Much as Superstorm Sandy’s creeping flood waters knocked out a Con Edison power plant in Manhattan for four days in October 2012, a rising tide of disdain for Donald J. Trump has drowned the brains of some normally smart conservatives.
These activists and GOP luminaries failed to clinch the Republican nomination for any of the 16 rivals whom Trump flattened — fair and square. Notwithstanding the ballots of nearly 11 million Republican primary voters who chose the real-estate tycoon, some Never Trump enthusiasts are plotting to run a third-way contender for president and, they hope, trap the presumptive Republican nominee in Trump Tower.
This is utter madness.
It also saddens me to see otherwise astute friends of mine lose their senses and promote a project that looks as promising as a canoe being paddled rapidly away from Niagara Falls.
A conservative third-party or third-candidate bid will accomplish one thing: Hillary and Bill Clinton will recapture the White House as their once and future crime scene.
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Before these “Never Trump” conservatives follow this third path any farther, they should Google these terms: President Ralph Nader, President Ross Perot, President John Anderson, President George Wallace, President Henry Wallace (no relation), President Strom Thurmond, and President Theodore Roosevelt.
TR was president, but as a Republican from 1901 to 1909. When he led the Bull Moose party’s charge against GOP incumbent William Howard Taft in 1912, Roosevelt lost. He also pulled enough Republican-leaning votes from Taft’s left flank to assure the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. As chief executive, Wilson bestowed upon the American people the gifts of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. involvement in World War I, and the flaccid, feckless League of Nations. Wilson’s signature on the Revenue Act of 1913 midwifed the beloved federal income tax after the 16th Amendment permitted it.
Such are the unplanned reverberations of third-party presidential politics.
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Those who blithely dream of an anti-Trump neo–Bull Moose effort proudly point to the last time a third-party campaign triumphed. Abraham Lincoln led the then-new Republicans to the White House after the USA had been led for decades by Democrats and Whigs. But that was 1860. Suffice it to say, 156 years later, this is not your great, great, great grandfather’s America anymore.
If not an outright, 19th-century-style third-party victory, the proposed Never Trump scenario involves engineering an inconclusive Electoral College outcome in which no candidate secures a 270-vote majority. Under the Constitution, this would hip-check Decision 2016 into the U.S. House of Representatives for what is called a “contingent election.” Under this zany scheme, each state delegation will caucus and decide how to cast its one collective vote for president. Whichever of the top three candidates in the Electoral College wins a majority of at least 26 of these 50 state votes would become president of the United States.
This last occurred 191 years ago. The House of Representatives in 1825 chose runner-up John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, who secured more popular votes but not an Electoral College majority.
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In order to succeed, a third-way anti-Trump campaign would require at least six stars to align into the rarest of constellations:
1. A viable third-way candidate must step forward. According to media reports, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been trying to recruit such an aspirant, but with no luck so far. The name of smart and well-spoken Trump detractor Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) has arisen. If he is the man, he can run on having half of Ted Cruz’s Senate experience. That might generate some votes.
2. This third-way candidate must win at least one state in order to garner Electoral College votes.
3. When Vice President Joseph Biden opens the 50 states’ Electoral College ballots next January 6, each candidate must fail to win a majority of 270 votes.
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4. The decision then must go to the House of Representatives.
5. After November’s elections, Republicans still must control a majority of state delegations in the newly sworn-in House. (The current breakdown is 33 Republican, 14 Democrat, and three tied between both parties.)
6. Ultimately, at least 26 state delegations (presumably including most of those dominated by Republicans) must decide to ditch the Grand Old Party’s nominee and, instead, select the third-way candidate as the next commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces and de facto leader of the free world.
In order to work, all of these things must happen. Disable any one bulb, and the entire string of lights goes black.
This is magical thinking.
#related#The Never-Trumpniks also should think long and hard about this: America has been bitterly divided since the 2000 Florida recount, the Supreme Court’s 5–4 Bush v. Gore decision, and G.W. Bush’s White House victory, when just 537 votes in the Sunshine State gave him an Electoral College majority, in spite of Vice President Albert Gore’s popular-vote win. This national rift will grow toxic if Americans see a bunch of Republican House members — not even supposedly disinterested justices, but GOP congressmen — hand-pick the 45th president of the United States.
It’s one thing if an amazingly close and indecisive vote just happens to wind up in the House. However, if Americans sense that the Never Trump crowd deliberately rigged things so that the November election lands in the House, the sense that their ballots have been undermined in some Beltway-fueled, right-wing monkey business will make the post Bush v. Gore acrimony resemble a Doris Kearns Goodwin lecture on C-Span 2.
No doubt unwittingly, Team Never Trump is cooking up a recipe for rancor, riots, and revolution.