For Ted Cruz and John Kasich, the math is clear: Neither man has any real chance of securing the 1,237 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination by the time the primaries are over. Cruz needs to win roughly 82 percent of the delegates still up for grabs, a nearly impossible task, and Kasich needs 116 percent, a literally impossible one. Each man’s White House strategy, then, goes something like this. Step one: stop Donald Trump from reaching the magic number on the first ballot in Cleveland. Step two: emerge the nominee in the contested-convention chaos that follows.
Naturally, then, Team Cruz and Team Kasich have spent the final days before next Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary—a possibly make-or-break contest for the #NeverTrump movement—laser-focused on the first and most important step, right? Wrong.
Cruz is suggesting Kasich won’t even be eligible to be nominated at this summer’s convention, attempting to get the Ohio governor knocked off the Montana primary ballot, and generally trying to paint him as a spoiler whose very presence in the race will hand the nomination to Trump. Kasich’s criticism of Cruz has been more muted, but his rationale for sticking around is built on the implicit belief that the Texas senator is only a slightly better version of Trump who would still get trounced in a general election. The candidates’ respective super PACs, meanwhile, are being considerably more direct with their attacks.
Here’s the latest ad the pro-Cruz Trusted Leadership PAC is running in Wisconsin:
And the pro-Kasich New Day for America PAC’s rejoinder:
This, of course, is not a new dynamic. Republican candidates not named Donald J. Trump spent the early part of the campaign beating up on each other as opposed to on Trump, and they continued to play king of the non-Trump hill even as the billionaire began racking up primary victories to start the year. It wasn’t until March that the candidates appeared to be on the same chapter, though definitely not on the same page. And while both Kasich and Cruz are now taking plenty of shots at Trump too, their current slap fight stands out given a poor showing by the GOP front-runner in Wisconsin could mean that a contested convention isn’t just possible, but probable.
Trump already has a narrower-than-you-might-think path to 1,237 delegates, and even a single-vote-loss in Wisconsin—which will hand out 42 delegates in winner-take-most fashion—would make his already difficult task considerably more so. Furthermore, since the state GOP awards more than half of the delegates out to the winners of the individual congressional districts, Cruz and Kasich appear poised to steal Wisconsin delegates away from Trump, not one another, as FiveThirtyEight explains. If Cruz can beat Trump in the statewide vote—as the latest polling suggests—the anybody-but-Trump crowd is better off with two candidates than with one, in this particular contest at least. Or that would be the case if Cruz and Kasich were both throwing everything they have at Trump instead of wasting their resources on one another.
And yet with a contested convention in sight but still far from assured, Cruz and Kasich are already looking ahead to the second step of their two-step strategies. It’s possible their own self-interest won’t hand Wisconsin to Trump but, even so, it is a reminder that for all the talk of stopping him, that only remains a means to an end for each of his two remaining Republican rivals. Derailing the Donald isn’t their actual goal; winning the nomination is. And as long as the two aren’t pulling in the same direction, they might as well be pulling in opposite ones.
