By James Irwin
Conventional wisdom for weeks has been that the Republican Party needs to coalesce around a single candidate to defeat Donald Trump. The New York businessman, thriving in a crowded race for the GOP presidential nomination, is winning states with as little as 32 percent of the popular vote.
Results on Super Tuesday did not help clear the field, said Lara Brown, political management program director and associate professor in the Graduate School of Political Management.
Mr. Trump won seven of 11 contested states (three with less than 35 percent of the vote) to widen his delegate lead. Ted Cruz won three states, including Texas. Marco Rubio won in Minnesota. John Kasich finished a close second to Mr. Trump in Vermont.
No one is going anywhere, Dr. Brown said. And contrary to mainstream logic, that could be better for the field than for Mr. Trump. Despite his big night, Tuesday may have revealed a new blueprint to defeat him.
“[The field] has to deprive him of states,” Dr. Brown said by phone Wednesday morning. “The whole strategy for Republicans right now is: Stop Trump.”
Divided they rise?
A divided field might be better equipped to do this than one that consolidates around a single anti-Trump candidate, Dr. Brown said. She pointed to Tuesday as proof.
“Even though Trump won seven states, I was surprised how much the other candidates were able to blunt his success, whether it was Marco Rubio in Minnesota and Virginia, Ted Cruz in Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska, or John Kasich in Vermont,” she said. “I thought it was going to be a bigger night for Trump given his poll averages.”
She was surprised Mr. Trump did not do better. And while the path to the nomination has narrowed for Mr. Cruz, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kasich, the path to keep the nomination away from Mr. Trump still exists. The larger the field, the more they can attack Mr. Trump on several fronts.
“The party strategy: Cruz has to attack him on ideology, Rubio has to keep going after his persona as a con artist, and Kasich has to go after him being wildly unrealistic,” Dr. Brown said.
The plan to derail Trump
Her scenario for the “Stop Trump” movement is to turn the field’s glaring weakness into it’s strength, with Mr. Cruz, Mr. Kasich and Mr. Rubio all staying in the race as the top alternative candidate in certain states this month. None of them can sweep the March 15 winner-take-all states—Missouri, Florida, Ohio and Illinois—but each candidate could stop Mr. Trump in a strategic place, Dr. Brown said.
“It’s unlikely that anybody but Kasich or Trump can win Ohio,” she said. “So to a certain extent, they need Kasich to stay in to deprive Trump of those 66 delegates. They need Kasich in Ohio, they need Rubio to focus on Florida, and they need Cruz in Missouri.”
It is a difficult strategy, she admitted, but it might be the only one left.
The Republican Party, in her opinion, made a strategic error early in the race, assuming there was time during the primary for one person to become the alternative to Mr. Trump. They fought each other, and it opened a wide path for Mr. Trump to amass support.
“The strategy long ago should have been: We need to cut out the cancer from the party that is Donald Trump, and then focus on healing the rest of the party,” she said. “Part of the problem: They didn’t realize that until about a week ago.”
Worry about the nomination later
The field is running out of time to mitigate that mistake, Dr. Brown said. But the race is not over.
“Remember, a substantial portion of the party does not want [Trump] to be the nominee,” she said. “If they were in his favor, they would be telling everybody to drop out and coalesce. They aren’t doing that.”
The plan she outlined is sequential: Defeat Trump, then worry about the nomination. She sees March 15 as the litmus test.
“If Rubio wins Florida, Kasich wins Ohio and Illinois and Cruz wins Missouri, all of a sudden Donald Trump will not have a lead that is insurmountable,” she said. “Their goal on March 15 is to prevent Trump from sewing up the nomination.”
