In all of the strategizing and imagineering about the primaries there’s an eventuality I’ve only heard mentioned a couple of times. Imagine that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate and Ted Cruz is the Republican candidate. Not too much of a stretch, eh?
Now imagine that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both make third party runs for the presidency, all four of the candidates take states, and none of the candidates wins enough electoral votes to be elected to the presidency outright.
Well, the most obvious answer to that is that the election gets sent to the House of Representatives, where the most likely outcome would seem to be that Ted Cruz would win the Presidency. Who becomes Vice-President could depend on which party has control of the Senate in January.
More practically speaking, though, it would be an incredibly chaotic situation that would make Florida 2000 seem like a picnic.
I have a different scenario from an article in GQ of all places. http://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-contested-convention
Essentially the idea is that this is all a publicity stunt gone horribly wrong for Trump. They point out he’s spent no money, hired almost no staff, and clearly has no interest in all the annoying details of, you know, anything having remotely to do with actually being POTUS.
In this scenario Trump would do best by losing at the convention. He can spend the rest of his life in his massive gaudy and tasteless penthouse playing the part of the guy who could have fixed the world if only corrupt politicians blah blah blah.
That certainly fits with my read of Trump as fictional character.
Sanders could probably finance a run, but he’d have a credibility problem: he predicates everything on some sweeping revolution in which millions of phantom progressives (they live right next door to the phantom conservatives) will take the Senate and the House. That narrative is kinda hard to peddle if you can’t even carry the Democrats.
Practically speaking, I think it would be too late for either Sanders or Trump to launch an effective third-party bid if they wait until after their respective party conventions. My understanding is that deadlines for ballot access will already have started expiring at that point, and for those states where it has not expired it would require quick action and money to meet the often stringent ballot access requirements that a third party/independent party would face if they actually want to be on the ballot in more than just a handful of states. There would also be the question of “sore loser” laws that prevent candidates who lost their bid for their party’s nomination from running as an independent or third-party candidate.
I don’t think that enough people appreciate what Trump has done. Basically, he’s deconstructed a presidential campaign. What do presidential campaigns spend money on? Television advertising and consultants. He gets free television advertising by dominating the news. He doesn’t hire consultants.
How does he dominate the news? By saying whatever will ensure he dominates the present news cycle. It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s consistent with what he’s said before, or whether it’s true or false.
He’s also created a brand and is merchandizing it. He’s financing his campaign by selling hats and T-shirts, for goodness sake.
Trump has taken the Obama 2008 campaign to eleven. Remember the reporting (only after the fact, of course) about how astonished some Hillary staffers were when, post convention, they started working with the Obama team? It turned out Obama’s team was even weaker on policy than they had thought during the primary campaign.
And yes, they criticized Obama for that loudly during said primary season. But most didn’t care, they were voting for a brand, the blank screen upon which they could project their own wishes, as Barry himself put it.
Trump is doing that to, although his hook hasn’t been opposing getting into a war that was already several years old, it has been as an anti-immigrationist – first just illegal immigration, but legal immigration as well now, thanks to the expansion of the Overton window he himself helped create.
It’s just that Trump is already known to one & all, and has a talent for getting & holding the spotlight. So he hasn’t had to do all the grubby ground work Obama did. Actually the guys emulating Obama’s grubby ground work from 2008 are Ted Cruz & Hillary Clinton, both of whom are trying to win their nominations not by getting a majority of votes at the ballot box, but through targeted voter turnout efforts & party nomination arcana.
Everyone is fighting the last war, they’re just bringing their own weaponry refinements to battlefield.
The actual meltdown scenario is Paul Ryan steals the nomination at the convention, Hillary wins the Dem convention, Trump decides to NOT go third party, and then Hillary gets indicted before the general election on a strong enough case that she’s forced to step aside for her Veep candidate. And that’s how we end up with President Castro next year! He will still be learning how to say “hello” in Spanish after several years of tutelage, but what the Hell, at least he isn’t a white man like George Zimmerman.
Dave,
The question is could anyone who isn’t Donald Trump replicate what he has done in terms of making an end run around the traditional methods of campaigning and using free media to build his campaign?
I would argue that one of the reasons that this strategy is working for Trump is because he has been the subject of media fascination for four decades now. Someone did a search several months ago and found that the first mention of Trump in the New York Times came in the early 1970s when he first decided to leave his fathers firm, which basically was involved in the world of low to middle income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, and venture into Manhattan, something his father apparently initially advised against. By the early 80s, the younger Trump had concluded a number of high profile development deals and become a well-known name in the media in the Tri-State area. Since the media is largely based in New York, it wasn’t long before he went national and the rest is history. Whatever else one thinks of him, over the years Trump became a master at playing the media’s game in a way that would make Hollywood PR agencies green with envy.
It’s not just that he says outrageous thing, it’s that he says outrageous things while using some four decades of experience with the media to make sure people pay attention to him. Some other candidate with the same outrageous platform, but without the ability to get the media eating out of his hand, probably wouldn’t be quite so successful.
Also, I’d note that not following traditional campaign rules does have a price, as Trump himself has learned during the delegate selection process in Colorado and elsewhere. Even if you can avoid spending $ $$ on paid media, you still need a ground game and Trump may come to regret not being better prepared in that regard.
That’s why I’ve argued that Trump is a creature of the media, something that, as you know, has been bitterly denied, ironically, by the media.