Early indicators suggest this might be right.

A story from Politico yesterday discusses South Dakota’s delegation, which Cruz apparently dominates.  But this is not too surprising, because South Dakota is prime Cruz Country: a Midwestern conservative plains state with an especially arcane delegate election method (delegates are chosen in convention before the primary on June 7th). I would be surprised if Cruz did not win the state outright, ending up with 29 bound delegates who are also totally loyal to him.

More intriguing is word from Louisiana, reported in last night’s Wall Street Journal.  Although Donald Trump won the popular vote in Louisiana, by 3.6 points, and the two candidates tied in the bound delegate count (18-18), Cruz has apparently captured all of Louisiana’s 10 unbound delegates (5 of which used to belong to Rubio), giving Cruz a 28-18 delegate lead in Louisiana.  Unsurprisingly, the Cruz-controlled delegation then elected fellow Cruz supporters to fill various RNC committee positions, taking 5 of those 6 slots as well. (We’ll discuss the importance of those committees in upcoming entries of Conventional Chaos.) This is all good news for Cruz, because Louisiana is a southern state where (as the Journal reports), the Trump campaign not only won a strong plurality (41% of the popular vote), but also made significant inroads with Republican party officials, who normally wield outsized influence in the delegate selection process. If Cruz’s delegate-acquisition program is stronger than Trump’s in Louisiana, it’s probably stronger than Trump’s everywhere, or just about.

That said, I don’t want to read too much into this story, because all the Journal reported is that Cruz did very well picking up unbound delegates. If Cruz is to have any chance at all of denying Trump 1,237 first-ballot votes, he is going to have to pick up virtually all of the unbound delegates nationwide anyway.  (Fortunately, there aren’t very many in the South. Louisiana had 10, which Cruz has picked up, Georgia has 16 now that Rubio dropped out, and Oklahoma has 2. Cruz is very well positioned to get all of them, which is good because it’s not yet clear that he can afford to lose any of them.) These are good, necessary pickups, but they aren’t what I’m really interested in.

What I really want to know is whether Cruz managed to get any Cruz supporters elected to Trump’s delegate slots (or vice versa). This would begin to tell us how well Cruz (and Trump) are going to be at acquiring “supporters-in-name-only,” or what John Yob called SINOs, who could wreak havoc on a convention by rendering the bound delegate count moot on the second ballot… or the first. If Cruz’s delegate-acquisition organization is good at picking up unbound slots, it’s probably good at picking off Trump slots as well… but we don’t know, and won’t know, until a newspaper starts asking.

Unfortunately, the Journal had absolutely nothing to say about this.

This is not terribly surprising, because (segue to new topic!) the Journal‘s reporting and opining on the delegate race has been abysmal, especially in their fawning and downright irrational coverage of Gov. John Kasich’s campaign. In the story we’re discussing, for example, the Journal reports, falsely:

The Texan must win 85% of the remaining delegates to win outright, a highly unlikely scenario with many states awarding delegates proportionally.

In fact, of the 19 states yet to vote, only 3 are awarding delegates proportionally. All the rest are winner-take-all or winner-take-most (or unbound, which are more likely than not to be winner-take-all in effect). This distinction is a very big deal, because proportional allocations can favor multi-candidate races, while winner-take-most allocations strongly favor the plurality winner and harshly punish candidates who split their votes.

Unfortunately, based partially on this error, the editorial board recently made the insane argument that Kasich should stay in the race in order to win the Northeast:

Mr. Cruz finished back in the pack in New England outside Maine, and the states coming up include Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Maryland. Mr. Trump wins the nomination if he wins most of those states.

For one, it is totally false that Trump wins the nomination if he wins most of the Northeastern states.  In fact, my personal spreadsheet (hey, everyone builds one after a certain point) has Trump winning every single delegate in the Northeast. 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.

Unfortunately, Kasich’s presence in the race makes winning those key states away from Trump exponentially more difficult, since every single one of them allocates delegates winner-take-all or winner-take-most. I am not alone in my analysis: the best analysts, both on the Left and on the Right, agree that Trump will likely win most or all of the Northeast but can still lose the nomination, and every serious observer agrees that, by staying in the race, Kasich is either a stubborn fool or running to be Trump’s vice president. Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is apparently doing the same — or simply cannot bear the thought of a nominee who isn’t popular in the Acela Corridor, and has become willfully blind to facts that get in the way.

For two, it is now obvious that Kasich can hardly make a dent in the Northeast. In delegate-rich New York, for example, Trump leads by at least twenty points in every poll, and by 50 points in one recent poll. Better still? Cruz, not Kasich, is in second place in most of those polls. In Maryland? Same story… which the Journal knows full well, since it’s their own poll. Trump will win the entire (or nearly the entire) Northeast with or without Kasich in the race. Kasich might beat Cruz throughout the Northeast, but, without a radical change in the direction of the race, Trump will still win the night and the vast majority of the delegates.

You may recognize these two points as precisely the same two points I made to argue that Rubio should drop out before March 8th. You may further recognize that these two points turned out to be absolutely correct on both March 8th and March 15th.  The Journal, inaugurating its practice of being totally oblivious to both delegate counts and delegate allocation methods, was on the wrong side of this question three weeks ago, too, arguing that Rubio should stay in the race days after it was clear he was helping Trump more than anyone. I was right then (and I was not alone). Same argument applies now.

For three, as the Journal itself appears to concede, the best hope anyone has of stopping Trump in a three-way Kasich-Cruz-Trump race is if Cruz supports Kasich in Kasich’s strong states and Kasich does the same in Cruz’s. But the Journal makes no mention of the fact that Kasich has deliberately embarked on a maximally destructive path, focusing his attention in obvious Cruz-favored states Utah and Wisconsin. To put this in perspective: in Utah, Kasich was hoping to get delegates (which would be nice for him) while denying Trump any (which is the absolute top strategic and tactical priority of any stop-Trump campaign bar none). Under Utah delegate allocation rules, the only way Kasich could both win delegates and deny delegates to Trump is by personally winning more than 50% of the popular vote in Utah. Based on the pre-caucus polling average in Utah, which Cruz led by huge margins, this means Kasich would have had to beat his polls by as much as Bernie Sanders did in Michigan. You may recall that people got pretty excited about Sanders’ win there. That’s because it was the second-largest primary election upset in history. So Kasich deployed resources that would either have no effect at all, or could conceivably help Kasich in a once-in-a-generation lucky break, or, in all other cases, would give Trump delegates. It was a totally irrational move. The New York Times reports that the Cruz campaign is furious about it. You’re goddamn right he is, and has every right to be. (The Times also reports that Kasich is furious at Cruz for calling him a spoiler. Kasich can’t handle the truth; too bad.)

Fortunately, Kasich’s campaign is too hapless, and Utah’s voters too intelligent (with a late assist from Mitt Romney), for this to work: Cruz won the state with nearly 70% of the popular vote, denying all delegates to Trump, despite Kasich’s spoiler effect.

Unfortunately, Kasich is now pursuing a similar strategy in Wisconsin, where Cruz narrowly leads him, while himself narrowly losing to Trump, in a state that allocates delegates winner-take-most. You may recognize this as the mirror image of demographically similar Illinois, where Kasich handed some 20 delegates to Trump by spoiling the race.  If Kasich were serious about actually stopping Trump, he would be stumping in the New York City GOP congressional districts, where he can pick off 39 delegates from Trump without too much difficulty. Instead, he is deliberately running in states where he will do far more to help Trump than hurt him. The Wall Street Journal says nothing about any of this. The Journal, either through better-Trump-than-Cruz malice, mathematical ignorance, or sheer arrogance (ironically, precisely the same blind arrogance that drove Trump’s supporters from the Wall Street Journal wing of the party in the first place), is enabling Kasich’s totally destructive, Trump-abetting campaign.

Hopefully we don’t have to wait for another awful night like March 15th for the Journal — and Gov. Kasich himself — to realize that, though I am often wrong, I am absolutely right about this. As of today, a vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump. This is not a slogan, and it is not a joke. It is the fact that will likely determine the future of the Republican Party — if the Grand Old Party has a future at all.

P.S. A word of reassurance: though all agree that the Kasich campaign is a net benefit to the Trump campaign — hence, “a vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump” — there is no need to panic about it… not yet.

If Kasich performs unexpectedly well in the Northeast, that would be a minor miracle, but it would also be great news: Trump’s path to the nomination would be complicated, perhaps ruled out entirely.

If, as seems far more likely, Kasich is humiliated in the Northeast, he would be forced to drop out… and the Northeast votes before the most critical states in the Cruz stop-Trump strategy. Either way, Cruz still has a path, though a much more difficult path than one where Kasich drops out before Wisconsin.

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.

On Super Tuesday (1 March 2016, for those of you reading this on a Multivac archive in the far future), Minnesota went to the caucuses.

For those of you who aren’t from caucus states, let me explain them quickly: caucuses are a wonderful system where all members of the local party come together to discuss the issues of the day, conduct the business of the party, and select our wisest and most enthusiastic members to represent our precincts as officers and delegates for the district party (and, ultimately, the state party and the national party as well). It’s a bit more work than pulling a lever in an anonymous box, and there’s a lot more opportunity for chaos (since they are run by party volunteers, not by the government), but caucuses are an American tradition, dating back to the Jacksonian Era, that ensures the whole party speaks for the People… without handing over the reins to the mob.  (Primaries are prone to errors on both sides of that ellipsis.  And they’re more vulnerable to the influence of big money.  And… well, this isn’t a post about why you should ask your primary state to switch to a caucus.  But that may be a future post!  So look out!)

One point of caucuses that makes them different from primaries is that, in a caucus, you have the chance to debate the candidates with your neighbors before voting on them. This year, I wrote a speech about the grave threat posed by Mr. Donald Trump. I expected to give my speech to the voters in my precinct (about 15 people in a normal presidential year) and that would be that. These are the remarks I prepared.  (This was going to be the whole blog post, but there’s a twist!  So stay tuned after the speech.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican party stands on the brink of catastrophe.

Our frontrunner is a serial adulterer who spent his life building an empire of celebrity on a throne of failed businesses, a fraudster who has cheated his customers and screwed over his partners for decades.  His abortion platform is the same as Harry Reid’s (who, by the way, also claims to be “pro-life”), and he is so thin-skinned, so eager to turn libel laws and the government against Americans who disagree with him, that he makes Oberlin College feminist fascists look tolerant.  If he is our nominee, we will lose this election to Hillary Rodham Clinton. If he is our nominee, we will deserve to.

Donald Trump must be stopped.

Our path to victory means denying Trump a plurality in as many states as possible.  That means we need to vote tactically tonight.  We must vote for the strongest anti-Trump candidate in each state, even if that’s not our favorite candidate.

So, if we were in Texas, I’d ask you to vote for Cruz. In Ohio, Kasich.  Here in Minnesota, Marco Rubio is strongest.  Therefore, I am voting for Marco tonight, and I ask you to do the same.  They are all are all good conservatives and good men, and I’d be happy to see any of them replace Barack Obama in the White House.

But our frontrunner is no conservative. He is an evil man.  I implore you to help Marco Rubio Stop. Trump. Tonight.

I was pretty nervous about this speech, but pleased with it overall.  I shared it on Facebook; many people who would be at my caucus read it and liked it and even shared it. I encouraged them to give this speech, or at least to vocally oppose Trump, in their own precincts.

Then we got to the caucus, and it was a madhouse.  The volunteers, led by our stalwart District Chairwoman, Abby, managed to keep things running smoothly, but the sheer number of bodies nearly overwhelmed the school.  They’d clearly been prepared for unusually high turnout, but no one would have been prepared for turnout this unusually high.  We were all sent into the gymnasium for a giant district orientation and pre-caucus meeting prior to breaking out into our precincts.  Caitlin and I found some friends and neighbors and chatted for a bit. We knew lots of people there, including friends, former professors, current students, fellow parishoners, and others. Indeed, I got a bunch of texts from a lot of them a few minutes later. (This is another great feature of caucuses: you get to see your friends!)

However, this year (unlike the last time I was at a presidential caucus), there was something different: an opportunity for a representative from each candidate to speak, not just to the local precinct, but to the entire assembled district — all 1,513 of us.  This was announced quite quickly, blink and you’ll miss it, and I assumed at first that it was pre-scripted, that the presidential candidates had each selected someone to speak on their behalf in our district.  When the Ted Cruz guy stepped forward and started talking, though, it slowly dawned on me that these weren’t people from the campaigns; they were just random local joes who’d been quick enough on their feet to reach the microphone and say their piece on behalf of their guy.

Some of the speakers were fine.  Others were not, shall we say, rich in charisma.  These are mostly off-the-cuff remarks by friends and neighbors, though, so I’m not expecting Dan Webster levels of oratory. Honestly, I assume that’s precisely why we usually limit the speeches to the more conversational setting of a 15-person precinct meeting.

My sister, who was with me, started encouraging me to go take the microphone and give my anti-Trump/pro-Rubio speech, insisting that it was a good speech and needed to be heard.  I demurred, still unclear on the process for becoming a speaker and more than a little shy about addressing an audience of a 1500 instead of 15, but she kept on needling me and eventually pushed me forward to the speaker “on-deck circle,” where I asked about the process to become a speaker. I learned that anyone could volunteer to speak on any candidate’s behalf, and that each candidate was budgeted two minutes of speaker time.

Unfortunately, I learned this just as some guy was finishing a two-minute speech on behalf of Marco Rubio.  Rubio’s time was expired.  I was out of luck.  So I said, “Ah, well, guess that’s why campaigns need district captains in caucus states!” and stepped back into the crowd while the Kasich guy spoke. My sister said I shouldn’t give up so easily. I shrugged. “Rules are rules.”

Next up was a group of five speakers, three of whom were wearing red hats that said “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”  The Trump guys, unlike everyone else at this caucus, were organized and tightly coordinated: they had a young man, a middle-aged woman, and an older man all speak on his behalf in quick 45-second bursts.  (This is great optics and great tactics. I did not expect the Trump campaign to be the best-organized, but they were. That’s very bad news nationally for a lot of reasons, which I’ll talk about in a later blog post.) They got some boos, but they also got some cheers, and they rattled off the usual Trump talking points. “He’s a businessman! He won’t let us make such bad deals! He can beat Hillary! He’ll make America great again!”

This got my blood up.  I’m sure these people are fine, decent, upstanding citizens, but what they’re selling is a bill of goods, and this is my district.  I’m not going to see the Republican Party corrupted here, where I can actually do something to stop it.

So I stepped back into the clutch of on-deck speakers as the Trumpsters were finishing up. My sister had never stopped encouraging me to get up there, even after I gave up, so props to her; I certainly would not have done something so impulsive without a great deal of prodding from her.  I had no plan, but my speech was bursting to get out now.  Abby, the district coordinator, saw that I was in the speaker box and silently mouthed at me, “WHICH CANDIDATE?”

My mind raced.  Rubio had used all his time.  She wouldn’t give me the microphone if I said “Rubio”.  Ditto Cruz and Kasich.  Now even Trump had used his time.  I flicked through the remaining candidates in my mental rolodex, and I looked around to make sure I was truly the last speaker, that I wasn’t stealing an opportunity from anyone more invested in the candidate whose time I was about to use.

“CARSON,” I mouthed back, before I could talk myself out of it.

I like Ben Carson.  Who doesn’t?  I’d love to see him be president.  If I thought he was our best shot to stop Trump, I’d back him to the hilt.  But I had a speech that told everyone to vote Rubio!  I could hardly give a pro-Rubio speech on Carson’s time, as it wouldn’t be fair to the good doctor (or, indeed, to the other candidates). Heck, even though I like to think that Ben would approve of any effort to stop the disreputable frontrunner (who is his opposite in every morally important sense), I still needed to say some very warm things about Dr. Carson to morally justify using his time for it. At the same time, I couldn’t come straight out and endorse Ben, since I had no intention of actually voting for him. Nor could I afford to lie to or even mislead the audience, especially not with so many friends and neighbors watching me. I thought about sitting back down, giving up the whole thing as a rash error. Then I thought again about the red-hats still giving their spiel in front of me.

I had only about ten seconds to do a mental rewrite before Abby handed me the mic.  This is what I ended up saying (from memory; if an official recording ever surfaces, trust it instead of my memory):

My name is James Heaney, and I am speaking on behalf of Dr. Ben Carson.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican party stands on the brink of catastrophe.

[“Louder!” the crowd cries.  I realize the mic is too far from my face, pull it in.] Our frontrunner is a serial adulterer who spent his life building an empire of celebrity on a throne of failed businesses [HUGE cheer: I am reassured that the Trump people do not control this crowd], a fraudster who has cheated his customers and screwed over his partners for decades.  [My hands are trembling, my voice quavering. My sister later says she thought it was righteous fury. I’m hoping it’s coming off that way, but it’s actually just good ol’ terror.]  His abortion platform is indistinguishable [another huge cheer; God bless the pro-life Catholics around here; I ride roughshod straight through the applause, getting louder instead of pausing] from Harry Reid’s (who, by the way, also claims to be “pro-life”!), and he is so thin-skinned, so eager to turn libel laws and the government against Americans who disagree with him, that he makes Oberlin College feminist fascists look tolerant.  [Another cheer, I think, but what the heck am I going to say when I get to the Rubio bit?]  If he is our nominee, we will lose this election to Hillary Rodham Clinton. If he is our nominee, we will deserve to. [No, really, what am I going to say?]

Donald Trump must be stopped. [Are they cheering again? What am I going to say?]

Now, I like Dr. Carson a lot.  He’s a great American and a good conservative, who could do a lot of good for this country in the White House.   But we have a lot of great conservatives in this race — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and more — and I’d be happy to see any of them replace Barack Obama in the White House. I ask you to vote for them. Because we won’t have a good man or a conservative in the White House if you don’t help us Stop. Trump. Tonight.

Thank you.

[Did that sound good? That sounded good. Maybe. I really hope Ben will agree if he somehow ever hears about this!  I really do like you, Ben!  Oh, are they cheering? Okay, they’re cheering. And Abby wants her mic back.  Judas priest, let’s just go caucus now and maybe never say anything again.  Oh, look, a text from my best friend in Arizona, who just heard from his sister that I gave a great speech… and also wants to know since when am I voting for Carson? Fair enough, fair enough.]

I was the last speaker.

Now, I don’t know that my speech had much effect on the results.  This was clearly a crowd already primed against Mr. Trump and his disgusting candidacy.  However, I will say this:

Minnesota delivered a crushing defeat to Donald Trump on Super Tuesday (Rubio 36, Cruz 29, Trump 21). All Minnesotans can be proud of that. It was Trump’s first third-place finish in any primary, it came just minutes after Trump finished bragging that he had finished first or second in every state, and it was not. even. close.

And Trump’s very worst district in the entire state?  Republican Senate District 64 — the district I am prouder than ever to call my home. The district where 1,513 people stood up to our savage frontrunner and his thugs and said “Hell, no!”  Final results: Rubio 64%, Cruz 13%, 2% for my adoptive Dr. Carson (who honorably departed the race today, head held high), 10% for Kasich… and a mere 10.8% percent for Donald J. Trump, frontrunner.

In Minnesota, we stopped Trump cold.  Rest of the country: get your act together.  We can still win this.

P.S. If you want to use my speech for any purpose, you may do so, even without attribution, so long as you intend no benefit, direct or indirect, to Mr. Donald Trump or his candidacy.