Trump Towers over the GOP Field

With his stunning blowout victory tonight in the Nevada caucuses, billionaire Donald Trump has now won three contests in a row in the derby to be the 2016 Republican nominee for president. Trump won with a staggering 46% of the vote, 22 points better than second place finisher Marco Rubio (24%), with Ted Cruz coming in 3rd just slightly behind with 21%. Ben Carson finished with 5% of the vote and John Kasich a mere 4%.

With its complicated and time-consuming caucus process, the Silver State’s turnout was dramatically less than the primary vote in South Carolina on Saturday. with about 75,000 voters showing up to caucus. In the Palmetto State, nearly three-quarters of a millions citizens voted in the Republican primary. In votes with low turnout, it’s enthusiasm that wins the day and Trump’s supporters are extremely enthusiastic about their champion.

Trump’s big win in Nevada was fueled by the electorate’s desire for an outsider candidate and outright anger at the establishment in Washington DC. According to Fox News entrance polls, 57% of Nevada voters are flat out angry at the government.  One fascinating result: although it was a small sample size, in a CNN entrance poll, Trump won 44% of the vote among Hispanic voters in Nevada. Guess they must be “the good ones” that he talks about. The Donald long ago predicted he would win the Latino vote in Nevada and he was right but let’s put a big BUT on it. Trump’s Latino votes total about 2,700. In Saturday’s Democratic caucuses, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined for over 15,000 Latino votes. If you match those up against each other, the Dems got 85% of the Latino votes cast in Nevada. That’s death in a general election for the Republicans. Trump has damaged the entire party with his mass deportation scheme.

So with three wins in four states, many pundits are asking whether The Donald can be stopped in his quest for the nomination. What started as a 17-horse field has been reduced to a five-man race, although Senators Rubio and Cruz and their surrogates have called it a three-way contest, discounting Ohio Governor John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as long-shot also-rans.

Trump now has won 82 convention delegates, nearly double every other candidate combined. This does require two explanations. First, although you may have heard or read that all of the GOP primaries and caucuses before March 15th have proportional delegate allocation, there was one exception and that was in South Carolina, where Trump was awarded every single one of the 50 available delegates. Second, the delegates awarded to date represent a tiny fraction of the 1,237 needed to win a majority and assure the nomination.

That will all change next Tuesday, March 1st, when 12 states go to the polls and a jackpot of 600 delegates up for grabs, nearly a quarter of all that will be available between now and the end of the nominating process in June. In a five-way race, with Trump still capturing about 35% of the vote nationwide while the others split 65% four ways, The Donald is well positioned to win most or all of those 12 Super Tuesday contests. Luckily for the others, all 12 states voting next Tuesday will reward delegates with different proportionality formulas so Trump will not gobble up all of them (or even likely half of them).

Besides Trump’s wins on Saturday and tonight, the other key story lines over the last week were Rubio’s two second place finishes and, more significantly, the departure of of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush from the race. Both developments represent positive news for Rubio. The first, obviously, is that the two 2nd’s represent a momentum boost for the Florida Senator heading into next Tuesday’s big voting day. Even though he barely beat Cruz for 2nd place in South Carolina, it was a come-from-behind 2nd place finish, given his poor 5th place showing in New Hampshire. With two-thirds of the voters calling themselves evangelical, the Palmetto State should have lined up well for the Texas Senator but Trump won the evangelical vote 33%-to-27% (with 22% going to Rubio). The rationale behind the Cruz campaign strategy was to win in the evangelical states (Iowa, South Carolina and several southern states voting on Super Tuesday). If he can’t beat Trump (and barely beats Rubio) with that constituency, it will be a tough road for Cruz.

As for Bush’s departure from the race, it’s a huge boon for Rubio on multiple fronts. It was about time for Bush to get out of the race; there was simply not a thread of good news anywhere to provide a rationale to continue. After a 6th place finish in Iowa and two consecutive 4th place finishes, there was no credible path to the nomination. Remember also that Bush brought out the big guns in South Carolina, with his brother George hitting the campaign trail for the very first time. It didn’t help. Bush sought the endorsement of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley but she sided with Rubio. There was no good news whatsoever in any of the polls for Bush and he really should have gotten out of the race after New Hampshire.

Without Bush in the derby, his odious super-PAC (Right to Rise USA) will no longer spend tens of billions in attack ads against Rubio so that’s a big benefit. With Bush out of the race, “establishment” endorsements and money have started to flock Rubio’s way (that may be a double-edged sword in this anti-establishment year). And with Bush finished, Rubio is best positioned to gain the voters (albeit there weren’t a lot of them) who were supporting his mentor. As Trump pointed out Saturday night, not all Bush supporters will necessarily go in one direction; they will splinter. But virtually every poll shows Rubio as the top “2nd choice” candidate so he’ll benefit the most. One of the South Carolina polls (the PPP poll), actually broke down the 2nd choices for each candidates supporters and Rubio was listed as the 2nd choice for 52% of the Bush supporters (with 16% for Trump and 7% for Cruz).

The chart below shows the actual vote in South Carolina and a hypothetical outcome if Bush’s votes were re-allocated according to the 2nd choice numbers indicated in PPP and if Bush, Carson and Kasich’s votes were all re-allocated to the second choices:

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There’s a point to all of this: the point is that Rubio is better positioned to be the last man standing in the battle to take down Donald Trump but he needs the field to clear. The bombastic billionaire is absolutely the big front-runner and, as long as the field remains divided three to five ways, he will be the Republican nominee for President.

So what’s the path forward for our five nominees?

Donald Trump: right now, he just needs to hope that the field remains spread out. He has his solid 30%-to-40% base but has had that for months and hasn’t been able to grow that base, despite being the king of free media. But he may not need more than that. If it remains a three or four person field when the winner take all delegates states start voting on March 15th, his 35% will result in plurality wins and he will be unstoppable. He’s already proven that there’s nothing he can say or do to offend his core supporters so he’s virtually guaranteed that 35% base, which is enough to win as long as it remains a multi-candidate field. Tonight in Nevada, despite the small overall turnout, this was Trump’s first win in the 40 percentile of the vote, showing that his ceiling may be rising. If he can get over 40% of the vote in the Super Tuesday states next week, the math gets very daunting for any of his opponents.

Throughout this nominating process, the wealthy and famous reality star has had a massive advantage over his lesser known rivals. Trump’s popularity crosses all income and demographic levels, he’s been able to brilliantly dominate the news nearly every day and has a huge edge with low information voters who enjoy his theatrics and don’t need to hear any specifics but just want to hear him say “I can make America great again!” As each day passes and he keeps winning, Trump is more and more likely the best bet to win the GOP nomination.

Ted Cruz: it’s been a bad week for Cruz. Besides finishing a disappointing third in both South Carolina and Nevada, there’s a narrative building that is starting to stick and is very damaging, that he will lie, make things up, and use dirty tricks in an effort to win. Cruz fired his Communications Director (Rick Tyler) after Tyler tweeted a fraudulent video of Rubio with subtitles indicating that he was mocking the Bible. The “liar” mantra, if it does stick, will sink him. One thing that Cruz must have next Tuesday is a win in his home state of Texas. If he can’t win there, he’s finished. If he does win there, he’ll need to split the 2nd place race with Rubio in the other states to credibly claim that he’s the one to go mano a mano with The Donald. But there’s something to consider: Cruz is despised by “establishment” Republicans, even more so than Trump. So even if he wins Texas and does generally better than Rubio, there will be a lot of pressure and money to keep Rubio in the race in a desperate attempt to stop both Trump and Cruz.

Marco Rubio: he needs to put a couple of wins on the board. With 12 states voting next week, if he doesn’t win ANY of them, that’s not a good story to tell. Still, if he’s ahead of Cruz in the vast majority of contests, he may win by finishing 2nd. The best thing to happen to Rubio would be Trump to beat Cruz in Texas. Despite the narrative of many in the media that, if Cruz were to drop out, that Trump would get most of his supporters, the polls don’t bear this out. An NBC Marist poll in South Carolina showed that Rubio was the 2nd choice of 40% of Cruz supporters (compared to just 18% for Trump). This is also true in reverse, by the way, with Cruz being the 2nd choice of 33% of Rubio backers.

According to both the South Carolina and Nevada entrance polls, Rubio was the clear winner among voters who want the candidate “who can win” in November and the few who wanted a candidate with political experience. In both contests, he was also the top choice among those who made up their minds in the last few days, proving that Marco-mentum is real even if perhaps too late.

John Kasich: he’s by far and away the best candidate (and president) of the final five but he has virtually no shot and is apparently getting a lot of pressure from GOP party big-wigs to get out of the race and get on the Rubio train. Kasich has resisted those entreaties for now but his only path to the nomination is a complete collapse by Cruz or Rubio where one of them exits the race on March 2nd. He may have finished 2nd in New Hampshire (a state with a lot of independent voters) but he’s been in single digits in the other four contests. Kasich garnered just 2% of the vote in Iowa, 8% in South Carolina and 4% in Nevada. That lack of widespread appeal puts him so far behind the Big Three that it seem like his quest for the presidency is mission impossible.

The popular Ohio Governor is putting his eggs in the Midwest and Northeast baskets. He’s focusing on Massachusetts and Virginia on Super Tuesday and is already campaigning actively in Michigan (voting March 8th). Kasich got some bad news today with a new poll from his home state of Ohio, in which he’s losing to Trump 31% to 26%. If he can’t even win the state in which he is a popular governor, how could he possibly win anywhere else? If he’s still in the race when Ohio votes (March 15th) and he pulls it out (gaining all 66 delegates), his role would ultimately be to deny Trump the 1,237 total delegates he needs to secure the nomination. This would result in a contested convention in which party leaders take a more prominent role and would likely block Trump from being the nominee. A successful governor in the ultimate swing state might do quite well in a contested convention. Perhaps that’s Kasich’s long game.

Ben Carson: after two consecutive last place finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina and a 2nd to last place finish in Nevada, I still wonder why he’s still running.

Finally, some interesting notes from the South Carolina polls, first from the CNN exit polls:

— 74% of the voters support Trump’s idea of banning Muslims from entering the United States. A whopping 74%!! Incidentally, Trump didn’t get all of those votes, he got 41%. That tells me that people want the Muslim ban but are somewhat realistic that it won’t happen.

— 53% of the Republican voters said that illegal immigrants should be offered some kind of legal status, with 44% saying they should be deported to their home countries. That’s actually a fairly surprising number and a good sign for Marco Rubio going forward.

And last, some juicy, funny and frightening tidbits from the pre-voting polls:

— In a Bloomberg poll, 35% of respondents said Marco Rubio was too young to be president. Only 2% said the same about Ted Cruz even though they are less than 6 months apart in actual age. If either Senator were to win the nomination, they would be 45 years old on election day. Guess that looks are everything!

— In the PPP poll, 20% of respondents supported banning homosexuals from entering the United States. I’m not kidding. Want more? 29% of the respondents wish the South had won the Civil War. There are clearly some kooky people on the far right of the party.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Bodig