

When Ted Cruz folded on the night of Indiana’s primary, two turning points were simultaneously reached: one, the only candidate who could challenge Trump was eliminated, and two, the open convention bubble burst. The latter held that Cruz could deny Trump enough delegates to keep him from 1237. I think John Kasich hung on as long as he did with the same assumption – that an open convention would mean the nomination was up for grabs and he could be the nominee on a second ballot as readily as anyone. That gone, Kasich bailed out the day after Cruz quit.

When the campaign season began, the pundit class wanted to give props to the potency of Trump’s campaign, but threw shade at every turn. No ground game. Big rally turnouts but no votes behind them. Cruz had an organization that focused on delegates and the convention and Trump did not.

Then, the die was cast that Ted Cruz would not beat Trump straight up and reach 1237 delegates first. But the backup plan of the DC establishment and Sunday morning roundtable shows was that Trump could not hit 1237 either. Projections and prognostications held that a robust Cruz campaign, including delegate maneuvers such as the Colorado GOP convention, would box Trump out and the party could finish him off in Cleveland.

So the emphasis shifted from Cruz turning his campaign around and defeating Trump, to keeping a zombie Cruz campaign around long enough to at least deny Trump 1237. It’s clear from Paul Ryan’s statements all along and then again this week that he expected neither candidate would clinch and he, Ryan, could have a hand in shaping an open convention. It’s also clear Ryan was caught off guard when Cruz quit, again, because I believe the Ryan wing depended on a zombie Cruz campaign to hold them over until their convention coup could whack Trump.

Early open convention fantasies depended on Trump’s “ceilings,” which were fabulously wrong.

Hugh Hewitt, CNN, December 10, 2015: Is GOP Heading Toward Open Convention?

National polls are valuable glimpses of where an electorate is on any given day, and right now the GOP primary electorate favors Donald Trump by a lot over everyone else. But not over the field as a whole. And therein lies the question: Has he hit his ceiling? If so, the Cleveland convention will be the most interesting in more than a century.

Say it again: If a majority of voters vote non-Trump & he falls short of a delegate majority, nothing can be stolen. https://t.co/P5w8iLwtEk — Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) March 8, 2016

The rules will get challenged. Delegate slates will get challenged. Floor motions. Oh man it is going to be GONZO. — Jay Cost (@JayCostTWS) March 6, 2016

Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard, April 18, 2016: Fear Not A Brokered Convention

With Ted Cruz’s victory in last week’s Wisconsin primary, the odds are rising that the Republican party will have a “contested” or “brokered” convention in Cleveland this summer. That presents a host of questions, not only about how such a process would work but whether it would be legitimate.

“Freedom Truth,” RedState, April 10, 2016: This Is The Week That Cruz Won The Republican Nomination

With Trump’s complete failure to win the delegate race, with him losing steam in primaries and getting punked in almost every caucus and activist-filled GOP convention, it’s become almost a certainty that if Trump can’t get to Cleveland either at or very close to 1237 bound delegates, that he will fail to have sufficient delegates to actually win the nomination. Cruz will indeed win the nomination on the second ballot should Trump fail to win it on the first ballot. Victory will go to Cruz, the man who’s run the best campaign and is indeed the best candidate. And history will look back at this week and the Wisconsin victory and other wins this week as the turning point.

The talking head class got cocky after Wisconsin and Colorado. Cruz cleaned Trump’s clock in Wisconsin, and for the two week lull that followed, they felt certain Cruz was on the rebound. They mocked Trump’s cries of “unfair” after Cruz operatives worked the floor of the Colorado convention and swept that state’s delegates, exploiting a state party rule that essentially eliminated their primary election.

Even Cruz himself threw all his eggs in the contested convention basket.

“The convention is an extension of the democratic process. … I am confident that we are going to win a contested convention.” – Ted Cruz, 4/9/16

Other doomed early campaign prediction: 16 other candidates would split the anti-Trump vote and he’d be finished. Doomed late campaign prediction: Cruz would crush Trump as soon as it was a two man race.

Ted Cruz bought the siren song of infallibles who assured that neither he or Trump would get to 1237 before the convention, and that was fatal.

This technique blows up in the face of the GOP time and time again. Republican opposition to Obamacare was largely token and depended on longshot court challenges after the fact. Ditto for amnesty, abortion funding, and disastrous treaties such as the one Obama negotiated with Iran. “We’ll get them next time” is the mantra and the recipe for defeat Republicans trot out over and over.

The attempt to derail Trump was no different. At some point, the GOP stopped running against him and hoped it could end his his bid through convention back channels and skulduggery. Again, this failed miserably. Open convention talk backfired and enraged Trump supporters who were determined his nomination would not be “stolen.” They turned out even more for him.

The kingmakers saved their best for last, and banked on Cruz sticking around. He didn’t. Trump won. Game over.

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