The Republicans' Kobayashi Maru

The 2016 Republican primary has become the most game theoretically complex situation of any American Presidential contest in decades, or perhaps ever. And what some still don’t want to admit is that a defeat may in fact be guaranteed, either for the establishment if Trump wins against their wishes or the Republican Party as a whole if they block him (thus the no win situation known as the Kobayashi Maru). A mere two weeks ago consolidation of all non-Trump voters behind Rubio was the elite’s goal, requiring Cruz and others to drop out. Now that strategy is broadly recognized as very unlikely or impossible even though recent events played out more or less as predicted, or even slightly unfavorably to Trump. Despite looking at the same information as before elite opinion has rapidly shifted against consolidation, confirming the maxim that hope is not a strategy. More troubling even than such inexplicable strategic waffling was the New York Times report on the GOP’s anti-Trump plan, which revealed that top Republican leaders have no idea what to do and no plan on how to do it, even when faced with an existential threat.

In any case Super Tuesday killed consolidation in practice just as analysts realized it may not work in theory either, since each dropout would send some support towards Trump, dangerously pushing him towards 50% even if others end up closing the gap a bit each time. In fact now the party wants everyone to stay in place and defend their walls — Rubio to fight for Florida, Kasich for Ohio, etc., and thus deny Trump the majority. Romney even recommended tactical voting, rarely seen or necessary in America, to boost the best non-Trump candidate in each state who might win, regardless of one’s actual voting preference.

Given a divided field, top strategists now recognize that no other candidate can catch up and beat Trump outright. If in a four way face Trump’s bedrock of 30–35% holds it would take a statistically improbable set of outcomes to deny him the strong plurality or outright majority of the vote. And yet, the party mandarins have decided to ride the knife’s edge and hope that they can deny him just enough states to take away the nomination in a brokered convention.

Here’s the problem: even though a brokered convention can theoretically pick any candidate, we’re not in the 1920s anymore and nothing would look worse on 24 hours news than Trump getting say 45% of the primary vote, and losing to someone with maybe 30% or less. It’s not even likely he’d be very close, as in Trump with 35% to Rubio’s 32%. And by the way if it were that close, you could very well see Cruz not Rubio in the #2 spot. The party may then have to pick the third place candidate or someone even lower (or who didn’t run), because the establishment hates Cruz almost as much as Trump. Therefore as long as they absolutely won’t accept Trump, Republican power brokers and strategists find themselves in quite a labyrinth with no guarantee of getting out intact or even alive.

Even in the best case scenario the hope for a brokered convention is a death wish for the party. For one, given the level of enthusiasm for Trump it’s probably safe to assume that if the Republicans rob him of the nomination they’d lose his supporters permanently. Also, Trump could then easily justify an independent run (even if by some very improbable setback he slightly lost the plurality, since he can argue that he faced unfair and disproportionate counterpressure from the establishment). Given Clinton’s core strength and Trump’s civil war, the Republicans would get crushed in the general election, probably by 10–20 points. And, given the shocking levels of support he gets from Democrats and Independents, Trump might still conceivably get the national plurality against Clinton and a Republican (Clinton would get the Democrat coastal base, Republicans their Southern base, and Trump the big middle including blue collar states such as Ohio and Michigan).

Regardless of Trump’s actual performance, Clinton would almost certainly get more electoral votes than the non-Trump Republican standard bearer (Democrats tend to have a greater firewall of major states locked than Republicans, who would also be splitting the vote more against Trump). If no one wins a majority in the Electoral College the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation collectively gets one vote, which must go to one of the top three candidates. Since Republicans typically control more states even when they lose the overall House majority they’ll almost certainly have the final say. They might then be tempted to vote for the third place general election candidate (a hypothetical Republican behind Clinton and Trump) who was also third or worse in the primaries (perhaps Rubio behind Trump and Cruz). The country would be in utter chaos for 4 years if a President had so little legitimacy while the national polarization would become apocalyptic.

Considering the chaos we are seeing, what Trumpism reveals at the highest level is that the Republican Party has lost enough of its core supporters that it can probably no longer function as a coherent coalition. A large faction looks like it has escaped the force of ideological and partisan gravity never to return to the Reagan way, which persisted without major updates for 36 years even as the state of the middle and working class as well as the country’s international position declined. As for the establishment’s last stand against Trump in the coming weeks, I quote the King of Rohan: “Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?”