Beyond Coordination
It’s too early to tell for sure, but it’s looking like Trump’s margins over Kasich and Cruz will be so large that it wouldn’t have mattered if his rivals had coordinated. This doesn’t make things look good for the Stop Trump movement going forward. As many people have said many times, if this were anyone else, no one would be calling the Republican race anything but over.
It also leads me to a couple of counterfactual questions. First of all, what if this kind of coordination had happened earlier in the season? Bear with me here – what if someone in the party had seen the writing on the wall over the summer or in the early fall, and thought about the various Republican factions? There’s Trump and his supporters. There’s the Cruz wing of the party — evangelicals, organized conservatives. And finally, the Kasich wing – still conservative, but the more pro-compromise wing. Then they figured out how to get the latter two groups on the same page. Was there a candidate who could have done that? Would it have mattered?
Second, what if one of the bigger names had stuck around? Bush, Rubio, and Walker were all disappointing in the polls – and the first two in early primaries as well. But was this also part of the coordination issue? Could one of of them have gained steam if they’d played by what are maybe the new rules, rather than the old ones that require candidates to drop out sooner rather than later?