Anti-Trump deal with Ted Cruz gives John Kasich staying power
No matter how John Kasich fares in the five East Coast primaries Tuesday, he's staying in the race.
The most immediate benefit to Kasich of his new alliance with Ted Cruz comes in the form of certainty for the rest of the GOP primary season. In the long run, the alliance, announced in emails each campaign sent just before bedtime Sunday, marks both candidates' best chance of keeping front-runner Donald Trump from amassing enough delegates during primary contests to win the GOP nomination outright.
The linchpin in the plan: Indiana, where Kasich has agreed not to campaign or advertise, and which stands as the biggest wild card in Trump's narrow path to wrapping up the nomination before the Republican convention in Cleveland. The state's May 3 primary awards its 57 delegates in chunks to the winner of each congressional district and to the statewide winner. Second place gets nothing. Cruz is polling behind Trump, but polls had suggested he could defeat Trump with Kasich out of the way.
Both Cruz and Kasich need Trump to fall short of the 1,237 delegates necessary to clinch the GOP nomination, as neither candidate will be able to win the nomination on the first convention vote. That means someone needs to deny Trump Indiana's delegates, and Cruz has the best shot at delivering. In return for Kasich's agreeing to pull out of the Hoosier state, Team Cruz ceded two states: Oregon and New Mexico.
Which states he got mattered little to Team Kasich. With the possibility of Trump being stopped, and the hope for snapping up delegates in two states that vote late in the primary season, Kasich has the justification he needs to take his couple hundred delegates to the GOP convention. Finally, he need not explain where he thinks he will win delegates after coming up short in primary after primary. Finally, he can justify saving his low cash reserves for states where he may perform better and where he'll find shelter from Team Cruz's attack ads.
Pro-Ted Cruz groups have 10 times as much campaign cash as pro-John Kasich groups
Despite deal, 'vote for me'?
This is not a deal for the White House. As of now, Cruz and Kasich will try to beat each other in the seven other states left on the Republican primary calendar, although Kasich advisers have whispered for weeks about a potential deal for splitting up regions of California, which wraps up the primary season June 7 with 172 delegates.
Indeed, the morning after the deal was inked, it already was limping along as a marriage of convenience.
Kasich said he wouldn't recommend his supporters in Indiana vote for Cruz. "They ought to vote for me," Kasich told reporters while he munched eggs at a diner in Philadelphia, in an exchange broadcast on CNN. "We have limited resources," he said, justifying the deal.
And a pro-Cruz political action committee reportedly said it planned to continue to run an attack ad against Kasich in the state, apparently to help discourage any straggler Trump opponents from voting for the Ohio governor.
Still, the two opponents can at least agree to oppose Trump's candidacy. The GOP front-runner spent Sunday night and all day Monday walloping his opponents, despite assurances from aides last week that the controversial billionaire would clinch the nomination by taking a more presidential tone.
Trump accused the two candidates of "collusion." He said in a statement: "This horrible act of desperation, from two campaigns who have totally failed, makes me even more determined, for the good of the Republican Party and our country, to prevail!"
On Twitter and in campaign appearances Monday, he reupped his "Lyin' Ted" moniker for Cruz and ridiculed "1-for-38 Kasich" for failing to win any state outside of his native Ohio. (Forty-one states and territories have allocated delegates, according to the Associated Press, and Trump later corrected the number.)
"He's like if you have a child. He's just like, 'I want it, Mommy!' " Trump said of Kasich in a Warwick, Rhode Island, appearance broadcast on news networks. Then, he mocked Kasich for catching attention for eating his way across the East Coast. "He has a news conference all the time when he's eating. I've never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion. ... Do you want that for your president?"
In an interview with NBC, Kasich declined to comment "on people who call names."
Win-win in Indiana
The Kasich campaign had pushed for weeks to coordinate with Cruz, but the Texas senator's campaign had demurred, hoping to catch fire as the sole alternative to Trump and pull even with him in the delegate race. With last week's last-place showing in New York, Cruz lost his mathematical ability to win the nomination solely through the primary process, increasing his interest in the deal. And Kasich is running low on cash, bringing urgency to the situation.
The approach of the Indiana primary, on May 3, helped seal the agreement.
For Kasich, leaving Indiana's votes to Cruz comes at little cost.
If the nomination battle extends beyond the first ballot in Indiana, the state's rules will free its 57 delegates to vote for the candidate they prefer, regardless of how the state's voters lined up in the primary.
Indiana's Republican Party last weekend chose the people who will cast the state's votes in Cleveland. After the selection, the Kasich campaign claimed to have more allies headed to Cleveland than his rivals, a claim the Indianapolis Star checked and found plausible. No campaign has disputed Kasich's declaration of victory.
And the Indiana winner for president is … John Kasich?
Likewise, Cruz loses little by letting Kasich have a clear path in New Mexico and Oregon. Neither offers big chunks of votes, as Indiana does. Both states have only about two dozen delegates, split between candidates in proportion to their performance in the state.
The proportional distribution ensures Kasich should be able to get delegates, and deny Trump those delegates, even if Trump wins both states. And the last state in the deal, New Mexico, votes on June 7, the last date of the GOP primary – boosting Kasich's justification of campaigning until the end.
'Get out there and campaign'
For Kasich, the number of first-ballot delegates he brings into Cleveland, determined by state primaries, matters little. He can't win on the first ballot in any case. Yet every delegate vote he earns denies one to Trump. And campaigning for primary wins will help him woo the people who will decide the GOP nomination if Trump fails to reach 1,237 on the first ballot. At that point, the people sent to Cleveland to cast their state's vote will get to cast ballots according to their personal opinion.
In Cleveland, Kasich will woo delegates by arguing polls show he could beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in November. Trump trails Clinton in polls, while Cruz generally sits slightly behind her.
Here’s the script John Kasich is using to woo delegates
Still, “one of the ways you win those delegates is you get out there and campaign," said Tom Rath, a Kasich adviser from New Hampshire. "You’ve got to be able to demonstrate that if the circumstances are right in the general election, you can run well.”
No recent polls exist for New Mexico or Oregon, so it's hard to know how Kasich will fare there. Kasich's endorsement team in Oregon includes the state's 2006 GOP nominee for governor. But his campaign failed to send in a biography to include in a pamphlet the Oregon secretary of state sent last week to every household in Oregon. The two candidates in the pamphlet? Trump and Cruz.
"Gov. Kasich is on the ballot in Oregon, and the campaign will do its part to educate voters about why they should vote for him the primary," Kasich spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach said in a statement.
Oregon is “similar to the Northeast, where we have outperformed Cruz,” Kasich spokesman Chris Schrimpf told The Enquirer. “New Mexico is a purple state, where, when you narrow it down just to two people, we can do well there.”
Kasich's new strategy was the source of buzz at his campaign event Monday in Rockville, Maryland.
“Whatever it takes to get to the convention,” said Kelly Kout, a retiree and a Kasich supporter.
But Monica Harwood, a 26-year-old music teacher, said the Kasich-Cruz alliance could just serve to further anger and energize Trump supporters by feeding into his argument that the process is “rigged” and “crooked.”
“Trump supporters feed off the disenfranchisement,” said Harwood, who had yet to pick a candidate for Tuesday's primary. “He seems to get stronger whenever other candidates try to knock him down.”
Super Tuesday, East Coast edition
Donald Trump is expected to clean up in Tuesday's primaries. Here's a snapshot of each state.
Connecticut
28 delegates at stake
Polls: Trump is up by 26 points in the average of three recent polls, according to realclearpolitics.com
Trump: 52.3 percent
Kasich: 26.3 percent
Cruz: 16.3 percent
Pennsylvania:
71 delegates at stake
Polls: Trump is up by 19.4 points in the average of five recent polls, according to realclearpolitics.com
Trump: 45.8 percent
Cruz: 26.4 percent
Kasich: 23 percent
Rhode Island
19 delegates at stake
Polls: Trump is up by 25.5 points in the average of two recent polls, according to realclearpolitics.com
Trump: 49.5 percent
Kasich: 24 percent
Cruz: 13.5 percent
Maryland
38 delegates at stake
Polls: Trump is up by 14 points in the average of three recent polls listed on realclearpolitics.com. This state appears to offer Kasich his best chance of picking up some delegates, and the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC ran ads here to assist with that effort.
Trump: 41 percent
Kasich: 27 percent
Cruz: 23 percent
Delaware
16 delegates at stake
Polls: Trump is up by 37 points, according to one Delaware poll listed on realclearpolitics.com
Trump: 55 percent
Kasich: 18 percent
Cruz: 15 percent