As the Republican presidential nominating contest lurches into it dog days phase with limited activity but a riot of speculation, there’s still talk of party elites drafting some “unity” figure in Cleveland instead of going with one of the people who are still battling in the primaries. But as I noted at New York this week, the polls are showing that actual Republican voters really hate the idea:

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post

points

to two emphatic data points:

A new Bloomberg Politics poll finds that 63 percent of Republican voters nationwide think that the winner of the most delegates should get the GOP nomination, even if he does not win an outright majority. Only 33 percent say the delegates at a contested convention should pick the nominee instead …
[A] CNN poll earlier this week … found that by 60-38, Republican voters think the candidate with the most delegates should get the nomination, even without a majority.

As Sargent notes, both polls also showed Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in a general election, which will be the party elites’ excuse for taking over the nomination process if they can — and if they dare.
But they could be courting disaster if they do so. An even more emphatic indicator of rank-and-file antipathy to a bossed convention comes from a HuffPost/YouGov survey, which shows only 16 percent of self-identified Republicans and leaners being “satisfied” with a nominee chosen from outside the current field, while the idea makes 55 percent angry. The second-worst idea, respondents to the survey say, would be to nominate John Kasich, the closest thing to an acceptable-to-the-Establishment candidate left in the field and the brandisher of many a general-election poll. Seems Republicans who keep passing up opportunities to vote for Kasich may mean it.
There is, of course, more than a little irony in the insistence of Republican voters on intra-party democracy. This is, after all, the party that’s busy creating potholes in the path to the ballot box anywhere it can. And you could make the argument that latter-day “constitutional conservatism” is all about creating iron-clad protections for conservative governing models (and the interests that benefit from them) against popular majorities acting through Congress or the presidency to enact progressive policies. There’s very significant support among conservative activists for repealing the 17th Amendment to take away direct election of U.S. senators in favor of returning the privilege to state legislators.
In that context, this sort of opinion expressed by North Dakota RNC member Curly Haugland isn’t so surprising:

“Do the primaries choose a nominee or do the convention delegates?” he asked. “It can’t be both.” “Democracy is pretty popular,” he added, “but it’s simply not the way we do it.”

I suspect party leaders like Haugland are in the process of finding out that Republicans want democracy for themselves even if they are occasionally willing to deny it to those people who are presumed to want to live off the hard work of virtuous older white people, or murder their own babies, or force bakers of conscience to create same-sex-wedding cakes. And a “brokered convention” that ignores this sentiment may soon find those sunny general-election polls showing some non-Trump or non-Cruz candidate winning may be premature.

Trump may well win the nomination decisively on June 7 in California and New Jersey and make it all moot. But if not, GOP elites would probably be prudent to let either Trump or Cruz win the nomination after a good vicious fight in Cleveland. Sure, they might be general election losers, but they’re what voters chose from a vast field. It’s not like they didn’t have options..

Watching primary and caucus returns from Arizona and Utah on Tuesday night, one Republican candidate’s performance was reminiscent of an episode of the TV show about a zombie apocalpyse, The Walking Dead. I wrote about it the next day at New York:

Donald Trump won Arizona and all of its 58 delegates, while Ted Cruz won Utah and its 40 delegates. The third candidate still in the field, John Kasich, won no delegates, and his big psychological victory was finishing a very poor second place in Utah over Trump in what may very well be America’s preeminent Trump-hating jurisdiction. He also managed to “finish fourth in a three-man race” in Arizona by trailing the zombie candidacy of Marco Rubio (who did better in early voting than Kasich did in early voting or on election day).
In popular mythology, when you get bit by a zombie you soon zombify yourself. The Arizona showing by Kasich seems to consign him to the ranks of the walking dead. Even before last night, there were signs in every direction that the Ohioan had worn out his welcome with, well, just about everybody in the GOP. His refusal to give Ted Cruz a clean shot at Trump in Utah greatly annoyed Mitt Romney, who can hardly be expected to promote Kasich’s interests if the contested convention they both want actually materializes. But as Robert Draper explained on Monday in The New York Times Magazine, it’s hard to find much of any “insider” base of support for the man:

[M]ost party insiders to whom I’ve spoken flatly reject a draft-Kasich movement. Partly this is because he hasn’t earned it. To date he has triumphed only in his home state — which was not a huge surprise, given that he won all 12 of his previous elections (for State Senate, Congress and governor) there. Kasich was something of an absentee candidate in the South and has underperformed in the North and the Midwest outside Ohio. His fund-raising abilities are not especially impressive: He has raised $15.3 million thus far, not much more than the $14.2 million that Marco Rubio raised in the last quarter of last year alone …
Perhaps just as important, conservatives — particularly in the G.O.P. commentariat — do not see Kasich as one of them … As governor, Kasich expanded Medicaid benefits in his state, against the wishes of a Republican-controlled Legislature. He also embraced Common Core educational standards and today favors a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants. All of these constitute apostasies to movement conservatives.
But there’s a third layer of resistance to Kasich, one with which Cruz can identify: Many Beltway Republicans don’t like him.

Yeah, the dirty little secret of the Kasich campaign all along has been that the actual candidate behind his relentlessly upbeat campaign has a long-standing reputation in Washington and Columbus as a nasty piece of work. Republicans who know this are understandably a mite irritated at Kasich’s little lectures on how to emulate the sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
But if Kasich really has little support in the Republican Establishment, how about his occasional claim of being a big brawling anti-Establishment figure himself, fighting the good fight out there in the Ohio badlands? Roll Call‘s Stu Rothenberg, who certainly knows a Beltway insider when he sees one, had great sport with the idea of Kasich the Outsider in a recent column:

Kasich … often refers to his service in the House but insists that the establishment fears him.
Just don’t look behind the curtain, because if you do, you will see that Kasich’s supporters and advisers include party establishment types like consultant Charlie Black, former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, long-time party strategist Stu Spencer, former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu and New Hampshire veteran GOP operative Tom Rath.
There is nothing wrong with that team, except that it was the establishment before anyone was complaining about “the establishment.”

And that gets us to the strategic anomaly of the Kasich campaign. The one thing we know right now with a high degree of certainty is that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are going to arrive in Cleveland ranked first and second in bound delegates, together holding a sizable and perhaps an overwhelming majority. How exactly does it transpire that these delegates (yes, there will be some disloyal-to-the-candidate party hacks among them, but not really that many) will on some second or third or fourth ballot settle on the candidate they’ve both regularly trounced in the primaries and who epitomizes the veteran elected official RINOs their supporters despise? Is the “year of the outsider” in the GOP really going to produce a nominee who’s been in public office for 27 years, dating back to the Carter administration?

I don’t think so.

One of the most unusual things about this unusual presidential cycle is the disconnect, especially on the Republican side, between campaign money and candidate performance. I discussed this topic in connection with Donald Trump’s strange candidacy at New York.

[C]andidates other than front-runner Donald J. Trump have spent a lot more money on themselves and against him than he’s had to expend, enabling him to pose as the guy too rich (and too popular with small donors) to be vulnerable to “bribery.” This was exemplified by the failed effort by Marco Rubio and an assortment of conservative groups to take down Trump in Florida. Anti-Trump “independent” ads alone in the Sunshine State cost an estimated $35.5 million. Total spending by Trump and his supporters for the entire campaign nationwide is at $25.8 million.
Trump’s difference-maker financially, of course, has been his massive advantage in “earned media” (or what used to be called “free media,” because it’s provided by media coverage free of charge). MediaQuant, a firm that measures and values unpaid media coverage, estimates that Trump has harvested nearly $1.9 billion in earned media this cycle. That’s about twice as much as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush combined have received, and within shouting distance of being twice as much as the two Democratic candidates combined as well.
But general-election campaigns are a lot more expensive than primaries. So it’s not surprising that Trump has hedged on repeating his “no special-interest contributions” pledge beyond the Republican Convention in July, and CNN is reporting that he’s already planning a big fund-raising blitz for the general election.
At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney puts all this together and suggests that total campaign costs are about to become too high for Trump to perpetually surf earned media to victory:

So far, Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary political ride, fending off millions worth of hostile attacks, prevailing against opponents who out-organized and outspent him, and sparing himself the punishing grind of high-dollar fundraisers. He’s also gotten considerable political mileage out of his claim to be above the big money fray. It remains to be seen whether Trump can continue playing by his own rules, or whether he will be forced to get his hands dirty in the messy business of campaign financing–and answer for it to voters.

But there are two factors that undercut this possibility. For one thing, Trump could liquidate some of his assets (estimated independently as having a value of about $4.5 billion) and self-finance to a considerable extent. And for another, this long nominating contest season in both parties is shortening the general-election campaign and the time and cost of any “air war.” Additionally, earned media is much easier to come by in presidential general elections than any other mode of politics, sometimes dwarfing paid media even when there’s not a wildly entertaining and galvanizing figure like Donald Trump in the fray. So it might make sense for Trump to wait and see if he even needs to spend a lot of money.

If he doesn’t, that means the news media’s fascination with Trump is still paying him dividends.

Many Republican Establishment figures are excited if nervous about the possibility of denying Donald Trump and Ted Cruz their party’s presidential nomination via the first “contested convention” since 1976, and the first multi-ballot convention since 1952. But the two candidates are making it clear they cannot both be shut down, as I discussed today at New York:

There’s a big problem with such scenarios, however, and it transcends the unilateral threats Donald Trump is making about the disturbances and defections his followers might generate if he is denied the nomination. A more basic reality is that together Trump and Cruz are likely to command a solid majority of delegates going to Cleveland, even if neither of them has a majority on his own. And if they choose to deny any other candidates a shot at the nomination, they can almost certainly do so.
Their most direct means of control is via convention rules. And as Politico‘s Kyle Cheney reports today, the two camps are already talking about working together to make it a “two-man race” to the very end:

Advisers to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say there’s no way they’ll allow John Kasich to even compete at a contested national convention — let alone prevail.
Trump and Cruz are betting that their dual dominance in the delegate hunt will permanently box out the Ohio governor, who has no mathematical path to the nomination and is openly pursuing a floor fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
And their aides say Kasich won’t even make it to the floor.
“There is virtually zero chance he can even be nominated,” Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican national committeeman who’s advising Cruz on his convention strategy, told POLITICO. “It’s a two-man race.”
Their confidence is rooted in the fact that Trump and Cruz are nearly certain to control the lion’s share of the 2,472 delegates participating in the July convention. Together, they’ve earned more than 1,000 delegate slots to Kasich’s 136. And those delegates will ultimately approve the rules that govern a contested convention.

One possible means for excluding Kasich is the famous 2012 rule, enacted to thwart a discordant Ron Paul faction in Tampa, that a candidate must have a majority of eight delegations in hand before her or his name can even be placed in nomination. That would take care not only of Kasich (barring some late-primary pyrotechnics) but any dark horse as well. But the more abiding reality is that a convention makes its own rules, and so long as Trump and Cruz control a majority and continue to work together to force a “two-man race,” they can do so.
That’s probably true even if there are a significant number of “false flag” delegates who don’t really support the candidate to whom they are bound on the first ballot. They are free to vote as they wish on procedural matters such as the rules. But it’s hard to imagine there will be enough of them to overcome the combined forces of loyal Trump and Cruz delegates. And for that matter, if you had to figure who will be most successful in “stealing” delegates prior to Cleveland, it will probably be Cruz with his well-organized campaign, not the inchoate forces of the anti-Cruz/anti-Trump Establishment.

So Establishment fantasies of nominating Kasich or Paul Ryan or anyone else other than Trump or Cruz may be as unlikely now as this whole cycle might have seemed a year ago.

As we all continue to mull the greater meaning of Donald J. Trump, it’s generally assumed he’s built a cult of personality for himself, and not any sustainable movement or point of view beyond a crude authoritarianism. But at least one left-of-center writer thinks otherwise. I discussed the topic at some length at New York, beginning with an observation about Thursday night’s subdued Republican candidate debate:

With the volume turned down, the emptiness and incoherence of Donald Trump’s approach to public-policy issues becomes especially clear. He’ll make good deals and will be lethally inclined toward America’s enemies (including, for the moment, global Islam, it seems). Even on the one topic where he seemed to have a new thought — supporting the deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS — no reason was given for the change in position, other than a sort of gut feeling it would be necessary to “destroy ISIS.”
Everyone understands that Trump is exploiting a rich and very real vein of public sentiment, centered in but not limited to white working-class folk who may have voted Republican in the past but never shared the economic and foreign-policy views of the business and movement-conservative elites who run the GOP. Some optimistically view this Trump constituency as an addition to the Republican coalition; I think it’s mostly elements of the existing coalition that are threatening to leave unless the party changes. Either way, does this all go away if Trump loses or gets bored and goes back to different modes of brand promotion?
You might think so, but a certain erudite if occasionally cranky polymath and thinker, New America’s Michael Lind, believes there’s something we can call Trumpism, and it’s the future of conservative politics. Here’s how Lind boils it down in a piece on Trump as “the perfect populist” at Politico:

It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House. But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.

Now, that’s a fascinating prospect, isn’t it? The entire conservative policy and messaging edifice, the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and many years of development, employing God knows how many thinkers, researchers, gabbers, and writers, replaced by an infrastructure devoted to making Trumpism not just a brand or an epithet but a whole way of thinking about public life.
Where this would all come from is a mystery. The Trump campaign itself is a strange assortment of personal retainers, hired guns, and the occasional public figure reeking of brimstone after climbing aboard Trump’s bandwagon out of what appears to be sheer opportunism. When you look at a guy like Sam Clovis — the intellectually well-regarded Iowa “constitutional conservative” who abandoned Rick Perry’s sinking ship last summer and signed on with Trump as “senior policy adviser” — you see someone who’s probably winging it as much as the Donald himself. So the question abides: Does Trump represent anything larger than himself (not that he could imagine it!)? Is he the harbinger of some “national populist” movement that will kick conventional conservatism to the curb, or just (like many right-wing demagogues before him) the vehicle for the occasional rage that seizes people furious with change?
It’s hard to say…. If Trump is somehow elected president, the challenges of actual power may domesticate him and make him a real Republican. Without question, the prestige of the presidency and its vast patronage inside and outside government would stimulate the kind of interest in developing Trumpism that Michael Lind expects. If he wins the Republican nomination but then loses the general election, it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity.
And if Trump can’t even make it to Cleveland and seize the nomination with all of the things working in his favor at present, he’ll become just another loser, and no more likely to become the founding father of a new ideology than Rick Santorum. So don’t hold your breath waiting for the development of Trumpism until and unless Trump takes the oath of office as president. But then we’d have more things to worry about than the future shape of center-right thinking, wouldn’t we?

Democrats need to work hard to make sure it does not come to that.