The Guardian view on the anti-Trump pact: too little, too late
|
Version 0 of 1. History offers many examples of weak political leaders making the right decision at the wrong time. America’s Republican party may just have added another to the list. There are 15 state primaries remaining in the race for its 2016 presidential nomination. Five of them will take place on Tuesday in north-eastern US states that are likely, on the whole, to add to Donald Trump’s drive towards winning the race – with Pennsylvania the biggest prize of the five. That leaves another 10 before the convention in July in Cleveland. At this very late stage, Mr Trump’s two remaining rivals, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, have finally made an electoral pact against him. This will please all of those who believe that making sacrifices is a necessary element of winning power. But the real question is whether it is simply too little and too late. While it remains possible that Mr Trump will fail to amass enough delegates to win the nomination – before Tuesday’s contests he has 845 of the necessary 1,237 required to win – the pact does not guarantee that outcome. It may even make it less likely by stirring resentment that the contest is being fixed in the establishment back room against the populist frontrunner. Although they are different shades of conservative Republican, the two men have finally decided that defeating Mr Trump is essential to their own and the party’s fortunes. On Sunday, in the margins of the final meeting of the Republican National Committee before the convention, the two camps agreed that Mr Cruz will effectively stop campaigning in New Mexico and Oregon, in return for Mr Kasich doing the same in Indiana. This formal pact follows an informal decision by Mr Cruz to scale back his campaigning in some of the north-eastern states that vote on Tuesday. The big winner of this deal is Mr Cruz, since stopping Mr Trump in Indiana would be a very statistically and psychologically important victory in a populous state where the winner-takes-all rule applies at congressional district level. Mr Cruz was also already the more likely of the two to benefit from any failure on Mr Trump’s part to win on the first ballot in the convention, since Mr Cruz has many more pledged supporters than Mr Kasich, currently 559 to 148. Mr Kasich, on the other hand, has greater support in the Republican congressional hierarchy, where opposition to Mr Cruz is widespread. The larger question is why the Republican party has left it so late. The possibility that Mr Trump might dominate the contest was well established long before the first votes were cast in Iowa at the start of the year. Yet the crowded field has unquestionably helped to clear Mr Trump’s path. This was certainly a tactical failing. But it was also a moral and political one. Mr Trump’s drive towards winning the nomination has been fundamentally based on racial politics that ought to have had no place in the party of Abraham Lincoln. But the modern history of the Republican party has gone a long way to disarm its ability to make such a stand when it mattered. The party has long allowed itself to become predominantly a party of and for white Americans. Intermittent past attempts to reach out to minority voters, for instance under George W Bush, have not been carried forward, but pushed back. The upshot is a party that, even if it does not have Mr Trump as its nominee, will struggle to unite around someone who can reach out to an increasingly diverse US electorate. |