Jonathan Tobin wonders if it’s too late to thin the Republican field and stop Trump:
We will eventually get down to two or three Republican candidates. But the only way Republicans can be sure that a newly minted conservative that even now still spouts positions on foreign policy and entitlements that sound like recycled Obama talking points, will be if that happens in the next few days.
Whoever it is that wins second or third, the aftermath of South Carolina should be the moment where Republicans sit down with fourth, fifth, and sixth place finishers and ask them to do the right thing for the party [bold mine-DL]. If they don’t, the only winner will be Trump.
If there were a consensus on what the “right thing for the party” was, presumably there wouldn’t still be five non-Trump candidates in the race. But there isn’t any agreement about which one of those candidates the rest should rally behind, and none of them is winning enough support to be able to make an obvious claim to the loyalty of the others’ supporters. At a recent event in South Carolina, a Cruz supporter implored the crowd to unite behind Cruz using the same argument:
We have a conservative [in the race], don’t we? It’s time for all conservatives to come home now and do the right thing. And if you are a conservative, you know what the right thing is.
The trouble is that conservatives are sharply divided over what “the right thing” is, and as the candidates have been tearing into each over the last few weeks those disagreements are intensifying rather than fading away. Rubio has labeled Cruz a liar and accused his campaign of all sorts of “dirty tricks” in South Carolina, and Cruz has repeatedly attacked Rubio’s credentials as a conservative. The notion that the supporters of either one would unite behind the other seems more far-fetched than ever, especially when each believes that he has the better chance at eventually winning.
Based on how successful the different candidates have been so far, it would make more sense for anti-Trump Republicans to get behind Cruz or Kasich, but both have weaknesses that keep that from happening. Many party leaders are horrified by the thought of a Cruz nomination and Kasich is not well-liked by most Republican voters nationwide. Kasich seems to be the best bet for the general election, but outside of Ohio he has inspired little interest and received just as little support. Cruz seems remarkably ill-suited to a general election campaign, but has a far better chance of competing in primaries with Trump in many parts of the country than any of the others. Rubio doesn’t seem as electable as Kasich in the general or as competitive as Cruz in the primaries, and yet for various reasons many party leaders and pundits keep trying to foist him on the party as the answer. It hasn’t worked yet, and it seems unlikely to work. None of the anti-Trump candidates is able to break away from the pack on his own, and that perpetuates the uncertainty among donors and voters about which one to support in order to stop Trump.
The result tomorrow promises to resolve none of this, and instead it seems likely to prolong the anti-Trump Republicans’ agony and make the rivalry between Cruz and Rubio that much more bitter. No matter which one takes second, the margin is probably going to be small enough that either one can spin it as a tie. No matter how it is spun, it will represent the latest failure of the anti-Trump candidates.
P.S. South Carolina predictions
Trump 30%
Cruz 20%
Rubio 18%
Kasich 13%
Bush 13%
Carson 6%
Clinton 57%
Sanders 43%