Al Davis, the coach-owner of the Oakland Raiders, was a hard man but a simple man and he had a simple strategy: “Just win, baby.” It appears on the surface that the rivals to Donald Trump are trying to soothe themselves with the possibility there is another path to victory in the Republican primaries other than Davis’s. I say “appears on the surface” because it’s possible something else is going on under the surface, which I’ll get to. But first, the surface.
On the surface, Donald Trump is cruising to the Republican nomination as easily as anyone has in recent memory. By which I mean, he’s won two early primary states handily and at the moment polls show him leading almost everywhere but Texas. You have to get complicated to argue this isn’t the case. You have to talk about delegate counts and proportional distributions of delegates in states that aren’t winner-take-all and provide technical arguments for why there’s not much difference between a strong second and a first-place showing in most of the states voting a week from today on Super Tuesday.
I love complicated arguments. This magazine is dedicated to them. But policy isn’t politics. In electoral politics, there are defined winners and losers, and there are specific dates on which we see who wins and who loses things. Reality alters itself after those dates. Donald Trump is stronger today than he was on Saturday because of the results of the South Carolina primary. Marco Rubio is also stronger than he was because he came in second. But again, you have to get complicated to argue that Rubio is somehow in a stronger position than Trump because potentially he can consolidate the votes from the departed Jeb Bush and potentially pull votes away from Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and John Kasich so that potentially next week he can run a strong second to Trump all sorts of places and get lots of delegates. The same argument holds for Cruz, should he do better on Super Tuesday than Rubio and come in second more places.
The key word in those sentences is “second.” Second isn’t first. Rubio and Cruz may get lots of delegates—but Trump will get more. And yes, if the day disappoints him, Ted Cruz will drop out or Rubio will drop out and perhaps even John Kasich will see the light even though he also has some highly complex theory about how, if he wins in Ohio on March 15, he will be in a position to do something or other.
This is all fun to talk about. It’s like the political version of fantasy football. But it’s all nonsense, I’m afraid, when it comes to the real world. Every scenario that doesn’t involve going head-to-head with Trump and winning depends on matters candidates cannot control. You can’t design a strategy for victory based on the idea that if you do A, a person whom you don’t control is going to do B, at which point C will happen organically. I mean, you can—but William of Occam’s razor is standing at the ready to slice you into bits. You know Occam’s razor, right? It’s the view of the universe that says the possibility with the fewest variables is the likeliest to occur.
Look, reality will alter itself again next Tuesday night. If Trump wins all but one or two of the Super Tuesday states, only the political version of a meteor strike will lead to him performing far worse on March 15. At that point, 31 states will have voted. If he wins all but a handful of those 28 states, he will be the nominee. We’re not living in the smoke-filled-room era. He will have a few million more votes than his nearest rival, far more delegates, and will have prevailed in every region. Any effort to stop him will be literally cause riots, especially if such an effort takes place on the convention floor in Cleveland in July. No fantasy-football scenario will stop that.
You only win by making the person who is winning lose. Yes, you can improve your standing by making the other guys who aren’t winning either lose and taking some of their ju-ju. But that will never be sufficient. The one who is leading has to be beaten.
Trump doesn’t have to be beaten all at once, but his glide path to the nomination has to be interrupted. And that has to start happening now. This week. And it has to be visible and public so that everybody sees it—so that reality can alter itself. The GOP debate on Thursday is the obvious key to this, but it needn’t wait until then.
Now, for the “under the surface” analysis. It’s possible Rubio — and Cruz, to a lesser extent — are doing a masterful job of lowering expectations for Super Tuesday, so that if they can catch up to and best Trump in six or seven states they will appear to have mortally wounded him. In addition, it would be madness for these campaigns to highlight states they believe they might win because a loss in any of them would provide hostile media forces an easy target to claim they are weaker than, in fact, they would be.
The point stands, though: if they don’t know that the winner wins, they’re deluding themselves.
