The rules of this game are simple: President Trump implements a bad policy, makes a bad decision, or says a bad thing, which is worthy of condemnation. The Cathedral then reacts by describing that policy, decision, or quote in apocalyptic terms, becomes hysterical, and then questions not the wisdom of the policy but its very legitimacy–its legality, its authority, and its membership in the set of things that may be reasonably discussed by reasonable people. In most cases, this overreaction is (in my opinion as a hardcore Rule-of-Law guy) more dangerous to the American system of government than the actual bad things Trump is doing. So then I need to stand up and say, “Hey, guys, it’s Not That Bad,” explain why it’s Not That Bad, and then remember to still mention somewhere that it’s still bad, because the last thing I want is for people to think I’ve turned into a pro-Trumper (or even an anti-anti-Trumper).

This overreaction to Trump’s policies should not surprise me as much as it does, since we saw something similar in the right-wing fever swamps whenever Pres. Obama did… well, just about anything. Indeed, the birther controversy, which was exploited by our new President, rapidly devolved into nothing but a blanket assault on Pres. Obama’s legitimacy. However, the right-wing fever swamps do not control the commanding heights of culture the way, say, Joss Whedon does, so the Trump Freakouts are more dangerous than the Obama Freakouts. Besides, if the election taught me anything, it’s that I substantially underestimated the threat of Obama Freakouts (and the concomitant crisis of truth in conservatism), and should have done more to stand up against them at the time.

So, onto today’s Trump Freakout, about something that is Not That Bad.

Even after everything I’ve seen the past few weeks, I’m still taken aback by the amount of sturm und drang I’m seeing the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. A representative comment I just saw:

“This is great. Now I can feel secure my future children will be force-fed Creationism, even though I’m a Jew. And they can forego…let’s see…..math. Perfect.”

Another:

“I am a public school teacher. I am sitting at my desk, which is in a classroom in a public school full of minorities and SpEd students, and I am weeping. I have about 9 minutes left on my lunch break, and I don’t know that I can pull it together in time. I am crushed, absolutely gutted. I am afraid for my students, I am afraid for myself, and I am afraid for this country.”

Granted, those are from Jezebel, not known for its level-headedness, but I’m seeing surprisingly similar sentiments on my Facebook and Twitter news feeds, including from friends. A great many people seem to have this mistaken idea that the Education Secretary is King of Schools, and that America’s schools must now cater to Secretary DeVos’s every whim. Since Secretary DeVos desires the destruction of all public schools (a debatable proposition in itself), the American education system is now pretty much doomed for the next four years. Thus, time for a Trump Freakout.

Now, I don’t know much about DeVos, other than that she should know more about growth versus proficiency, doesn’t have the kind of experience I’d look for in an EdSec nominee’s résumé, yet still made good noises about giving schools more freedom.

I do know a few things about the American system of government.

In reality, the Secretary of Education is about as far from King of Schools as you can get. The Constitution assigns primary responsibility over education to the “states respectively, or to the People.” The federal government has no explicit Constitutional authority over schools. Therefore, Congress can only interfere with education in limited contexts, when justified by another constitutional power.

For her part, the Secretary of Education can only interfere with education in even more limited contexts where Congress has expressly authorized her to do so. That’s not a huge grant of power, and it’s not likely to get bigger in the near future, either: Congressional Democrats are currently in the minority in both houses, but they hold a filibustering minority in the Senate. This means they can block any legislation to grant Secretary DeVos more power unless a large portion of Democrats think it’s a good idea.

So, practically speaking, Betsy DeVos’s job responsibilities are:

• Continue the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (a bipartisan law that replaced No Child Left Behind and reduces federal standardized testing)

• Keep the federal student loan program functioning as-is.

• Distribute various grants, authorized by Congress, to schools deemed eligible.

• Enforce FERPA, a federal law protecting student records.

• Grant regulatory waivers to states that decide they want to try other things, within limits prescribed by Congress.

• Step in to enforce civil rights and disability rights in schools, as mandated by federal law… if states fail to do so on their own.

Compared to the Secretary of State, who can pretty much start a war if he wants to, or the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has vast powers to transform the national medical insurance market, the Secretary of Education just… isn’t all that big a deal. The best EdSec in the world can’t save a failing school system on his own; the worst would be hard-pressed to destroy a healthy one.

After all, K-12 education in this country is more than 90% funded at the state and local level. The entire federal contribution to the K-12 education system is less than 10%… and a whole lot of that is non-discretionary funding, meaning Secretary DeVos can’t do anything about it. Moreover, the Department of Education is expressly forbidden by federal law from creating or imposing a national curriculum (Common Core’s implementation was legally sketchy for that reason), so you don’t need to worry about Creationism in schools. Besides, DeVos is on record as wanting more state/local control, not less.

So, even if Secretary DeVos wanted to go to war with public schools (she doesn’t), and even if Congress authorized her to do so (they haven’t), there’s really just not that much she can do, given the limited influence of the federal government over education. Even if there were, assuming Secretary DeVos is as unqualified as many of her opponents believe, then she wouldn’t be able to harness the fearsome DoE bureaucracy to do her bidding in the first place. The narrow regulatory windows through which Washington is able to affect education policy are hard to navigate even with a full team of lawyers and bureaucrats in your corner; working against them is not easy at all.

DeVos’s confirmation as EdSec is not that bad.

(Now for the part where I acknowledge what is bad.)

None of this is to say, “Oh, that Betsy DeVos is going to be a terrific EdSec!” (Heck, I don’t even know what a terrific EdSec would look like.) I’m not saying she can’t do bad things.

Heck, I’m quite certain she is going to do things I think are bad. Joy Pullmann at The Federalist has done yeomen’s work documenting the large gaps in DeVos’s record as a true decentralizer, placed DeVos’s idea of school choice under scrutiny, and has repeatedly called attention to DeVos’s support for the Common Core implementation, which I thought was a travesty for federalism. I thought her confirmation hearings went much less badly than most people believed, but Pullmann is right that a lot important questions weren’t even asked at those hearings.  And, hey, as with any Secretary of Education, DeVos’s discretionary power over grants and waivers is hard to use for good, but easy to use for evil. (Hey, Congress, maybe we should stop ceding discretionary power over billions of dollars in funding from Congress to a bunch of unelected officials? Because that whole “power of the purse” thing is there for a reason? Just saying.)

DeVos will also surely do some things I think are good but which other people think are bad. She’ll probably rescind the notorious Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letters, which (even without discussing the policies they embodied) were a travesty of law and federalism based on transparently unsupportable interpretations of Title IX and defended only by the imperial power of an unchecked Executive Branch. But the “Dear Colleague” letters were considered huge victories by feminists and transsexual activists, who strongly supported the underlying policies.

Likewise, if your state or city is bad, you might not want more state/local control of schools. There are people close to me who are gravely concerned about whether their home states will protect their disabled children’s federal rights under the IDEA Act if the federal government isn’t supervising them as closely anymore. Fair enough: disabled kids rule, and deserve the highest standard of care.

So, yeah, Betsy DeVos might be bad, and she might be worth opposing, particularly if you’re a liberal Democrat; I’m not going to dispute that.

But, at the same time, if you’re worried about your local school, the federal Secretary of Education is not even in the Top 20 most important people who shape the day-to-day of your district. There’s no need to weep at your desk. It makes me sad to see people treating a relatively minor federal department like it’s King of Schools. (Among other things, it points to an alarming deficit in our national civics literacy.)

It’s just Not That Bad.

Next time on Not That Bad: James explains why we need to stop having Giant Freakouts about proposed bills, like the one that would withdraw the U.S. from the U.N., that are never in a million years going to get passed into law.

My wife and I learned different things about feelings when we were growing up. My wife was taught that, “Whatever feelings you’re feeling are okay.” (It was how you acted on your feelings that mattered.) Whether billowing anger or rapturous joy, she was raised to let those feelings happen, without self-criticism or external judgment, regardless of how they arose. Her job was to ride those feelings out and then make good choices.

I, on the other hand, was raised by two philosophy professors who were great fans of Thomas Aquinas. Although I don’t think anyone ever sat me down for a talk about “feelings,” it is not surprising that I ended up believing something rather different: emotions can be disordered, irrational, improper, and just plain wrong. We might not be directly responsible for our feelings—we can’t turn them on and off at will—but, if you’re looking at a mass grave and experiencing joy, there’s something wrong with you. Even if you go on to do the right thing (good for you), that emotion you felt was wrong, and you need to take steps to make sure that you don’t feel that way the next time you see a mass grave. To me, one of the signs of a fully developed human being is that he evolves beyond simply riding out disordered emotions; instead, he stops experiencing such emotions altogether.

So I was alarmed when I woke up the morning after Election Day and discovered that I felt… pretty good, actually!

After all, I had just spent the past nine months making the case that Donald Trump was unfit to be President of the United States. During the primary, this blog became a chronicle of the campaign to stop him. After he won, I kept defending #NeverTrump and trying to remove him. Less than a week before the election, I published a post entitled, “For the Record, Trump is Evil”, in which I derided him as a moral monster whom the ethical voter should not elect to the post of dog-catcher, still less the highest office in the land. Unfortunately, I thought the same of Mrs. Clinton, which left me in something of a bind—so I spent the final days of the election bending over backwards to try and find an ethical way to oppose Mrs. Clinton without supporting Mr. Trump. When Election Day arrived, still undecided, I stalled: I didn’t show up at the polls until just an hour before they closed, and then I spent twenty-five minutes agonizing over my choice (which was between third-party candidate Mike Maturen and the Republican slate of electors).* I soon thereafter sent a piece to The Federalist arguing that the Electoral College had a duty to reject Donald Trump in favor of some other conservative, because of Trump’s manifold moral and legal failings.

So the election of Donald Trump should have made me feel awful. Other than the little bit of schadenfreude I gleaned from reading Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow and the New Yorker in complete meltdown—yeah, the expansive, take-no-prisoners culture war you started isn’t so fun when you’re losing, is it, guys?—the American future I forecast under President Trump was bleak. I expected (in no particular order) corruption, recession, realignment, war, big government, racism, violence on all sides, incompetence, the surrender of social conservatives on all the issues that really matter (while simultaneously turning back the clock on human decency under the guise of fighting political correctness), classlessness, lawlessness, end-runs around the Constitution, deficits as far as the eye can see, brand new threats as yet unimagined, and a myriad of other evils. In fact, I still expect all these things: my pre-election outlook on Trump has changed only a little. All this, my Thomist training told me, should have left me bereft and horrified. I shouldn’t have been feeling schadenfreude while reading Anna Merlan, I thought; I should have felt more or less the same awfulness she was feeling (credit where due: her piece, “It’s Okay To Feel Terrible Before You Feel Anything Else”, inspired the title for this post).

But the weeks passed. The schadenfreude faded, and I still felt fine.

Trump made it clear he planned to continue to beclown himself with celebrity feuds even as President. Russia’s increasingly clear interference in our election added a whole new dimension to a foreign policy chess game not a single person in Washington was equipped to play—least of all the President-elect. I kept feeling fine.

I watched Gods of Egypt, as promised, and it was an abomination before God and Man. The Electoral College betrayed its duty and elected Trump despite everything. The dumb caricatures of GOP policy Trump ran on (when we could have had the policies of a Paul or a Rubio or a Cruz! Auugh!) didn’t get less dumb after his election. If anything, they became more confused. And, even then… I felt fine.

I’ve seen scant evidence that Trump has developed a single virtue since the election, but I have seen an awful lot of evidence that Republicans, from the grassroots to the pinnacle of the Senate, are more willing to aid, abet, and generally cover for him (now that he’s “our” guy) than I ever imagined in my most cynical moments as a Republican. A once-great American party I once called home has permanently sullied itself, and I’ve scampered away to start a new political party—an effort which, I’m sad to say, isn’t going all that well at the moment! In short, everything is terrible.

Now, a lot of this did make me feel frustrated or dismayed. I was very cranky for a day after the Electoral College voted. Yet, through all of it, my basically okay feeling remained. This, in turn, made me feel awfully guilty: how dare I feel good while staring at the political equivalent of a mass grave? What the hell is wrong with me? I’m not my wife! I don’t think it’s okay to just feel my feels whatever they may be!

During the run-up to Inauguration Day, I was forced to think about it more and more. Why wasn’t I more enthusiastic about impeaching the new President? Why wasn’t I feeling more ashamed for my country as he prepared to take the Oath? No longer able to set my feelings aside, I examined them more closely, and realized a couple things.

For one, it turns out a lot of what I’m feeling isn’t happiness. It’s just relief. The imminent, even inevitable, presidency of Hillary Clinton had weighed on my chest for months.

Actually, scratch that: I resigned myself to President Hillary Clinton way back in 2012, because I thought President Obama’s “blue wall” gave Clinton a structural advantage that even a real Republican like Rubio or Fiorina would have a tough time overcoming. When Trump secured the nomination, my hope of victory died, but it had never been strong to begin with. I had this vivid mental image (read: nightmare) of President Hillary Clinton naming Barack Obama to fill Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court seat, with Goodwin Liu as a chaser when Clarence Thomas died. Of Catholic schools (like the one I work for) and convents and hospitals being threatened with destruction unless they abandoned their Catholic identities. Of the First Amendment going away for good, in more ways than one. (Mrs. Clinton did not hide her disdain for pro-1A decisions like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.) Of gender ideology spreading to every corner of society, not through debate and cultural change but through imperial mandates and threats of defunding and blacklisting and jailing. Of Obama’s imperial presidency continuing to expand into a monarchy while a rapturous press corps did nothing but cheer. Of continuing persecution for me and mine through the organs of the unaccountable federal bureaucracy, with no check in sight. Above all, I imagined a lot of babies being killed by the abortion machine, even as President Clinton destroyed the Hyde Amendment and put us taxpayers directly on the hook for mass murder.

I was going to fight like an archangel to stop all this from happening, but I didn’t expect to succeed. I thought Clinton would be the next President no matter what we did. (Trump supporters reading this are probably thinking that makes me a cuck, but I think fighting for a lost cause, never surrendering, is noble.) So, by the time Clinton got around to losing, I had been carrying the dread of her presidency around with me for four years. I had no idea how much that quiet, resigned horror affected me until it was, suddenly, gone.

It’s okay to feel relieved about that. It’s not disordered. It’s actually pretty reasonable. I’m not saying you have to. I have plenty of friends, including conservative friends, who are feeling various shades of despair, anger, and simple shame today. Given how awful Trump is, I think those feelings are entirely justified, even if I find, to my surprise, that I don’t share them. But hear me out:

You look at the Orange Menace on the presidential dais and say, “Okay, yes, he’s a perilous, predatory Putin puppet who proudly posed for Playboy, but he’s not going to destroy whole orders of nuns for declining to join the Left’s Permanent Sexual Revolution.”

“…but he isn’t going to repeal the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.”

“…but, when he brazenly ignores the rule of law to advance narrow political ends, he isn’t going to be able to get away with it quite as easily as President Obama and the Clintons always did.”

I can stack those “buts” all day. There are dozens—hundreds—of catastrophes Clinton vowed to inflict on us in her own campaign materials, and (unlike Trump) you could actually take her word for it when it came to policy. And then, in one remarkable night, those catastrophes all went away.

We are left, instead, with Trump.

There are a lot of bad things you can say about Trump. I said some of them, above. Now let me say a few more:

Trump could start a nuclear war that kills us all. I’d trust Fake Drunk Nixon with the nuke codes sooner than I’d trust Trump with them—and, yet, here we are.

Trump could be the most corrupt president in history. In the country where Warren G. Harding was once president, that’s saying something.

Trump could be the most ethically-compromised president in history. In the country where William Jefferson Clinton was once president, that’s saying something.

Trump could be the president who does the most damage to the unity of the country itself. In the country where James Buchanan was once president, that’s saying something.

Trump could be a (not-so-)secret fascist who is just waiting for an opportunity to sweep aside the checks and balances of the Constitution and impose a permanent, autocratic political order on us—and has perhaps the best chance of succeeding when he does. In the country where Woodrow Wilson was once president, that’s saying something.

Trump could start torturing U.S. prisoners of war, in serious violation of domestic law, international law, and the moral law.  At one point, he promised to do just that.

Trump could start murdering the families of suspected terrorists in cold blood, in serious violation of domestic law, international law, and the moral law.  At one point, he promised to do just that.

Trump could abandon the commitments he’s made to the protection of the unborn, leaving them worse off than ever when a Democrat, inevitably, one day retakes the Oval Office. He’s taken so many positions on abortion and judicial nominees that you can pretty much take your pick!

This list could go on for a while. If you are a progressive who was counting on continuing the string of culture war victories achieved during the Obama presidency, it could go on almost forever—although that’s true of any Republican president.

But notice what every item on this list has in common: it’s all “coulds.”  Maybes.  Possibilities. With a man of Trump’s low moral character, even his most fervent promises evaporate at a tiny gust of political wind into dreams. We really have very little idea of what Trump is going to do in office. U.S. trade policy is probably going to take a turn, but U.S. trade policy is not the burning issue of my life that keeps me up at night, sick with dread. It’s pretty reasonable to allow the possibility that none of my worst fears will actually come to pass. Same goes for some of your worst fears, too: we don’t know what his immigration policy will actually be, we don’t know what his health care policy will actually be (a fact which is driving House Republicans crazy), we don’t know how serious he is about shielding himself against an emoluments clause prosecution. We can be pretty certain he’ll be a gigantic flaming amoral scuzzball, but we’ve been through that before and come out okay; one prays we can weather that storm again.

For me, there have already been good signs that my worst fears will not come to pass: Secretary of Defense Mattis had a talk with Trump and apparently changed his mind on torture—then promised the Senate he would refuse any presidential order to the contrary—so Trump’s torture promise has largely dissipated. Trump’s judicial commitments, by contrast, have turned out to be solider than I expected: the word is that his leading candidate to fill Justice Scalia’s seat was none other than Sen. Ted Cruz (who turned him down; Cruz still thinks he can be president), and his second choice is rumored to be Judge William Pryor, a very solid jurist. Trump’s cabinet is full of people who wouldn’t be my first choice, but, at the same time, every one of them so far looks like an improvement on his or her predecessor.**

Above all, they all seem strangely normal. They have pretty typical cabinet résumés. They have a wider range of views than, say, the George W. Bush cabinet, but none of them are shocking, except maybe Steve Bannon. Democrats are attacking them on pretty typical, opportunistic grounds, and Republicans are defending them on pretty typical, opportunistic grounds. The typical minor scandals are emerging, perhaps a bit more than usual because the nominees were so hastily vetted. If these are the people who are going to run the Trump Government, it’s not crazy to imagine the next four years might be a pretty typical four years of Republican rule.

None of this is to say that I expect the Trump presidency to go well. I don’t. That list earlier? “Corruption, recession, realignment, war,” et cetera? That’s still my prediction. For good or ill, the man’s an unprincipled, sociopathic demagogue, and—spoiler alert!—that usually ends up more ill than good. But the future under Trump, today, remains very uncertain. It could be very good; it could be very bad; and there’s a very large middle ground where the Trump Administration is just kinda okay with a side order of cruddy—a one-step-forward/two-steps-back grind, much like every presidential administration since I was born in 1989.  The future under Clinton, on the other hand, was deadly certain: it promised to be the final catastrophe that did in everything I believe in for a generation or more.

With all this very much on my mind, I sat down to watch Trump’s inaugural address today. It was a decent speech, following a messianic narrative quite typical of inaugural addresses, most clearly evoking Reagan’s 1981 inaugural but with strong strains of Obama’s 2009 address, and even a few hints of Roosevelt ‘33. It was not the speech I wanted to hear. I am sick to the teeth of presidents who think themselves Messiahs, and Trump is the poorest exemplar yet. Nevertheless, I still felt okay. And, on closer examination, I discovered that I wasn’t just feeling relief.

There were mountains of relief, of course. Whole kilos of it feel like they’ve rolled off my body since Election Day.

But there was just a whisper of something else. Something I haven’t really felt in American politics in over a decade. Something that could vanish again in a heartbeat like a passing fever dream—and, frankly, probably will. Something I never, ever expected to feel while watching a Trump speech:

I felt hope.

And that’s okay.

*It doesn’t matter which I decided, in the end, because I could have just as easily gone the other way. Decide whether you’d hate me more for voting for Trump or for Maturen, and then assume I did the one you’d hate more. Either choice was shameful, in its own way, I have readers on both sides of the question, and no light to shed on the question of which choice was best under the circumstances.

**Even if you question Betsy DeVos’s competence—not unreasonable!—it would be tough to be a more intrusive, overbearing overregulator than either of President Obama’s EdSecs, John King and Arne Duncan. Obviously your mileage will vary if you are a progressive… but that conservatives uniformly consider them an improvement and progressives uniformly consider them awful, all for the usual reasons, just underlines how weirdly normal this all is.

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!

Of course, the media exaggerated this narrative, as the media does, with some pundits saying really silly things, like that there will “almost certainly” be a contested convention. But it definitely seemed more likely than not. April 19th and April 26th were always expected to go badly for Cruz (and did), but from there on out the wind seemed to be at Cruz’s back.

Yet, by April 28th, that confidence had faded — not just among workaday pundits, but among Delegate Twitter.  By April 30th, the mood was grim throughout the anti-Trump universe.  And by May 2nd, we could see clearly that either the polls were very, very wrong or the anti-Trump campaign was very, very toast.  On May 3rd, the party united — behind Trump — and delivered Trump a massive 16-point win in Indiana. Within the hour, Trump’s only viable opposition, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race, effectively ending the primary that was so recently an open question.

What happened?

I don’t believe any one explanation can account for what happened. Many things played small parts, and, together, they added up to the race-ending catastrophe of May 3rd.  Here are ten:

1. Indiana was never as friendly to Cruz as we thought.

Indiana is a plain weird state. It’s a Midwestern state, like Wisconsin, and has Midwestern demographics on the surface, which made it look like good ground for Cruz. But it is also a state with a notoriously strong Southern history and subculture — the last traditional lynching north of the Mason-Dixon line was in Indiana — and it’s close enough to the East Coast to have elements of that culture as well. Indiana is far more of a Rust Belt state than Wisconsin. While Wisconsin has an exceptionally strong conservative Republican party under Scott Walker, Indiana’s Republican Party is built on the legacy of moderate pro-business Mitch Daniels, whose most (in)famous contribution to national politics was to call for a “truce” on social issues, and the conservative coalition there was shattered last year by the bitter intraparty conflict over the Indiana RFRA.  Indiana was always an unlikely Wisconsin II, and we largely overlooked that.

Still, both public polls and (according to rumor) campaign internal polls say that Cruz was, at one point, winning the state.  There was a notable collapse towards the end.  And that collapse was not limited to Indiana; even Minnesota, which memorably handed Trump his greatest defeat of any state this primary season, has suddenly warmed to Trump, with Trump winning a recent statewide poll there (not by much: Trump 34% Cruz 24% Kasich 23% undecided 19%), and, in California, which once seemed quite winnable for Cruz, Trump now leads by an average of 26 points.  There was a real collapse here. Why?

2. Voters really hated the Cruz-Kasich alliance. 

One poll I found said that 58% of Indiana voters disapproved of the Cruz-Kasich deal last week.  The exit polls — and, pardon, I can’t find a link for this right now — reported that most voters didn’t let that affect their decision, but a few did, and they were by and large not happy about it.  The deal was always going to damage Cruz, but it appears Cruz (and I) underestimated the extent of the damage.  The fact that Kasich reneged on the deal just eight hours after making it meant that this potentially beneficial arrangement turned into nothing but an albatross.  Speaking of Kasich…

3. Kasich was still there, functioning as a spoiler.

Now, I was all hepped up to blame Kasich for everything tonight. I’ve been gearing up to do that for months now. In the end, though, Trump won by such a huge margin that Kasich’s presence in the race was non-determinative.

That said, Kasich certainly contributed to Trump’s victory.  We know from past exit polling that, if Kasich dropped out, nearly half his voters would stay home, while the other half would split 2-for-1 to Cruz over Trump. That would have brought Cruz one point closer to winning (he would have lost by 15 points instead of 16). And, of course, if Kasich had dropped out before forcing Cruz to enter that alliance in the first place, that would have been worth a few percent as well.  I can’t blame Kasich for this loss entirely, as I had expected, but he does share a portion of the blame.

4. The sheer propaganda value of April 19th and 26th was underestimated.

It’s a well-known fact: people like to vote for winners, not losers. Trump won big on April 19th and April 26th. The fact that the smart set knew months in advance that this would happen did not apparently dampen the impact it had on voters: there was palpable motion toward Trump in polling after the April 26th landslide. It’s difficult to sort out how large of the movement was, since it came at the same time as the damaging Cruz-Kasich deal (so there’s a bad signal-to-noise ratio), but I think we can be confident the Acela landslides helped Trump’s standing among Republican voters nationally.

5. April 26th already showed substantial movement toward Trump.

I was always especially bearish (even compared to other delegate nerds) on anti-Trump prospects in the Acela Primary. But even I was surprised by the scope of Trump’s victory: I always thought he’d win all or nearly all of the delegates, but the popular vote percentages were larger than they should have been going by demographics. 52% Trump in Connecticut would have been a good night for Trump; he won 58%. Kasich really should have won at least 3 delegates in Maryland. None of this did much material harm to the delegate race — Connecticut was giving all its 28 delegates to Trump either way, and 3 delegates in Maryland wasn’t going to make or break the convention — but Trump’s strong performance on the 26th was, in retrospect, not merely a sign of regional strength, but a real canary in the coal mine. Why such big victories?

6. The party’s voters opposed a come-from-behind win at a contested convention.

In every single poll since they started polling the question, the GOP base in every state has insisted, by huge margins, that, in the event of a contested convention where no candidate has a 1,237-delegate majority, the candidate with the most delegates should be nominated.  Neither Cruz and Kasich had any hope of overtaking Trump in the delegate count. This has been true for over a month, but only started to be widely reported after Wisconsin, when Cruz started snatching up loyal Trump delegates throughout the country. Once GOP voters realized that the only Cruz/Kasich win possible was a second-ballot, out-from-under-Donald win, one may reasonably guess that their (misguided) sense of fair play kicked in and Trump gained a few more points over Cruz.

7. Trump got organized.

This was also presaged on April 26th, when Trump’s previously incompetent delegate acquisition operation was able to pick up 40 delegates in Pennsylvania’s oddball “loophole” primary. This required coordination on a large scale that the Trump campaign just hadn’t pulled off before (and which left the Cruz camp hopeful that it could win a majority of PA’s delegates even without winning the popular vote, simply by out-organizing Trump).  At the time, I hoped that Trump’s success here was more due to his overwhelming popular-vote majority, not an actual ground game, but he finally opened his pockets in Indiana, and I read this morning that his volunteers had knocked on 70,000 doors by primary day. Campaign ground games aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, but they’re worth a few points on election day.

8. Trump is a Great Communicator.

It pains me to write that, but it’s true. Once Trump targets somebody, he knows how to make their poll numbers and favorability ratings collapse.  “Little Marco” withered under Trump’s attention, and, once Trump settled on the “Lyin’ Ted” meme and exploited primary voter resentment of the intricate delegate selection process to paint Cruz as a conniving, sneaky anti-populist, Cruz’s net favorability among Republicans fell like a stone, even though it really doesn’t make sense; Cruz, despite some integrity problems a few months ago, is clearly way more honest than Trump, who lies more than once per minute. But “Lyin’ Ted” stuck to Cruz, and Trump’s favorability ratings remained strong. He really is good at this, and it’s why I don’t count him out (not entirely, anyway) when he says he can beat Hillary once he focuses his attention on her.

9. The Party refused to rally around Cruz.

It wasn’t just Kasich. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on May 2nd — with the Indiana race still in doubt! — calling on the GOP to rally around Trump (should he become the nominee) rather than voting third party, as a tactical vote to stop Hillary. Never once did the Journal run a single article calling on GOP voters to rally around Cruz, not even as a tactical vote, though he was clearly the only chance at stopping Trump.  The Cruz endorsement by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence came too late to matter, and was extremely tepid even when it did come — a stark contrast to Scott Walker’s eventually enthusiastic campaign on Cruz’s behalf. Indiana’s talk radio and conservative media were equally half-hearted. Sen. Dan Coats sat on the sidelines. The state party machinery mostly wanted Kasich, and made that clear, though many also fantasized about drafting ex-Gov. Daniels. These things matter to voters — not as much as they once did, especially in this outsider year, but they make a difference at the margins.

10. The Establishment had to choose between Cruz and Trump — and consciously chose Trump.

This is the most damning thing of all. The Republican Party’s coastal rulers made it very clear, in the final days, that they would prefer the lying thug to the irritating but genuine conservative. Jon Huntsman, the avatar of the ruling class, endorsed Trump over the weekend. John Boehner, who was effectively the leader of the party from 2010-2015 (with a brief 2012 Mitt Romney interlude), stated plainly that, if he had to, he would vote for Trump, who is a golfing buddy of his, but #NeverCruz. This was the culmination of an Establishment Trump-over-Cruz campaign that started all the way back in January, before Iowa. At the time, many people considered it a false flag operation: the establishment was only pretending to prefer Trump because they thought Trump could knock out Cruz in Iowa and then they could destroy Trump in South Carolina. But recent days have proved that this was false: a critical mass of Republican leadership, including some of our most prominent and powerful, genuinely want Donald Trump if the only alternative is Ted Cruz.  Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham did the honorable thing and embraced Cruz despite their hatred of him, but they were the exception (and deserve great credit for it).

This last item is the one that really worries me. I can explain away a lot about the Trump candidacy as a black-swan event, a temporary mass delusion caused by free media exposure, too much direct democracy, and an overcrowded field.  I can even write off a chunk of my party (as many as one-third, perhaps) as basically corrupt people with whom I remain in a tense but workable alliance of convenience.

But that the ruling faction of the party — the faction that claims they’re really conservative deep down, but are just a little reluctant because they care about “electability” and “growing the map” — would actually acquiesce to a violent, racist, unelectable, lying, adulterous thug, rather than accept Ted Cruz (whose great sin is that he would be the first genuinely across-the-board conservative nominee since 1980)… well, it exposes them as a pack of anti-conservative liars. I can’t accept that. If those of us who prefer conservatism to Trumpism are a minority in the Republican Party, then in what sense is the Republican Party “conservative” at all?

I am coming to believe that there is no home for me in the Republican Party anymore.  It’s not just Trump; it’s the voters who embraced him, and the establishment that ultimately preferred Trumpism to conservatism. Trump will pass, but those voters will still be the Republican base, and those establishment figures will still be the Republican leadership. This isn’t just a 2016 problem.

So, I ask you, dear reader: after tonight, how can I — or any conservative — ever call myself a Republican again?

More on this soon.

(UPDATE 5/4: More on this now.)

The conservative movement, which has made its home in the Republican Party for decades, faces the abyss. Trumpism, a philosophy based on thuggery, resentment, and complete epistemic closure, is poised to take its place in a new coalition with the East Coast Establishment… leaving conservatism in the wilderness.

One imagines Ted Cruz touring his Indiana headquarters tonight, preparing for what may be the final battle against Donald Trump, and reflecting on the future, as Captain Picard once did before the Enterprise‘s great battle against the Borg:

Transcript:

PICARD: Captain’s log, stardate 43996.2. The Enterprise remains concealed in the dust cloud. And, to my surprise, the Borg have maintained their position, waiting for us to come out of hiding. I have no explanation for their special interest in me or this ship. We continue to prepare our defences for the inevitable confrontation, but… I must admit, on this night, I contemplate the distinct possibility that no defence may be adequate against this enemy.

(Picard enters Ten Forward, which is dark and apparently empty, and stares out the window. But then his confidant, Guinan, emerges from the shadows.)

GUINAN: Trouble sleeping?

PICARD: Something of a tradition, Guinan. The captain touring the ship before a battle.

GUINAN: Before a hopeless battle, if I remember the tradition correctly.

PICARD: Not necessarily! Nelson toured the HMS Victory before Trafalgar.

GUINAN: Yes, but Nelson never returned from Trafalgar, did he?

PICARD: No, but the battle was won.

GUINAN: Do you expect this battle to be won?

PICARD: We may yet prevail.

That’s a conceit, but… it’s a healthy one.

I wonder if the Emperor Honorious, watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill, truly realised that the Roman Empire was about to fall.

(pause)

This is just another page in history, isn’t it? Will this be the end of our civilization? Turn the page.

GUINAN: This isn’t the end.

PICARD: You say that with remarkable assuredness.

GUINAN: With experience. When the Borg destroyed my world, my people scattered throughout the universe. We survived. As will humanity survive. As long as there’s a handful of you to keep the spirit alive, you will prevail. Even if it takes a millennium.

Thanks to Chakoteya.net.

We will prevail, conservatives. Even if it takes a millennium.

And, hey, don’t forget: the Enterprise defeated the Borg at the end of this two-parter, and they were facing much longer odds than Cruz faces in Indiana. Even the hopeless battles are sometimes won!

And, if not… well, the Republican Party is not the same as conservatism.  The Party is not conservatism’s last hope. On the contrary, conservatism is the Party’s.  There will be other possibilities in a post-Trump world:

For now, like a thousand other commanders on a thousand other battlefields… I wait for the dawn.

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.

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.

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.