Dump Trump Republicans Hatch a New Line of Attack
By Jonathan Bernstein
The Dump Trump rumbling continues, as “dozens”of Republican delegates attempt to organize a real effort to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee at the national convention in Cleveland in July, and other party actors consider their best option under the rules.
According to the Washington Post, "dozens of Republican delegates are hatching a new plan to block Donald Trump," though it wasn't clear exactly how. The core of any effort would have to involve establishing rules for the convention that would allow delegates allocated to Trump to vote against him on the first ballot, despite tentative rules that bind them to vote for him.
There's no indication that Trump is really in trouble, though we still have no reliable whip counts of his genuine support on the convention Rules Committee or at the full convention.
Still, even if there are enough potential Dump Trumpers to win a vote, they would still need to be willing to do it.
There is no consensus alternative, which means that the movement against Trump probably will fizzle if it’s perceived as an attempt to install any particular candidate. We know, for example, that many Republican party actors prefer Trump (bad as they consider him) to Senator Ted Cruz. Others might be deterred from opposing Trump if they believed that would mean replacing him with a “moderate” or “establishment” figure such as Mitt Romney.
In other words, as long as the Republican Party continues to be divided and dysfunctional (which isn’t going to change in the next few weeks), the best strategy for beating Trump is to form as broad an alliance as possible to vote for rules that would unbind the delegates, while doing everything possible to be neutral about who the eventual nominee would be.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/dump-trump-republicans-hatch-a-new-line-of-attack