By Tim Alberta
Monday, April 04, 2016
Brookfield, Wis.
— One week before Wisconsin’s presidential primary, Ted Cruz stood before
hundreds of supporters in this Milwaukee suburb and cast the contest in
sweeping terms, framing it as a “battleground” where forces opposed to Donald
Trump could turn the momentum of 2016 campaign against him.
“The entire country is focused on the state of
Wisconsin,” Cruz said. “And right now in the state of Wisconsin it’s neck and
neck — Donald Trump and I are effectively tied.”
Cruz was underselling his own support in the state, where
he had already pulled comfortably ahead of Trump, according to private and
public polling. But he was right about one thing: Wisconsin is being watched by
Trump’s adversaries around the country. And what they see is not just an opportunity
to defeat the Republican front-runner on April 5, but a formula for denying him
the nomination outright.
Trump’s negatives are sky-high, particularly in populous
southeastern Wisconsin, in part because of relentless attacks on his candidacy
from the state’s influential conservative talk-radio hosts. Two outside groups,
the Club for Growth and Our Principles PAC, amplified that assault by
blanketing Wisconsin’s airwaves with anti-Trump ads. The state’s GOP
establishment, led by Governor Scott Walker, reacted to the winnowed primary
field by rallying around Cruz as the best bet to topple Trump. And swarms of pro-Cruz
volunteers and super-PAC workers descended on the state, seizing on the lull in
the primary schedule to out-organize the competition as they had done in
neighboring Iowa.
“It was a perfect storm, if you will,” says Matt Batzel,
the Wisconsin-based head of American Majority, a conservative activist group.
“A lot of people talked about Trump having a ceiling of 30 to 35 percent in
other states. But we actually see that in Wisconsin, and it’s because of those
factors working together.”
The result: Cruz has pulled away from a battered Trump
over the last two weeks and is poised for a resounding victory in Tuesday’s
primary. “We’re going to have a solid win,” says state senator Duey Stroebel,
Cruz’s Wisconsin chairman. “He’ll beat Trump by at least eight points, easy.”
Indeed, Cruz’s “neck and neck” talk did not reflect his
team’s bullishness, which was detectable even before a crucial 24-hour stretch
last week seemed to seal Trump’s fate. Tuesday afternoon, hours after Walker’s
endorsement, Trump’s campaign manager was charged with battery against a female
reporter. The next day, Trump stepped into fresh controversy after saying that
if abortion were illegal, then women who have abortions should face “some form
of punishment.” (Cruz pounced; Trump later reversed himself.) Capping it off,
Wisconsin’s top pollster, Marquette Law School’s Charles Franklin, released a
survey Wednesday showing Cruz up ten points on Trump, 40 percent to 30 percent,
and Trump’s negatives surging statewide. (Marquette’s previous poll in mid
February also showed Trump at 30 percent, which at the time was enough for a
ten-point lead over a larger, still-fractured Republican field.)
This turnaround isn’t surprising to the Cruz campaign,
which weeks ago identified Wisconsin as fertile ground for both their operation
and the anti-Trump movement. “Once we get there and introduce ourselves, we can
very quickly make it a race like Iowa,” Chris Wilson, Cruz’s pollster and data
guru, predicted in late March, before Cruz and his allies arrived in Wisconsin.
The question no longer seems to be whether Trump will
lose Wisconsin on Tuesday, but whether Cruz’s victory will truly signal a
tipping point in the race — by arresting Trump’s momentum and also by providing
a blueprint for halting his march to 1,237 delegates.
“If Trump loses [Wisconsin], the wheels will be off Trump
Express and it’ll be the beginning of the end for him,” Brent Bozell, a
prominent conservative leader and Cruz supporter, tweeted Wednesday. “Crash and
burn, Donald!”
* *
*
There’s an assumption that Cruz would earn all 42 of
Wisconsin’s delegates with a comfortable victory, shutting out Trump. But that’s
highly unlikely.
Wisconsin awards 18 at-large delegates to the statewide
winner, but also three delegates to the winner of each of its eight
congressional districts. While Trump could be crushed in the white-collar
Milwaukee suburbs, his support appears steady in the rural northern and western
parts of the state. He is heavily favored to win the seventh and third
districts, and he should be competitive in the eighth and sixth, which
encompass the Fox Valley, an unpredictable region where the demographic
differences between southeast and northern Wisconsin collide. Whatever the
result there, Trump should pick up at least six and perhaps as many as twelve
delegates from Wisconsin.
“I think two is likely, three is reasonably possible, and
four is even possible,” Franklin says of Trump’s potential congressional
district wins. Walking away from Wisconsin with a dozen delegates or fewer
isn’t ideal for the front-runner, but at this stage, every bound backer is
critical.
An overlooked obstacle for Cruz is the continued presence
of John Kasich. Even though the poorly funded Ohio governor pulled his radio
ads from Wisconsin early last week, effectively ceding the state to Cruz, he
remains a threat in the affluent “WOW” counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and
Washington. “I certainly think Cruz is an odd standard-bearer for Republicans
in that area,” Franklin says, “but that’s the position they’re in because of
their disdain for Trump.”
Kasich topped 20 percent statewide in the Marquette poll,
largely on the strength of his support in metro Milwaukee, and Cruz kept
dumping anti-Kasich mailers in those areas through week’s end. It proved that
Kasich’s relative popularity with upscale white-collar voters remains a threat
to Cruz — in Wisconsin’s case, he could steal enough votes to hand a suburban
district to Trump, or even win one outright himself, further muddying a Cruz
victory statewide.
Even if Cruz does
win a lopsided victory on Tuesday, Trump’s immediate collapse is doubtful.
A two-week break occurs between Wisconsin and the next
primary on April 19, an extended hiatus during which accounts of Trump’s
unraveling are certain to echo. But the state that is voting on April 19
happens to be New York. All four polls there in March, including a Quinnipiac
survey last week, show Trump carrying at least 50 percent of the vote. That’s
significant: While New York’s 95 delegates are awarded via a winner-take-most
system — inviting Cruz or Kasich to win delegates in certain districts — anyone
hitting 50 percent in a district takes all three of its delegates. The same
50-percent rule applies to the state’s 14 at-large delegates.
If Trump takes a vast majority of New York’s delegates,
as seems likely, he’ll have momentum heading into the April 26 “Acela Primary,”
when nearby Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island
vote. With the exception of Pennsylvania — a volatile “loophole” contest where
17 delegates are awarded to the statewide winner, but the remaining 54 are
elected directly on the primary ballot — those states look solid for Trump,
regardless of the results in far-away Wisconsin on April 5.
It could be a very different story, however, as the
calendar turns to May and two states are tested as potential bulwarks against
Trump’s march to the nomination: Indiana and Nebraska.
* *
*
Trump will probably emerge from April 26 with about 900
delegates, which means he cannot afford to be shut out in either Indiana on May
3 or Nebraska on May 10. And yet those are the two remaining states where the
formula used to defeat Trump in Wisconsin will be most aggressively applied.
A Midwestern state with Republican voters clustered
around Indianapolis and scattered across more rural areas, Indiana will be
familiar terrain for Cruz and his team, who will target the state with a
well-financed, exhaustively organized effort similar to those they mounted in
Iowa and Wisconsin. Nebraska, another deep-red stronghold in the Midwest, will
receive similar attention from both Cruz’s campaign and the #NeverTrump
movement. And in both states, anti-Trump efforts are likely to receive a boost
from prominent conservative office-holders — starting with Mike Pence in
Indiana and Ben Sasse in Nebraska — who have made known their discomfort with
Trump and who will undoubtedly enlist their networks to organize against him.
The stakes are enormous: Indiana awards 57 delegates, 30
to the statewide winner, the other 27, three apiece, to the winner of each of
its nine congressional districts. Nebraska awards all 36 of its delegates to
the statewide winner. Depriving Trump of all or nearly all of the combined 93
delegates from Indiana and Nebraska could strike a decisive blow to his effort
to reach 1,237.
Voting with Nebraska on May 10 is West Virginia, which
holds another unpredictable “loophole” primary where all of the state’s 31 delegates
— 22 statewide, and nine from three congressional districts — are elected
directly on the ballot. Given that Cruz has outmaneuvered him in such
grassroots affairs, including in Colorado and North Dakota this past weekend,
Trump seems unlikely to collect many delegates in that contest.
A total of 375 delegates are up for grabs in the race’s
final stretch, from May 17 to June 7. But assuming that Trump is still hovering
somewhere around 900 — having been essentially shutout since April 26 — he
would need to win roughly 90 percent of those remaining to hit 1,237.
That’s quite improbable: Both Oregon on May 17 and South
Dakota on June 7 are closed, proportional primaries, conditions that in Trump’s
best-case scenario make it possible for him to take roughly half the delegates
at stake. And Montana’s June 7 winner-take-all caucuses — with 27 delegates on
the line — are ripe for Cruz, who has dominated western caucus contests.
The key contests for those hoping to squeeze Trump into
such a precarious position are Indiana and Nebraska. If Cruz and allied forces
can stifle Trump in those states (and any others along the way), they’ll make
it nearly impossible for him to hit the 1,237 mark, and Wisconsin will be
looked back upon as the catalyst: the state that wrote the playbook for
defeating Donald Trump.
Jason Storms, a 37-year-old pastor and anti-abortion
activist in Wisconsin, embodies that playbook. Cruz was not his first or even
his second choice in 2016. But determined to stop Trump, Storms signed on with
a pair of Cruz super PACs that employed 20 full-time door-knockers in the final
two weeks before Wisconsin’s primary — and 40 on the final weekend.
“Not many people were paying much attention to Wisconsin
as being a real factor in this race,” Storms says. “Now they are.”
Batzel, the Wisconsin-based activist, attended the
Pennsylvania Leadership Conference this past week to instruct fellow organizers
in grassroots-training seminars. “People kept asking, ‘What did you guys do?’
and ‘How did it work in Wisconsin?’” Batzel says. “They’re hoping our result
gives them some momentum — and some ideas — to stop Trump.”
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