Donald Trump continued to beat the GOP field on Tuesday night, winning contests in Florida, North Carolina …
Edition: US
The Stop Trump Movement Got New Life In Ohio
A floor fight in Cleveland just got a lot more likely.
03/15/2016 09:16 pm ET
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Updated
57 minutes ago
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Ryan Grim
Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post
Janie Velencia
Associate Polling Editor, The Huffington Post
Donald Trump continued to beat the
GOP field on Tuesday night, winning contests in Florida, North Carolina
and Illinois, but dropping Ohio to John Kasich and struggling against
Ted Cruz in Missouri. The loss in Ohio makes it extraordinarily difficult -- Trump will need some 60 percent
of the delegates left -- to get the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock up
the nomination without a floor fight in Cleveland, which will host the
Republican Convention in July. And that makes stopping Trump all the
more doable. A handful of states, including
delegate-rich New Jersey, have winner-take-all primaries, and others,
like New York, award most of their delegates to the winner. They will
help get Trump where he needs to be, but it will still be a tall order
after Ohio. If Trump has the nomination wrested
from him, it will not because he lacks support, but rather that he has
engendered too much opposition. He has virtually swept the South, won
every state in the Midwest save for Minnesota and Ohio, where he was
beaten by the popular governor, and even ran away with Massachusetts and
New Hampshire. If he ultimately loses, it will be because enough
Republicans came to believe that Trump had gone beyond the pale of
American politics -- or, perhaps more pragmatically, that he couldn't
win a general election.
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Earlier
Tuesday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky
Republican with a finely tuned political antennae, told reporters in the
Capitol -- unprompted -- that he had just spoken with the GOP
front-runner. "Donald Trump called this morning, and we had a good
conversation," McConnell said. "I took the opportunity to recommend to
him that no matter who may be triggering these violent expressions or
conflict that we've seen at some of these rallies, it might be a good
idea to condemn that and discourage it, no matter what the source of it
is." The source is not a mystery. At a November rally, Trump said of a black protester who'd been beaten, "Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." In February, he told his supporters at a rally, "If you see somebody who's getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of him, would you?" "Seriously," he added, "I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise."
If you see somebody who's getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of him, would you?Donald Trump
Later
that month, at another rally, Trump talked about a protester being
taken out "on a stretcher," and said, "I'd like to punch him in the
face. Just this month, as a protester was
being taken out, Trump said, "Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll
defend you in court, don't worry." He has since floated the idea of
paying the legal fees of a man arrested for sucker-punching a black man
at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On Tuesday night, he easily
won the state, and his supporters have only rallied to him in the wake
of the violence.
Stopping
Trump in Ohio has been an essential part of the GOP’s effort to block
him from the nomination. But there are no good options ahead for
Republicans, as underscored by Tuesday's exit surveys. A slim majority said they would be
satisfied with Trump as the GOP nominee, while four in 10 said they'd
give serious thought to a third-party candidate if Trump were carrying
the Republican banner. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that Cruz would win against Trump if the primary narrowed to the two of them. "The only person I know I'm not going
to vote for is Hillary Clinton. Call me after our convention, and I may
add to that list," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters on
Tuesday, condemning his own party for allowing Trump to get this far.
"Our party leadership's been light on Trump. Now everybody's up in their
game? Is it too little, too late? I don't know." Princeton professor Sam Wang calculated the effect on
the race of Trump winning or losing Ohio. The results show that if
everyone else stays in the race, Trump fares better, paradoxically, with
an Ohio loss. But even under that unlikely scenario -- impossible now
that Rubio has officially quit -- he still winds up short of the
majority he'd need for the nomination. PredictWise,
which aggregates betting markets for politics and other topics, shows
that bettors think there's about a 50/50 chance of the Republican
convention needing two or more votes to select a nominee.
PredictWise
Trump's stronger than
expected performance in Illinois and Missouri may make up some of the
delegates he's losing in Ohio. "Trump could still remain on pace for the
1,237 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination after tonight’s primaries, even after losing Ohio and its 66 delegates to Kasich," writes David Wasserman on the blog FiveThirtyEight. While Trump on his own may not win
enough delegates to secure the nomination, an intriguing possibility is
unfolding: Cruz, who is reviled among the establishment, and Kasich
together could be able to collectively beat Trump, setting up a
Kasich-Cruz, or Cruz-Kasich, ticket.
Kasich campaign chief John Weaver said in a memo Tuesday night
that the path ahead was wide open for Kasich as the contest moves away
from the South and toward states where Kasich is stronger. Weaver said
internal polling suggests most Rubio voters -- such as they were -- will
break for Kasich, giving him a good chance at racking up a majority of
the roughly 1,000 remaining delegates. Natalie Jackson contributed reporting.
PredictWise
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