Last week the Republican Establishment went full bore into it's anti-Trump attacks. They rolled out Mitt Romney in an anti-Trump speech on March 3rd. The New York Times published the text of the speech and you can read it yourself. Mitt Romney as you remember was the Republican Nominee in 2012 who lost the election to President Barack Obama. After Romney's loss one of the critiques was that he was insufficiently conservative. So who does the establishment roll out, but Mr Establishment himself who was dismissed by many conservatives for failing to be sufficiently orthodox. There was also some discussion and I don't know how serious it was of drafting Mitt for a dark horse run as a last ditch attempt to counter Trump. Somewhere over the last week the hashtag #NeverTrump was spun up on the web.
I don't know who started #NeverTrump, but I really have no clue what that means. A few strategies to get there have been floated. The one that is currently underway has been to support a candidate and try to get voters to support that person. As mentioned previously the establishment backed Marco Rubio once Jeb! Bush dropped out. Since then we've had two batches of primaries with Rubio doing poorly in both. He finished second or third on Super Tuesday and then on Semi-Super Saturday he finished third across the board. Rubio made a big splash in Florida when he ran for Senate and he was a Tea Party darling in those days. Ted Cruz did really well on Semi-Super Saturday coming in first in two caucuses and second in two others. So I'm wondering how much the establishment label is hurting Rubio, but if you were holding out for Rubio to be the #NeverTrump solution you probably need to look elsewhere.
There's Ted Cruz as the #NeverTrump candidate and based on Semi-Super Saturday it may be that some people are voting for him, but the establishment and elites in the Republican Party hate Cruz with a passion. They view him as an opportunist who will do anything to get to advance his career. So from an establishment point of view Cruz like going from the fire into the frying pan; you won't get burned, but you are still cooked. Cruz is however a palatable alternative for authoritarian evangelicals with an anti-establishment bent. The two states Cruz won are Kansas and Maine and I'm not going to put much weight on either of those states with states with much higher populations that do actual primary elections and not caucuses coming up.
Another option for the #NeverTrump faction is the concept of the contested election. In this strategy you don't have to win the nomination in the primaries, but you just have to make sure that Trump doesn't. When you get to the convention you won't have a clear winner and then the wheeling and dealing can begin and the establishment can engineer someone else to be the nominee. There's a huge danger here. Imagine what Trump's followers are going to think. They are angry because they feel that they've been screwed by just about everyone and they are incredibly anti-establishment. They are going to view this as the establishment stealing the election and invalidating them and their votes. And then who gets the nomination? The establishment doesn't like Trump, but it also doesn't like Cruz. If Cruz has the second highest number of delegates what happens? The establishment is pretty much screwed here. They could get #NeverTrump, but end up with Cruz or an emasculated Rubio or Kasich and an open civil war in the party.
The last option I can see is that Trump wins and the establishment runs a third party option in the general election. I don't see this happening, but it is an option. This is where Mitt Romney might come back into the picture or maybe Michael Bloomberg. There's really only a couple people who could fill the role, but basically it's splitting the Republican vote.
My opinion is that the people who say #NeverTrump are either not thinking things to the end of simply throwing a tantrum. #NeverTrump means finding another candidate to beat Trump out right in the primary or splitting the Republican vote in the general election. If you split the Republican vote in the general election you are giving the election to the Democratic Party. So win the primary outright or throw the election to Hillary Clinton. That's really what #NeverTrump means and I bet most people are either not thinking it out or are simply locking onto a catch phrase and lying to themselves.
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