Politico is reporting that according to a panel of Republicans they put together including some insiders, if Trump doesn’t get the 50% of delegates to win the nomination, he’s just gonna have to suck it up:

A majority of Republican insiders say Donald Trump should not get the GOP presidential nomination if he falls short of winning a majority of delegates — even if Trump amasses more than any of his opponents. That’s according to The POLITICO Caucus — a panel of strategists, activists and operatives in seven key swing states. Roughly 6-in-10 Republicans said the party should nominate another candidate if Trump finishes with a plurality, rather than the required 1,237-delegate majority necessary to claim the party nomination. “Rules is rules. You have to get a majority,” said a Virginia Republican who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “That’s the problem with our country: No one ever wins anymore.”







Trump’s surrogates, including Sean Hannity and Eric Bolling at Fox News, have been trying to make people believe that the GOP would be “stealing” the nomination from the toupee’d totalitarian if he got more delegates than anyone else and didn’t get the nomination. What they don’t like to admit is that those are simply the rules of the game.

More from Politico:

The question is central to the GOP calculus before the Cleveland convention: Should the party award the nomination to the candidate who won the most delegates in total — as Trump himself has advocated — or stick to the rule that a candidate must win at least 1,237 delegates to be the nominee? The majority of insiders who want the party to choose someone else if Trump only wins a plurality of delegates said they are motivated by questions of electability, Trump’s capricious campaign style and personality. “I’m firmly in the ‘Never Trump’ camp,” said a New Hampshire Republican. “The GOP gets killed if he’s the nominee. We probably get killed if he doesn’t support a different nominee anyway. So if it makes no difference to the eventual outcome, my conscience will be clear going down with a responsible nominee instead.”

Trump can whine all he wants about the rules, but that’s the game he chose to play when he got into the race. Don’t let any of his mindless sycophants, like Hannity and Bolling, convince you otherwise.