How to stop Donald Trump

The Mitt Romney "against Trump" speech and subsequent Republican debate hosted in Detroit were very interesting for what they revealed about Donald Trump and this race for the GOP nomination, but the subsequent results on Saturday really blew open this race in a very different way.

Heading into the Tuesday with primaries in Michigan, Hawaii, Idaho, and Mississippi the only way to understand where we're at in this race is to examine the three major revelations that have occurred in the last week.

Revelation 1: The party's plan to stop Trump

The first thing that was revealed was the GOP Establishment's strategy for stopping Trump.

First there was a series of attacks by Romney, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz on "Trump University" and his overall character. If you haven't read up on it, "Trump University" was a classic snake oil marketing scheme where customers were asked to give away their money in exchange for Trump's "business secrets" which proved to just be platitudes that you could find for yourself by Googling "business secrets."

Romney also hammered Trump over his past boasting of his extra-marital affairs, his exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, and his great willingness to hire immigrants over Americans to save himself money, which he claims to have no lack of.

Many of the attacks are landing well as Trump has a long history of putting his own interests over those of anyone else and has very little in his resume to suggest he has the kind of character and understanding of servant-leadership that you'd hope for from a man who is running to hold the most powerful office in the world.

As part of the #NeverTrump movement to keep Donald from securing the nomination, the preferred plan by the Establishment was to get to a brokered convention with no one securing the 1237 delegates needed to win. From there, they could try to rally delegates and the party around a consensus candidate like Marco Rubio, who's had the money and broad appeal to try and take on that mantle.

Revelation 2: Trump's plan to win the election

The second revelation from the debate came mostly from Trump's answer about off the record comments he made to the New York Times where he suggested some of his bluster about what he'll do about illegal immigration is just talk and that he'll compromise as needed once he's the President.

Most Americans outside of his most hardcore, cult-like following probably found that to be a relief, personally I've always suspected as much. However, it's becoming clear that Trump is planning a pivot in the general election that reveals what he's really all about as a candidate.

Essentially, Donald Trump is an old school Democrat from back in the day when the party was primarily about working class interests rather than special pleading for minority groups, environmental concerns, and culturally Marxist social issues like LGBT rights. As the Democrat party has moved in that direction they've slowly left behind working class white Americans, who now often find themselves lumped in with upper class white Americans as part of the "oppressive patriarchy" that's working against the DNC's new constituents.

Trump will almost certainly prove to be socially moderate, if not liberal, and more of a classic "protectionist, Union-preferred, expand social services, and nationalist" type President. His pitch will be one that Democrats aren't allowed to make anymore, that "free trade and immigration are why we can't have nice things!" in explaining why the country can't afford or successfully pass European socialist-style policies.

In the meantime he's hoodwinked much of the conservative base of the Republican electorate by being so outlandish and strong in his rhetoric that people have concluded "no one would say something so offensive and controversial unless they really mean it!"

You can imagine Ted Cruz's frustration after going to the senate and working hard to oppose Obama's agenda while calling out any fellow Republicans who didn't do the same so he could run on his "Trust Ted" slogan only to see many of the people he was counting on to help him win the nomination flock to a liberal like Donald Trump because he said Mexico was sending rapists into the country and that we should ban Muslims from crossing the borders.

Ultimately, I think Trump will prove to be what we might call a moderate or perhaps a liberal from another era and I highly doubt he pushes for socially conservative policies on abortion or religious liberty or appoints justices to the appellate courts or supreme court to protect conservative values from the attacks of the modern liberal movement.

Revelation 3: Cruz has an alternative plan for stopping Trump

The thinking after Super Tuesday was basically "Neither Kasich, Rubio, nor Cruz have much incentive to drop out at this stage so the best plan is just to deny Trump the 1237 delegates and go for a brokered convention."

Then Ted Cruz won 2/4 of Saturday's states, including Maine which was not expected to be a Cruz state, and nearly took Louisiana and Kentucky from Trump as well. Cruz is not a moderate by any stretch of the imagination, and up till now his plan to unite tea party conservatives, evangelicals, and working class "Reagan Democrats" has been thwarted because of a large field and Trump's dominance amongst "Reagan Democrats."

After South Carolina it appeared that Cruz was just cooked, but then he won his home state in Texas as well as in similarly conservative and oil-rich Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska where working class Trump supporters didn't exist in great enough numbers to stop him. Meanwhile, Rubio failed to win Virginia or other states where the establishment was counting on rallying middle class voters to stop Trump.

Nevertheless, moving forward from that point it seemed Cruz had missed his window and the remaining states would be more friendly to Rubio. But here was the problem for the establishment, who would vastly prefer a Rubio candidacy to a Cruz one, they'd spent so long beating each other up that none of their candidates was able to win states and build up any kind of momentum as a strong not-Trump option.

Meanwhile Cruz had victories to point to in Iowa, the first state contested, and also a big victory in the massive state of Texas.

If you were a Republican voter in Kansas, Maine, Kentucky, or Louisiana on Saturday you were less likely to be drawn to Rubio's cash reserves and upcoming slate of demographically favorable states, especially when current polls have Marco losing his own state of Florida to Trump. Instead, people rallied behind Cruz and produced this result:

Cruz won 69 delegates
Trump won 53 delegates
Rubio won 18 delegates
Kasich won 10

This effect was particularly stark in Kentucky where the finishing numbers were:
Trump: 35.9%
Cruz: 31.6%
Rubio: 16.4%
Kasich: 14.4%

Cruz is clearly the guy at this point who's the rallying point for beating Trump. Rubio may have the broadest appeal of any of the GOP candidates, but he's currently not a preferred choice amongst many group within the party...except in Puerto Rico.

So now here's where we stand in terms of the nomination:

Ted Cruz has the luxury of not having to sell voters on a brokered convention in order to stop Trump, he's arguing that if the party will fully unite behind him that he can win the nomination outright.

Here's the kicker, on March 15th Florida and Ohio will hold "winner takes all" primaries which are designed to allow a frontrunner with momentum to start to pull away. Whoever wins Ohio gets 66 delegates and whoever wins Florida gets 99, no one else will get any delegates from those states.

Cruz is not in good shape to win either of these states, so his plan is as follows:

1) Allow Kasich to do his thing in Ohio (where he's an immensely popular governor) and deny Trump from winning those delegates.
2) Set up offices across Florida and push hard to do as well in that state as he can with the obvious outcome of allowing Trump to beat Rubio.
If Rubio can't win Florida he'll be so marginalized that even if he doesn't drop out he won't be likely to hold his voters from flocking to Cruz
3) Keep winning states.

The original Cruz plan to win with Reagan Democrats will have to be on hold until he's their only GOP option in a general election against Hillary since he can't seem to separate them from Trump. Instead, Cruz is now pivoting to unite the rest of the party behind him and be THE not-Trump option.

So what do we do?

For those of us who want the GOP to continue to be about conservatism, or for those of us who simply believe that a man with such low character and judgment shouldn't be the President, the question now becomes "What do we do?"

If you feel that voting for a particular candidate to try and help him win office is the highest value your ballot can have, then vote for that candidate. But if you believe that the highest value your ballot can have is in preventing a "Trump V Clinton" general election then here's what I think the best use of your ballot might be on Tuesday, March 8th if you're a Michigan voter.

There are three key factors to consider, the first is that if a single candidate wins 50% of the statewide vote they get all of the delegates. Priority one has to be ensuring that Trump doesn't get 50% of the statewide vote, this can be easily accomplished be all of us simply turning out and casting ballots in the GOP primary for not-Trump candidates.

Secondly, only candidates who finish at 15% or higher in the statewide vote are eligible to receive delegates and they are doled out on a proportional basis from a total of 56.

Finally the state's winner gets three extra delegates, regardless of their percentage of the vote, who are bound to them at the convention. That last point is key because if we get to Cleveland and no one has 1237 delegates than most delegates will be allowed to switch their vote to another candidate.

Also worth noting, Michigan has an open primary. If you are a Democrat who believes (rightly) that Hillary Clinton has got the Democratic primary wrapped up and is appalled by the thought of Trump competing in a general election, you can choose to vote in the Republican primary rather than the Democratic primary.

One play would be to see who's battling to reach 15% and roll with that guy so that Trump gets a smaller share of the delegates. This was my plan until Saturday night. But given where momentum is right now, I doubt Rubio holds at 15% and makes that play worthwhile and instead I expect some of those voters to go with Ted instead.

Cruz is now positioning himself to be the only not-Trump option. Even if you don't like the Texan senator it's worth noting that the best chance of getting a brokered convention is for Trump to fail to win Ohio and Florida on the 15th and then for someone like Cruz to battle him all the way to the end so that he can't secure 1237 delegates.

The establishment's plan to unite behind Rubio is failing, it's just not going to happen. I think the following two options are your best options if you want to see Trump defeated:

Option 1: Vote Kasich
Either he gets some delegates and momentum heading into Ohio, which we desperately need him to win for any not-Trump plan to work, or perhaps he even pulls a shocker and wins. Well, he probably won't win, but he's still worth investing in at this point and will probably do decently well.

Option 2: Vote Cruz
I don't think it's possible to beat Trump in Michigan at this point, but continuing the theme of consolidating votes behind Cruz would give him greater momentum and validity as the not-Trump option. There's also a tiny chance he wins the state since you have to figure his excellent campaign is ready to turn out thousands of evangelicals across Western Michigan.

Personally I've always preferred Cruz to the other candidates and don't mind uniting behind him. I would recommend that everyone ultimately vote their conscience, but if you want to be strategic and try to avoid facing this in the November general election:

I think voting Cruz is the best option, followed by voting Kasich.

Mitt Romney strikes at Donald Trump's biggest problem

As I noted when I wrote that it was becoming impossibly difficult to get good people into office as the president of the US, the challenge of building a winning coalition in 2016 America is exceptionally daunting.

The #NeverTrump group has a one major, underlying problem that is preventing an easy path to stopping the clownish mogul from taking over the party: they don't have a strong leader within the party who can resist him.

The plan was to anoint Jeb Bush as the heir to the throne and he raised 157.6 million dollars for his campaign while his Super-PACs (allegedly independently run adjuncts) raised another 124 million dollars.

The thinking was to get someone who could win Florida, unite the Bush coalition of evangelicals, neocons, and middle class families, and expand the party's brand to include the growing numbers of Latinos in the country. Trump illustrated that this was a failed strategy in part because much of the GOP base is decidedly uninterested in expanding the party's concerns and values to include those of hispanics and in part because Jeb is not the strong leader his brother was.

All that money and power tried to force Jeb down the throats of the Republican electorate for months, and all the way through the South Carolina primary, before giving up and rallying behind Marco Rubio. But now they have a couple of new problems.

First, Trump has built a ton of momentum and stopping him from winning the nomination would be a difficult task for most opposing candidates. The bigger problem though is a lack of a clear alternative. They were all in on Jeb being the strong leader who could unite the party and now Rubio is trying to become that guy in his stead immediately after enduring tens of millions of dollars worth of negative ads from the Jeb campaign.

The ideal Trump alternative would be a candidate with a record of being open to some kind of amnesty-like program but firm on the need for strong borders. He'd be able to present a general case for bringing a firm hand on law and order issues within the US, in terms of either crime or terrorism, without coming across as a hawk on foreign policy. He'd be socially conservative but not aggressively so on losing issues like gay marriage. Finally, he'd have what every candidate needs to have, which is a trustworthy demeanor and personality.

This leads us to Trump's biggest problem both in securing the nomination and in winning the general election, having a trustworthy demeanor and personality.

The biggest success Trump has had so far has been creating a new coalition out of voters who both the GOP and DNC had passed over, working and lower class white Americans who have struggled to build middle class lives in the modern era yet feel that the Democrats are only out for minorities or LGBT folk and the Republicans are just looking out for the rich.

Donald's inevitable general election pivot would be towards a moderately socialist domestic platform that emphasizes looking out for America's poor and disenfranchised while looking to unite everyone with a "us for them" message of focusing on Americans rather than immigrants or foreign issues.

Here's the problem, his current coalition is still averaging at about 35% in the GOP primary elections and he's struggling to earn the trust of suburban and safely middle class families who aren't feeling the pinch in the modern economy badly enough to trust a fascist-backed demagogue with the most powerful office in the world. What's more, there's good reason to believe that they will take the out if offered an alternative option either in the primary, at the convention, or in the general election.

Everyone has spent so long worrying about what Trump might do as a 3rd party candidate like Ross Perot that no one has considered the possibility that Trump himself could be taken down by a third party candidate such as Mitt Romney.

If you don't think Romney is setting himself up to be either a convention or general election alternative to Trump then tell me why he's assuming the role of anti-Trump right now and taking all these swings at him.

There would be plenty of socially conservative, middle class voters in key states like Texas or swing states like Florida, who would take the "vote for Mitt and hope to deny either party enough electoral votes to win the election" option and keep their conscience clean of either electing a detestable liberal like Hillary Clinton or a charlatan like Donald Trump. It may not get poor Mitt into office but it could very well sink Trump.

Donald can't get into general office without support from the middle class, so how does he get it?

It's really too late to make any big waves or moves in his messaging and his frequent remarks about Planned Parenthood being great for women's health indicates that he doesn't plan on tailoring his message to the concerns of middle class families any time soon. Even if he did it would be hard to convince him over the next few months that he's a serious candidate that respectable, college-educated people vote for after his news-catching, vulgar comments over the last year.

What's more likely is that he tries to find a VP that can bring this strong base of the Republican party into his coalition and convince them to trust him. The fact that Hillary is his rival should help.

If someone like Romney is on the ballot though would it be enough? I suspect not. Crazy times we live in.