Ding Dong, Ted Cruz Is Gone

As we went to press, the last gasps of Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz were being heard in the race to pick presidential nominees, with Indiana at the center of it all.

The bizarreness of the Star Wars bar scene of 2016 Republican nominees continued with Mr. Cruz naming Carly Fiorina as his running mate, hoping it would give a boost to his campaign just as he’d been mathematically eliminated from winning the race outright. It didn’t, as he lost Indiana and didn’t see much boost in the polls and decided to leave the race, clearing Donald Trump’s path for the nomination.

If anything the reverse has happened, and the inevitability of a Donald Trump nomination seemed to set in, regardless of whether or not the establishment party were on board for it. It sounds like most everyone in the GOP is resigned to holding their nose in ballot booth and voting for Trump because they have no choice. After Cruz was mathematically eliminated, his only hope was Trump not getting enough delegates to win the nomination before the national convention, and then causing convention chaos trying to flip delegates.

If that effort was more grass roots and organic, it might’ve worked. But it was more about the party establishment being afraid that Trump would get thrashed in a general election race against Hillary Clinton and less about what a majority of party faithful wanted. It’s a very real concern for party leaders to be worried about a Trump loss…

However, the answer to that is not Ted Cruz. For all of Hillary’s flaws (high negatives, low enthusiasm among young voters), it is pretty much statistically impossible to beat someone when you have higher negatives than them. Both Trump and Cruz have higher negative polling numbers than Hillary does.

For all the fear of what Trump losing to Clinton would do to the party, convention chaos and a delegate fight wouldn’t be a much better alternative. Cruz’s argument that Trump doesn’t poll well versus Hillary Clinton in a general election was not a bad one, but the problem is, he doesn’t destroy her in the polls either. After watching him speak last month at the ND GOP Convention, he never seemed very presidential -- it was like amateur hour.

I’ve said that whoever wins the Presidency is seen by voters as the adult in the room when you put the two candidates side by side. I think that’s exactly what happened in both Obama and W. Bush’s two races. Cruz doesn’t seem like much of an adult at all when he gives speeches. He’s more like a cackling, partisan carnival barker.

Speaking of that ND GOP Convention, at the end it was revealed Ted Cruz won a vast majority of the state’s 28 unbound delegates in what was seen as a boost to the anti-Trump movement. Fast forward a month later and now it appears that support (which can change before the national party convention) appears to be wavering.

Reports in both the New York Times and National Review reveal some of those delegates who supported Cruz are having second thoughts. ND GOP Chairman Jim Poolman is committed to still voting for Cruz but says he’s not in the Anybody But Trump camp and thinks it’s important the party is unified at the Republican National Convention in July. If you read between the lines, he seems to say supporting a dead horse makes no sense. North Dakota Republicans would only get punished if Trump wins the Presidency.

Trump for his part tried to tone down his rhetoric once his nomination became more inevitable. But that only lasted a few days. Right before polls closed in Indiana, he said Ted Cruz’s dad helped the assassination of JFK by knowing Lee Harvey Oswald.

The discipline he was seeking to project deflated quickly. Which is a huuuuge problem for him. On the campaign trail, it will only be a matter of days before he puts his foot in his mouth and offends somebody. And that’s why I think he will lose. Because that’s how you get off message, you don’t get to talk about the things you want to talk about as a candidate when you are constantly having to defend what you said two or three days ago. He will be on defense when he wants to be on offense. And he will have a hard time convincing whoever he offended that week (women, minorities, the human race) to vote for him.

But that’s what the Republican party has come to after years of stirring the Obama pot. They are reaping what they sowed. The base fell in love with someone who speaks from the hip because they were tired of party leaders acquiescing to President Obama. The truth is leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for Obama’s policies and had they obstructed any more, it would’ve hurt them politically.

But the base doesn’t care about that. They are so anti-Obama, they can’t see anything else. And party leaders never pushed back against the anti-Obama rhetoric. They went right with it.

On the Democratic side, the pressure will continue to mount on Bernie Sanders to get out of the race but until he is mathematically eliminated why should he? He faced more pressure than Cruz after Cruz had been mathematically eliminated. All because the establishment is behind Clinton. There was pressure on Hillary to drop out in 2008 and she vowed to stay in the race as long as she could so it’s hypocritical for her to push him out.

I don’t think Sanders will have much luck flipping delegates if she gets the number of delegates she needs to win. I don’t think she will be indicted over private emails containing classified info when she was Secretary of State, so don’t count on that. For all the complaints about party rules and her bribing delegates, you have to change those rules going forward, not after the fact.

Bernie Sanders should have a strong say in shaping the party’s message going forward into the general election. He can keep it progressive and appealing to the party’s base, so that it doesn’t stray too far from they want with a moderate nominee.

Hillary has a problem with young voters, it wasn’t enough to cost her the nomination but she should still address it. She can ignore that once she is the nominee or really make an effort to reach out to them and hear their concerns, and actually earn their vote. Should she remain arrogant and refute everyone with the fact that she is the winner, I fear she will win the Presidency with a very low voter turnout.

The enthusiasm gap is very real in a Clinton vs. Trump race and party insiders ignore it at their peril. It is clear Hillary will combat that with fear of a Trump presidency. That will help to some extent. But she really needs to address the concerns of those committed progressives who don’t want to hold their nose and vote for her. Yes, the rhetoric has been heated on both sides. But a true leader moves on from that to bring all sides together to get them united to help you win.

Obama won in part with the help of a higher than normal young voter turnout. This seems nearly impossible for Hillary, but she should at least try rather than giving them the middle finger and saying I am the nominee.