Kasich and Cruz's Anti-Trump Alliance Is Cute, but It Won’t Work

There's a scene in Bob's Burgers where Tina, the series's stressed-out, hormonal 14-year-old, is driving a car in a parking lot for the first time. There's only one parked car in sight, but as she swerves slowly back and forth, groaning with anxiety the entire time, it becomes clear that she's going to hit it. "TINA FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TURN AWAY OR STOP!" her father Bob yells, seconds before impact.

Anyone who's been following the Republican primary campaign probably feels like Bob at this point. Over the course of the last several months a Donald Trump victory has gone from being a punchline to a real danger to an inevitability. On Sunday, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, the only remaining non-Trump candidates, announced that they would coordinate their efforts to stop the real estate mogul. The candidates won't be telling their supporters to strategically change their votes, but their operations will focus their money and ground games on whichever states they have a shot of stealing from Trump—that's Indiana for Cruz, and Oregon and New Mexico for Kasich.

It's a last-ditch strategy to deny Trump the delegates he needs to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican convention, and like most last-ditch strategies, like Bob screaming at his frightened daughter, it seems destined to fail.

The basic problem for what's become known as the #NeverTrump crowd is that they're running out of chances to beat the billionaire who has become the Republican Establishment's version of the Antichrist. Tuesday's batch of primaries includes Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island, states where Trump has polled above 50 percent—even if all the voters who prefer Kasich or Cruz lined up behind one or the other, Trump would likely carry those primaries. (All these poll numbers come from RealClearPolitics averages.) In Pennsylvania, also voting Tuesday, Trump is polling at around 46 percent, but it's too late to get all of Cruz's backers to line up behind Kasich or vice-versa. Trump is going to pad his lead in delegates this week, and he already has almost 300 more than second-place Cruz. There are more Trump victories on the horizon too—he's polling at 46 percent in California, the largest prize in terms of delegates left, and he will likely take New Jersey's winner-take-all primary too.

Currently, neither Cruz nor Kasich can actually win enough delegates to get the nomination the usual way. At this point, their only hope is to stop Trump from getting 1,237 delegates, the magic number that would make him the automatic winner. If Trump has a plurality of delegates but fewer than 1,237, the Republican National Convention will become a battle between campaigns and party officials to secure delegates who will be freed from having to cast ballots based on their states' voters' preferences. The Cruz campaign has been clever about making sure as many delegates as possible would support him in that kind of second-ballot contest. But that kind of victory would seem shady to many voters—Trump's simple, intuitive argument will be that he won the most ballots and the most delegates, so why should someone else get the nomination based on his ability to work a "rigged" system? Trump's not wrong to point out that these sorts of hail Mary strategies are panicked and vaguely undemocratic, not to mention unprecedented in contemporary politics.

Lyin' Ted and Kasich are mathematically dead and totally desperate. Their donors & special interest groups are not happy with them. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)April 25, 2016

What's really sad is that had the non-Trump campaigns had plenty of chances to stop him. The lack of an early Establishment favorite led to a dozen candidates crowding Iowa's first-in-the-nation primary, and infighting between now-defunct contenders like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio meant the GOP wasn't training its guns on Trump. And the many winner-take-all primaries meant that though Trump rarely won majorities, he kept walking away with chunks of delegates. He took all of South Carolina's 50 delegates despite getting only 32 percent of the vote; in Florida, he got all 99 delegates with 45 percent of the vote; in Illinois, he scored 54 out of 69 delegates with less than 40 percent. Had Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich managed to enter into a #NeverTrump alliance months ago, when those contests were live, they could have shut Trump down.

But they didn't, and so the Republican Party, a sizable percentage of which not only doesn't want Trump as its standard bearer, but actively and vocally loathes him, is stuck with the short-fingered vulgarian. Their best-case scenario now involves stopping Trump in Indiana, slowing him down in California, then stealing the nomination from him at a convention, which would result in all of Trump's very vocal supporters denouncing the GOP and maybe even rioting, as Trump himself suggested last month.

Even if they did manage to wrest the nomination from Trump, they'd be left with Cruz, who is more predictable than the Donald, but equally extreme, and possibly even more hated by his fellow politicians. It's taken a long time, and there were plenty of chances to turn away, but at this point it seems impossible for the Republicans to avoid a car crash.