that he actually believes he can win, or is he deliberately helping Donald Trump in the hopes of winning the vice-presidential slot on a Trump ticket?

For now, that’s not a question we can answer. Here’s one we can, though: exactly how much Kasich is helping Trump? We’ll go through the March 15th states one by one and see how many delegates were lost to Trump because of Gov. Kasich.  (We’ll do the same for Marco Rubio, simply for transparency, though Rubio has since done the honorable thing and dropped out.)

In Missouri, Kasich blocked Cruz not just from winning, but from climbing over the 50% threshold, which would have activated a winner-take-all clause that would have handed Cruz all 52 of Missouri’s delegates. Instead, Trump walked home with the majority of those delegates… despite winning by only 0.2%.

You see, in the first half of the GOP primary calendar, all states were roughly proportional, so every candidate would win at least some delegates as long as they won a reasonable number of votes.  In a winner-take-most contest, however, the rules make it so that a winner gets most of the delegates if he wins by 0-2%, and all (or nearly all) of the delegates if he wins by much more than that.  So Cruz and Trump can finish in a dead heat in Missouri (40.5% to 40.7%), but Trump is awarded 71% of the delegates! If Cruz had finished two or three percentage points worse, Trump could have won everything in Missouri — even without winning a majority.

Here in the second half of the GOP primary calendar, there are only 3 proportional states left. 10 are pure winner-take-all, 3 elect unbound delegates, and the rest (11) are some version of winner-take most.  That’s why a spoiler like Kasich is much more dangerous now than he was even a week ago: in a winner-take-most world, Kasich may only peel off 1 or 2% of Cruz’s vote relative to Trump, but that’s enough to swing many of the upcoming races from a Cruz triumph where he takes home two-thirds (or more) of the delegates to a Trump triumph where he takes home two-thirds (or more) of the delegates. What’s that give us? President Trump.

If Kasich stays in the race until March 22nd and beyond, this is a scenario we’re going to see over and over again.  For now, on to Ohio.

In Ohio, Kasich won his first (and likely only) victory of the 2016 primary, in the state where he currently serves as a popular multi-term governor.  It was a big victory, too, because Ohio’s delegates are winner-take-all.  Cruz could not have caught Trump in Ohio on his own, according to exit polls, so Kasich’s single win took 66 delegates away from Trump, which Trump otherwise would have won.  That’s a significant win that does, actually, offset the (significant) damage Kasich did elsewhere.

At last report, Kasich is currently searching for other states where he is a beloved multi-term governor.  “I’ve proved that I can win big in areas where I’m the governor, and now it’s time to take that approach nationwide,” Kasich said.  If he fails, then we will watch him do lots of damage for the rest of the primary… with no offsets like Ohio tonight.

In Illinois, the Kasich Effect is clear: the statewide vote was a decisive Trump win, with Trump taking 39% of the vote, Cruz taking just 30%, Kasich 20%, and Rubio down at 9%. But eliminate Kasich (and Rubio), and suddenly it’s a squeaker: 49% Trump to 48% Cruz. Because Illinois is a winner-take-most state, that’s a big deal.

Illinois uses a peculiar “loophole primary” system.  Don’t ask; it’s complicated. It took me well over an hour to remodel the results without Rubio and Kasich in all 18 districts. Suffice to say that, at the end of the day, Cruz’s much closer finish would have allowed him to take away 11 of Trump’s delegates… but Kasich’s presence in the race denied him that.

So, let’s recap: Kasich’s presence in Ohio took away 66 of Trump’s delegates.  But Kasich’s presence in Illinois and Missouri gave a total of 48 delegates back to Trump.  Kasich’s “big win” was truly a Pyrrhic victory: a few more “wins” like that and we’ll be toast!

North Carolina is one of the last proportional states on the calendar, so Kasich and Rubio dropping out has less of an effect there.  Still: it would have changed Cruz’s narrow loss there into a narrow win.  Not bad.

Nobody could stop Trump from winning winner-take-all Florida.

Ditto the winner-take-all Northern Marianas Islands, where Trump won his first outright majority win (he got 76% of the vote in the tiny island territory).

Rubio did nothing but damage Tuesday night (as predicted), handing Trump 22 free delegates just by spoiling.  Kasich’s presence did ultimately benefit the #StopTrump campaign by winning Ohio, but his 66 delegate win there was offset not just by Rubio’s defeat, but by 21 delegates Kasich himself gave to Trump elsewhere.  Kasich’s net benefit on Tuesday was therefore 45 delegates denied to Trump.  If he’d done this, then immediately dropped out, I’d give him a big round of applause for his help in the anti-Trump effort.

But he didn’t.

With Arizona coming up next Tuesday night, with its 58 winner-take-all delegates, Kasich — who notably is not the popular incumbent governor of Arizona — may well be able to wipe out all the gains he won this week… and then some!

In fact, let’s do a quick model of Arizona, based on the most recent polling. That poll gives Trump 31%, Cruz 19%, and Kasich and Rubio 10% each, with 30% undecided.

We will follow our assumptions above.  We will further assume, based again on FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of the March 15th exit polls (excluding the favorite-son states of OH and FL, for obvious reasons), that Ted Cruz will get 43% of late-deciding votes, Trump 31%, Kasich 16%, and Rubio 8%.  What that gets us:

Kasich’s presence turns the Arizona race from a Trump/Cruz dead heat into an easy Trump win. 58 delegates are on the line, and Kasich hands every single one of them to Trump, gift-wrapped with a ribbon on top.

Meanwhile, up in Utah, which votes the same day, we face another Kasich-induced quandary.  The state is proportional, with 40 delegates… unless a single candidate wins 50% of the vote, in which case Utah becomes winner-take all.

We don’t have any good recent polling of Utah, but we can still make a rough model.  We’ll assign undecideds and exclude dropped-out candidates not named Rubio (because we simply don’t know how Carson and Bush voters reassigned themselves). We grab the last poll, do some math, and boom: at the end of February, Utah looked something like this: 34% Cruz, 31% Rubio, 27% Trump, 7% Kasich.  Let’s feed those numbers into our model…

*Projected delegate counts are in parentheses.

Kasich’s presence in Utah spoils Cruz’s shot at breaking 50% and taking home all 40 delegates.  This gives Trump 14 free delegates (while scoring only 7 for Kasich, incidentally).

So, based on current projections, Kasich took 45 total delegates away from Trump on March 15th… and, on March 22nd, it’s a coin flip Kasich will give at least 14 and as many as 72 delegates right back to Trump.  Average damage: 46 delegates.  Just enough to finish cancelling out all the good Kasich did on March 15th in Ohio.

And that’s just two states.  There are 17 states with binding primaries voting after March 22nd, most of them either winner-take-all or winner-take-most.

Can you begin to see why Kasich’s presence in the race is so dangerous?

Please, someone phone the GOP Establishment in their secret headquarters deep inside the Bloomberg corporate offices and tell them that, unless they really want Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee — unless they want to completely shatter their own party — they need to hustle Kasich out of the race.  They have about four days left before the damage Kasich deals becomes severe.  If that happens, our hopes of denying Trump hinge on a series of iffy propositions like denying Trump wins New York, California, and Indiana.  We might pull it out anyway, if Kasich gets out by May 3rd, but we really, really don’t want to go there.  Surely the Establishment will listen to reason, pull some of the strings they have so often pulled to hurt conservatives, and get Kasich gone.

…right?

UPDATE: Go read Sean Trende, whose column today says the same thing differently.

This is the same conventional wisdom I have railed against time and time and time again in recent weeks, and, normally, I would let this one pass, but Alberta (unlike most pundits panicking about March 15th), has actually done some delegate math, which he lays out in his article.  This lends his piece the appearance of mathematical rigor.

However, while Mr. Alberta is to be commended for going through the actual delegate math, as so many other pundits have failed to do, his ultimate conclusions are based on grossly inaccurate assumptions about how Sen. Cruz would perform in head-to-head races against Mr. Trump.  These assumptions defy all available polling data, and lead Mr. Alberta to believe that Cruz would lose most contests with Trump in a head-to-head race.  Yes, it is obviously true, as Mr. Alberta contends, that, if a candidate loses most of the head-to-head races, he is not going to win a primary season — nor would he deserve to, since that would prove him to be the less popular candidate. But there is no good reason to be so terribly pessimistic about Cruz’s chances in head-to-head races with Trump.  On the contrary, Cruz is likely to win most races (and most delegates) once his rivals (Sen. Rubio and Sen. Kasich) have been eliminated from the race.

We can see this from the exit polling data in Michigan and Mississippi, in two ways:

(1) The obvious way: in Michigan, a demographically middling blueish-purple state where Trump won by 12 points (36% – 24%), polling shows that Trump would lose to Cruz in a head-to-head contest by 13 points (54% – 41%).  That’s not even close, and shows, in effect, a 25-point swing in Cruz’s favor if Rubio and Kasich drop out of the race. Trump currently leads almost everywhere, but nowhere does he lead by more than 15 points.  It would be a Trump-loving state indeed where Cruz would even be capable of losing with that kind of national lead on Trump.

(2) The precise way: FiveThirtyEight combined exit polls from Michigan and Missouri to determine exactly how Rubio and Kasich’s voters would behave if both dropped out, making the primary a head-to-head between Cruz and Trump.  They determined that 25% of Rubio’s voters would stay home, 60% would vote for Cruz, and 15% for Trump.  45% of Kasich’s voters would stay home, 37% would vote for Cruz, and 18% for Trump.  (You may recognize these numbers from the recent De Civ post, “How Much is Rubio Helping Trump?“.)

We can take these numbers and compute likely results in various states.  For example, FiveThirtyEight’s current weighted polling average in Wisconsin (which Mr. Alberta calls “prime terrain” for Trump) shows Mr. Trump with 30% of the vote, Rubio with 20%, Cruz with 19%, and Kasich with 8%.  (23% are either undecided or support candidates who have now dropped out.)  If Rubio and Kasich then drop out, according to the Michigan exit polls, Trump ends up with 37% of the remaining vote, and Cruz gets 38% — Cruz wins Wisconsin. That’s without counting the undecideds, who typically favor the non-Trump candidate (which is why Trump keeps underperforming his final poll numbers, even in states where he wins).  “Prime terrain” for Trump?  With respect, Mr. Alberta, the data do not support you.

This is broadly supported at the national level, as well, for those who go in for national polls.  The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which pushed undecideds toward one candidate or another and sampled only likely voters, had Trump at 30%, Cruz at 27%, Rubio at 20%, and Kasich at 22%.  Redistribute those votes as above, and Cruz has a 54% – 46% lead over Mr. Trump.

So let’s dispel once and for all with this myth that Trump is a national leader if Rubio and Kasich drop out.  On the contrary, Rubio and Kasich dropping out makes Cruz the national leader — and is the only plausible path to making anyone but Trump the national leader.  What about Alberta’s claim that the individual states coming up tend to favor Trump?

For the most part, Alberta’s claims here are based simply on wild assumptions.  Trump would be “heavily favored” to win in Arizona because “the Republican base is highly animated by immigration and border security.”  (The state that keeps re-electing pro-amnesty Sen. John McCain?  Seriously?)  This defies Cruz’s regional performance in most Western states so far, and ignores the polling data, which shows a close race once Rubio and Kasich are out (though Cruz’s win would still depend on get-out-the-vote efforts and undecideds in the state’s closed primary).  New York’s closed primary “could actually help Trump,” even though Trump has consistently and dramatically undershot his final poll numbers in closed primaries so far, because “Democrats in his home state won’t be able to show up and vote against him.”  (The white working-class Democrats of upstate New York represent one of Mr. Trump’s strongest potential voter areas, so locking them out could not be better news for Mr. Cruz.)

Nebraska, says Mr. Alberta, “could be a tossup,” for no particular reason, which is pretty shocking given that Cruz has beaten and usually dominated Trump in every nearby state that has voted so far (Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Idaho).  In California, “Trump could could be expected to win more than half, and probably closer to two-thirds” of congressional districts, because… actually, Mr. Alberta doesn’t give a reason.  Again, though, his conclusion stands in stark defiance of the only available polling data, a January 2016 Field Poll which showed Cruz leading Trump even before Cruz’s polling surge and before the field began to consolidate.  The Field Poll is extremely bearish on Trump’s chances in California for a wide variety of reasons, all of them still applicable today.

There are only two areas where I agree with Mr. Alberta’s analysis: Cruz is likely to do relatively poorly in the Northeast, where Trump has done very well so far (which tells you most everything you need to know about why the Republican party in the Northeast has failed), so his projection of “at least 100 delegates” on April 26th seems about right to me.  Also, Cruz may split the vote with Trump in the Pacific Northwest, where there is precious little polling data so far and demographics do not clearly favor either candidate (Cruz’s libertarian streak likely favors him there, while his evangelical streak hurts him.  Trump is likely the opposite.)

Everywhere else, Mr. Alberta does good delegate math, but based on extremely pessimistic assumptions about Cruz’s performance head-to-head with Trump.  This leads him to conclude, in error, that Trump is highly likely to win the race if Trump wins both Ohio and Florida. (Since there is no path plausible to stopping Trump with Kasich and Rubio in the race — at least, none I’m aware of — Mr. Alberta appears to concede the entire nomination to Trump through his aggressive naysaying on Cruz.)  His analysis is inaccurate, and should be disregarded in toto.

In reality, there is a good case to be made that the optimal strategy for stopping Trump involves Trump winning both Ohio and Florida, which would force the field to consolidate around Cruz.  Nate Silver thinks that’s plausibly the best anti-Trump strategy (a “close call”), and I believe it outright. The much bigger risk is posed by the possibility that Rubio and/or Kasich will cling to their doomed candidacies a second past March 16th, which would give Trump every opportunity to sweep across the remaining backloaded winner-take-all and winner-take-most states to win the nomination.  The faster the field consolidates, the clearer the path to stopping Trump.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a fairly popular post, “Trump’s Delegate Lead Is Overstated.” The post is as true now as it was then; political insiders continue to make poor predictions about the race, because they are not willing to learn the intricate delegate rules that govern it. (To be fair, who but a nerd like me would want to figure out, for example, what Illinois’s “loophole” primary is and how it differs from Pennsylvania’s loophole primary?) So people keep saying that Trump is doing much better than he, in fact, is. Trump is doing well and must be considered the frontrunner, but he is by no means the prohibitive leader, and his nomination is only inevitable if the party decides to accept it as inevitable.  (This won’t change until — at the earliest — April 26th, when much of the Northeast votes.)

Based on these poor predictions, pundits and even some Republican political figures are making all sorts of bad strategic decisions. For example, the widespread but false belief that Trump is guaranteed to win the nomination if he wins Florida and/or Ohio has led the Republican establishment to keep Rubio and Kasich in the race in an unlikely effort to deny Trump delegates in both states. (Sean Davis dismantles this strategy in a recent piece at The Federalist.) On the contrary, the optimal strategy for stopping Trump is to rapidly consolidate the field behind a single candidate who can defeat Trump head-to-head. Three weeks ago, I believed that candidate would be Sen. Marco Rubio, a man I greatly admire. However, intervening votes have proved me wrong: mathematically, the only plausible non-Trump competitor is now Sen. Ted Cruz. The longer Rubio and Gov. Kasich stay in the race, the more likely Trump wins the nomination instead.  This is but one example of incorrect party strategy based on unrealistically gloomy assessments of Trump’s current situation.

This post is De Civitate‘s poor-man’s delegate tracker, designed to counter those assessments. It will be updated after each primary election, so bookmark it and stay tuned. This delegate tracker doesn’t have any of Politico‘s fancy-pants graphics or FiveThirtyEight‘s sophisticated demographic projections or The Green Papers’ astonishing depth and update speed. But De Civ will tell you two things nobody else can:

1. How Trump would be doing in a field that never consolidates behind a single candidate, splitting the vote evenly between Cruz and Rubio, thus allowing Trump to win pluralities in every state. This is the “nightmare scenario” which I walked through with commentary back in my original post. It eventually allows Trump to “clinch” the nomination on the final day of primaries (June 7th).
2. How the actual results compare to that “nightmare scenario.”

If you are cheering against Trump, you want to see the “Progress to Brokered Convention” stat reach 100%.  Once that happens, the worst that could happen is a brokered convention where Trump is unlikely to win.  (It might still be possible for another candidate to clinch instead, though this becomes more difficult every day.)  On the other hand, if Trump reaches 100% on “Progress to Trump Clinch,” then it’s all over, and Trump wins.

This tracker is not pretty, but, if you ever need reassurance that the mainstream media is overstating Trump’s lead (still), come here for a breath of fresh air and a little sigh of relief. If De Civitate is panicking, then it’s time to panic… and not before. We — unlike, say, Ben Ginsberg* — have done the math.

Skip To: May 3 | April 26 | April 19 | April 6 | March 22 | March 15 | March 12 | March 8 | March 6 | March 1

May 3rd
1970 delegates allocated so far (82% of total)

Comment: Reader, I feel I owe you an apology. Months ago, I promised I would tell you when it was time to panic, and I believed that moment would come with a loss in Indiana. I even had a draft of this comment written, in case of a Trump victory. (The draft simply said: “PANIC!”) Perhaps you intuited this from last week’s discussion of Indiana, or from my very grim post yesterday. I believed that, after an Indiana defeat, the Stop-Trump efforts would have perhaps a 1-in-20 chance at beating Trump later on (and I was already working on the articles explaining those paths).

But Indiana turned out worse than the I expected, and worse than even the worst polls forecast.  Trump did not eke out a narrow win by pulling 40% of the vote against a divided field, which is what our Nightmare Scenario suggested; Trump won a solid majority in a largely “Evangelical” state, with demographics that should have been quite unfriendly to him, and crushed his nearest competitor by almost 20 points. It was far worse than the Nightmare Scenario, and it took us from “we have a fighting chance to stop Trump” to “there is no path forward at all” in a matter of minutes.  The first early returns came in, then the race was called, then Cruz suspended his campaign.  It happened so fast I never even had a chance to tell you to “PANIC!” until it was too late.

I’ve been gearing up for months to blame Kasich for this, but Trump’s victory was so complete that I can’t blame Kasich; his presence in the race made little difference. For whatever reason — and I hope to explore this further soon — the Republican Party rallied behind Donald J. Trump.

Over the coming days, now that Trump is winning outright majorities, you can expect his delegate count to rapidly reach and overtake the Nightmare Scenario we’ve been discussing throughout. Just doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, he should end up with between 1400 and 1500 bound delegates going into the convention. You can track that against the Nightmare Scenario, if it pleases you, here.

(FUN FACT: The odds of a brokered convention stopping Trump are still higher than Bernie Sanders’ odds of beating Hillary. That’s how bad the Sanders situation is right now.)

This concludes the De Civitate Poor Man’s Stop-Trump Delegate Tracker. It’s been fun, guys. You may now awaken to the nightmare world of 2016 America.

April 26th
1970 delegates allocated so far (80% of total)

Comment: I told you so: April 26th allowed Trump to make up the ground he lost in Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Colorado… and then some. He has almost, but not quite, caught up with the Nightmare Scenario. The only part of my prediction that wasn’t borne out was that Kasich would drop out after so humiliating a loss.

This brings Trump into a dead heat with the anti-Trumps: Trump is 80% of the way to clinching, and the anti-Trumps are 80% of the way to forcing a brokered convention. Because of the demographics of the remaining ten races, I give Trump the clear edge here — he is officially more likely to win the nomination than lose it — but he is by no means inevitable.

Yet. As I’ve been saying for weeks now, It All Comes Down To Indiana.

April 19th
1798 delegates allocated so far (72% of total)

Comment: Trump had a good night in New York, winning nearly 60% of the vote. (P.S. These results prove Ted Cruz was right: “New York values” are, indeed, terrible.) However, I expected Trump to sweep New York, as I noted two weeks ago, so the fact that he only won 90 delegates made April 19th a fairly good night in my book. (The fact that Kasich could be driven out of the race by this and a string of impending defeats was sauce for the goose.)

Actually, just go reread what I wrote in the April 6th entry. It predicted a good night for Trump in New York (and next week in the rest of the Northeast), and explains why it isn’t time to panic. We are, as you can see by the counts, still a bit off from the “nightmare scenario.”

The time to panic is on May 2nd, if Kasich is still in the race the night before the pivotal Indiana primary and splitting the anti-Trump vote.  That could easily hand Trump the nomination.

April 6th
1666 delegates allocated so far (67% of total)

Comment: Wisconsin, your country thanks you.

On Tuesday, millions of Wisconsinites, especially in the Milwaukee suburbs, rallied behind a candidate who is not necessarily all that popular in the suburbs — Sen. Ted Cruz — in order to stop the catastrophic candidacy of Mr. Donald Trump. The result: instead of the rout I expected, in which Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Cruz would evenly divide the anti-Trump vote and allow Trump to sweep up plurality victories across the state, Sen. Cruz came out firmly on top. Because Wisconsin votes winner-take-all by district (like most states in the second half of the primary season), Cruz was able to win 36 delegates to Mr. Trump’s 6 with only 48% of the popular vote. This was not considered likely a few weeks ago, and it makes Trump’s delegate math quite a bit more difficult. Notice that the actual results are now the mirror image of the Nightmare Scenario: in reality, we’re 73% of the way to a brokered convention, while, in the Nightmare Scenario, we were 73% of the way to a Trump clinch. That’s thanks to Wisconsin.

However, it’s not time to celebrate just yet: as Nate Silver observes today, Trump only needs to get to about 40% of the vote in a three-way contest to come out with large delegate majorities, and, as Nate Cohn pointed out a few weeks ago, Trump is poised to break 40% in a large number of upcoming states, where he has far more “natural” supporters than he had in Wisconsin. Many of the commentators who were treating Trump as inevitable a few weeks ago are now claiming that a contested convention is “almost certain.” Hogwash. I said they were being foolishly pessimistic in March, but that’s no excuse for becoming unjustifiably optimistic in April.

In reality, the stop-Trump delegate margin is razor-thin, and, if Kasich divides the anti-Trump vote in Indiana (May 3rd), Montana (June 7th), and all-important California (June 7th), Trump could still pretty easily walk into the convention with 1250 bound delegates — enough to clinch on the first ballot with no help from unbound delegates. Of course, if voters in those states follow Wisconsin’s lead and rally behind the single viable anti-Trump candidate, Sen. Cruz, we won’t have so much to worry about.

For the next few weeks, we don’t have too much to look forward to, but we also don’t have much to worry about. We are heading into the final Northeast primaries. Kasich’s entire justification for staying in the race is his appeal in the Northeast, with its 200-or-so bound delegates. Polls say he doesn’t have enough appeal to actually win, but he does have enough appeal to prevent Cruz from getting traction. Thus, I expect Trump to win virtually all the delegates in those primaries; so do most analysts. This wouldn’t be all that bad, either, as long as it drives Kasich definitively out of the race before the pivotal (and very competitive) Indiana contest on May 3rd. In fact, because the entire Northeastern bloc, combined, delivers only a few more bound delegates than California does on its own, a crushing Trump win in the Northeast (which would give Trump about 200 delegates but drive Kasich from the race) is probably better for the stop-Trump campaign than a narrow Kasich upset (which would hold Trump to about 100 delegates but allow Kasich to stay in the race to do much more delegate damage later on).

So it’ll be a while before we have a chance for another Wisconsin. Use the time to thank a Wisconsinite for their great work on Tuesday, and I’ll see you on April 19th, when New York votes and, quite possibly, awards every single one of its 95 delegates to Trump.

Colorado elects delegates April 8th.  They are officially unbound, but preliminary signs are good for Cruz taking the vast majority, and perhaps all of them.  Meanwhile, there are a couple other minor behind-the-scene shifts in the delegate count, most notably with Alaska un-re-allocating Marco Rubio’s delegates, which I’m not sure has ever happened before anywhere.

March 22nd

1596 delegates allocated so far (65% of total)

Comment: Kasich didn’t manage to ruin the night for anyone, so I am happy.  Trump won Arizona’s 58 delegates, which turned out to be inevitable given Arizona’s long early-voting window (Kasich actually lost Arizona to Rubio, which is pretty funny since Rubio dropped out a week ago), but Cruz came back with a massive win in Utah to secure all 40 of its delegates.  (Utah is normally proportional, but switches to winner-take-all if a candidate gets 50%.)  Thus, the night finished more-or-less even, and Trump missed his delegate targets. There are no more delegate-awarding contests until Wisconsin on April 5th, so the question of the next two weeks becomes: how fast can Kasich be driven out of the race after his disastrous showing tonight?

There were some minor delegate reallocations this week, particularly in Alaska; I have updated the counter accordingly (except for the Virgin Islands, because that race is still a mess).

March 15th
1480 delegates allocated so far (60% of total)

Comment: The good news is, while he made up some ground tonight, Trump missed his targets here by a significant margin.  60% of the delegates have been awarded, and yet Trump is only a little over halfway to clinching… while his opponents are nearly two-thirds of the way to forcing a brokered convention.  Meanwhile, the four-man race we’ve been suffering through lately finally shrank to a three-man race, with Rubio knocked out after a defeat in Florida.

The bad news is, because Kasich won in Ohio, we still have a three-man race. As the nightmare scenario shows, a three-man race will eventually hand Trump enough delegates to clinch a majority — even if he only wins 35-40% of the popular vote (a consistent trend that has continued tonight). Indeed, tonight’s results saw Trump win literally dozens of delegates outside Ohio that he would not have won except for the Kasich/Rubio spoiler effect. That trend will continue and accelerate now that we are in the winner-take-all portion of the GOP primary calendar.

Fortunately, the candidates have bought themselves a little breathing room with their defeats of Trump earlier this month.  Whereas the original “nightmare scenario” predicted that Trump became unbeatable if it was still a three-man race on April 25th, I now project that Trump’s nomination can still be blocked as long as someone drops out by May 2nd.

However, it would not be an easy path, by that late date, and it could easily fail. Gov. Kasich has literally no path to victory; it is impossible for him to achieve 1,237 delegates given that there are only 992 delegates left on the calendar, and it is almost impossible to foresee how he might plausibly reach the Rule 40(b) threshold even to have his name entered into nomination on the convention floor.  Every second Gov. Kasich remains in makes it more difficult to stop Trump; he should drop out immediately.  Preferably before his delusional campaign hands Trump another 74 delegates on March 22nd, one week from today.

March 12th
1114 delegates allocated so far (45% of total)

Comment: Not a ton of delegates awarded tonight, but, of those awarded, Trump got only 1.  Others got 47.  That’s a good night by any standard.

This is a long comment, because we are now two days away from March 15th.  March 15th is almost certain to be a bad night for #StopTrump.  Trump will very likely make up much of the ground he has lost in recent weeks, and it is entirely possible he will make up all of it.  Worse, much of the chattering class (as I have griped) is still insisting that the whole race hinges on Trump losing Ohio and/or Florida and their combined 166 delegates.  If he wins, they say, it’s all over.  So if he does win them both — still very much a possibility — there will be an overwhelming urge to panic and/or surrender to Trump.

But remember this: just to make his benchmarks for the “nightmare scenario” — just to make them, not exceed them — Trump needs to get to 769 delegates.  Ohio and Florida only get him to 630.  Sacrificing them may actually be best, since the biggest threat to the #StopTrump movement right now is the possibility that Kasich and Rubio will stay in the race, preventing vital consolidation.  Losing Florida and Ohio knocks them both out of the race, definitively. In my mind, that’s worth the 166 delegates it costs.

North Carolina is also voting on March 15th, but its delegates are allocated proportionally, so, even if Trump wins there, he won’t be able to get too many of its 72 delegates — not less than 20 and not more than 35.

Missouri and Illinois are also on the line Tuesday.  They use more complex allocation formulae than Ohio and Florida (which are simple winner-take-all states), but the plurality winner in each will win most and possibly all of their 121 delegates.  If Trump wins those plus Ohio and Florida, it puts him right back on track for the Nightmare Scenario. That would be very unfortunate.

It would not be the end of the world.  That’s right: thanks largely to the buffer the other candidates have steadily built up over the past several weeks, Trump can sweep all six elections on Tuesday (I didn’t mention the Northern Marianas Islands, which allocate 9 delegates, winner-take-all) and still be stopped by a rival candidate in May or June, as long as the field consolidates behind that candidate quickly after March 15th and that candidate starts consistently beating Trump, even by narrow margins, in most (not all) states.  Still, I would love to see somebody other than Trump win large delegate hauls in Missouri or Illinois; it would make the math a great deal easier.

Note that I allocated all of Wyoming’s delegates to “other” when they held precinct caucuses on March 1st.  I am reallocating them as they are bound to particular candidates.  (Cruz won 9 of 11 tonight, with 14-17 more very likely to fall into his camp at the state convention.)  I am also treating Guam’s officially-unbound-but-pledged-to-Cruz delegate as a Cruz delegate.

March 8th
1086 delegates allocated so far (43% of total)

Comment: At first blush, this was an awful night.  The crowded three-way battle to be the anti-Trump was a bloodbath in Trump’s favor.  Trump won 13 more delegates than he would have won without Rubio in the race… and it would have been worse in states with slightly larger delegations.   Rubio. Out. Now.

Meanwhile, even as it became clear that this race must become a two-way battle and must be led by Ted Cruz, Kasich continued to be so much of a spoiler that the “other” category is now threatening to overtake Rubio!

But take a longer look at the results, and they are not so awful after all. Cruz won Idaho outright, Trump was held to an average 35% of the vote (instead of the 40% expected by the Nightmare Scenario), and nothing could have made it clearer that other candidates must drop out and rally to Cruz. The brokered-convention camp grew its lead over Trump by a percentage point, and even reached the halfway point on its overall goal of denying Trump a nomination “clinch.”   More padding would be nice, with March 15th’s winner-take-all romp coming up, but every step to keep Trump off his targets helps.

March 6th
913 delegates allocated so far (37% of total)

Comment: What a wonderful weekend. Cruz took Trump to the woodshed and gave the stop-Trump coalition a very considerable buffer. It is vital to build up as large a buffer as possible before March 15th, when Trump is likely to make a large comeback if the field has not yet consolidated. Cruz did yeoman’s work on that buffer, though his rivals prevented him, in some cases, from building an even bigger lead.

It was an unspeakably bad weekend for Rubio, though, who is now running well behind even the worst-case numbers proposed by this “nightmare scenario.”  This is thanks mainly to Kasich, who took many of Rubio’s would-be delegates despite having no viable path of his own. Rubio’s campaign is now on life support.

March 1st (Super Tuesday)
757 delegates allocated so far (31% of total)

Comment: Super Tuesday could have gone better, certainly, as Trump broke 40% in several states and nearly broke 50% in Massachusetts — which explains why Republicans never win there — but losing four states, including the delegate pinata of Texas, measurably slowed his progress.

If 1,236 delegates are won by candidates not named Donald J. Trump, then there will be a brokered convention, where Trump seems unlikely to prevail.  On Super Tuesday, those delegates leapt out to an early lead, 27%-34%.

*NOTE: The rest of that article is quite good, and very helpful to understanding the convention process.  I mean, of course it is; it’s Ben Ginsberg, who practically is the convention. However, the second paragraph is just parroted conventional wisdom, and it’s wrong.