California could be critical to stopping Donald Trump

By Matthew Artz, martz@bayareanewsgroup.com

Posted: 03/03/2016 06:01:50 AM PST | Updated: about 10 hours ago


TOPSHOT - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in North Charleston,
South Carolina, February 19, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSONJIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images ( JIM WATSON )

Unable once again to turn Donald Trump into "a loser," Republican leaders are girding for a long, desperate and possibly futile fight to deny the brash New Yorker enough delegates to claim the party's nomination.

And that could easily make delegate-rich California a key battleground -- where residents would be bombarded with political ads and robocalls, à la Iowa and New Hampshire, before the June 7 primary.

Trump's victories in seven of the 11 Super Tuesday nominating contests weren't as impressive as originally predicted. But they left him in a commanding position -- well ahead of a fractured field, with his top rivals still refusing to rally behind a single champion.

With hopes dashed for a one-on-one battle between Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP establishment's darling from Florida, party leaders have little option but to root for Trump's remaining rivals to stay in the race and lap up enough delegates to throw the nomination to the party's July convention.

"If you don't want Donald Trump to get the nomination, it's about one thing now: keeping him from getting the 1,237 delegates he needs," said Bill Whalen, a longtime GOP operative who's now a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "That has to be the Republican strategy. Keep him from clinching on the first ballot, and let confusion reign in Cleveland."

In that scenario, the Golden State's primary would likely become the establishment's last stand.
"Once you get to June, California plays a gigantic role," said David Wasserman, an analyst with the widely respected Cook Political Report. "There is virtually no scenario to stop Trump without keeping him from winning a large number of delegates in California."

But it remains to be seen if Trump's opponents can keep the race in play that long or whether the strategy might backfire if the convention chooses someone else -- and Trump and his supporters desert the establishment's nominee.

"It's the only strategy at this point," said Louis DeSipio, professor and director of the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Democracy. "But the results on Tuesday demonstrated the breadth of Trump's support in the Republican base. And the likelihood is that he will be able to get to the delegate total that he needs."

Trump captured 34 percent of the popular vote on Super Tuesday, claiming states as disparate as Alabama and Massachusetts by large margins while also winning big in Tennessee and Georgia and scoring narrow victories in Arkansas, Virginia and Vermont.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won his home state, as well as Oklahoma and Alaska, but he continued to show little strength in more moderate states -- many of which are coming up on the nominating calendar. Rubio won his first contest in Minnesota but finished third in most of the other races. Overall, Trump has 316 delegates, compared to 226 for Cruz and 106 for Rubio.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton added to her sizable delegate lead, winning seven states. Her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, won four states and vows to stay in the race through the convention. But most political analysts don't expect it to be much of a Democratic race once it gets to California.

While the results look good for Trump, Wasserman said, the real estate mogul showed signs of being sapped by relentless attacks from rivals and his own self-inflicted wounds by initially failing to disavow the endorsement of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.

"I thought there was a scenario that Trump would simply run away with Super Tuesday, and that didn't happen," Wasserman said. "Last week, I would have expected him to have won 10 states."

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman is among several Republican billionaires funding a super PAC that will run attack ads against Trump leading up to the critical March 15 winner-take-all primaries in Ohio and Florida.

If Trump prevails in both contests, he will likely cruise to the nomination. But if he falters, Wasserman sees a good chance that Trump will come to California still needing delegates to claim the nomination.

And he still expects the front-runner to be fending off several well-funded rivals determined to keep him from getting over the top.

Republican Party rules grant 13 delegates to the top statewide vote-getter and then allocate three delegates to the winner of each of 53 congressional districts.

Republican Party rules grant 13 delegates to the top statewide vote-getter and then allocate three delegates to the winner of each of 53 congressional districts.

"I could see the Trump 757 touching down in each media market to huge rallies," DeSipio said. "And the anti-Trump money would flood the state."

Candidates would be drawn to California because the only other major state voting on June 7 is New Jersey, a Trump stronghold whose governor, Chris Christie, shocked political observers last week by endorsing the billionaire.

"Why run in Trump's backyard when you can come to California and pick at him in these congressional districts?" Whalen said.

That is what the Cruz campaign has been counting on for months. By far the best organized GOP campaign in the state, it has been setting up operations in each congressional district, said Ron Nehring, the campaign's co-chairman. "Every day that the campaign is not resolved by other states makes it that much more likely that it will be resolved by California," he said.

If California does keep Trump from getting the nomination, that would put the party in the difficult position of trying to select a nominee at a brokered convention.

"I think they'd be hopeless if it got to the convention," said David Brady, a Stanford University political science professor.

If Trump doesn't get the nomination in Cleveland, Brady predicted, he would punish the party by running as an independent, throwing the race to the Democrats.

"There is nobody who can unify the party on the convention floor," he said.

Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435. Follow him on Twitter at Matthew_Artz.

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