Generally my assumption has been that an independent conservative candidacy, in the event that Donald Trump captures the Republican nomination, would be a doomed crusade aimed at saving the right’s honor and helping down-ballot Republicans survive. But now (or from here to California) is the time for fantasy, so let’s play around with Ben Domenech’s idea for how a Libertarian Party candidate might actually help throw the election to the House of Representatives:
… The smart thing for both the #NeverTrump folks and for the Libertarian Party – assuming that neither faction would ever come around to supporting Trump as the nominee – would be to nominate someone with regional political appeal and the capacity to win a handful of key states, enough to prevent either Clinton or Trump from achieving an electoral college majority. At that stage, the House votes based on state delegation for any of the top three vote getters – that’s how you got John Quincy Adams.
The Libertarians have their convention at the end of May, and the current likely candidate is Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor, climber, and generally nice oddball. But he’s pro-choice and has never shown appeal beyond the normal Libertarian ranks.
If the #NeverTrump people want a protest vote, their best path is a Libertarian takeover, with someone who is Libertarianish on some issues – pot, prostitution, marriage – and yet pro-life and pro-religion enough to win over the votes of the holdouts to the Trump machine: churchgoing evangelicals, avowed social and fiscal conservatives, and those who just find his presence on the national scene to be a vulgar and demeaning one. (It’s no accident that Trump’s worst numbers come in states with heavy Mormon populations.)
Whoever the #NeverTrump folks settle on, they’d be wiser to choose someone with the ability to win a few key states, not just to make a generalized protest vote case against Clintonism and Trumpism. They should be focused on making a difference in the outcome, not just providing a better vehicle for throwing your vote away.
Here’s the strategic difficulty with this idea: Even if you found a Libertarian nominee who could win several states in a Clinton-Trump general, those states are very likely to be Mountain West states that a Republican nominee would have won anyway — and then that same candidate, by peeling yet more votes from Trump, would just end up making it that much easier for Hillary Clinton to win her key states and tack on a Georgia or a North Carolina as well.
Imagine, a Rand Paul or a Mike Lee or even a Rick Perry as the Libertarian nominee, for instance, and you can imagine a scenario where Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, or even Texas and Oklahoma might be winnable for the Libertarian ticket. That would be a fine anti-Trump gesture, but it would make no difference at all to the final outcome because Hillary needs exactly none of those states to win. To actually make that difference, all other things being equal, you would need that Libertarian candidate to not only pick off New Mexico (which did, yes, elect Gary Johnson governor) but also do something truly extraordinary and win California. Which … no.
It’s true that if Trump really scrambled the map the way that his boosters imagine, running up huge majorities among white voters in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania, then this scheme could work: By winning the big Rust Belt states he’d knock the Democrats below 270, and then the Libertarian would hold him below 270 in the West, and off to the House we go. But this is not remotely plausible. With his unfavorables Trump probably isn’t going to win the big Rust Belt states no matter what, and even if you assume a black swan scenario in which he somehow could, having an independent candidate draining votes from him would extinguish that possibility entirely.
So what you need for this to be remotely plausible is for the independent, not-Trump candidate to be capable of garnering enough votes to capture a couple of key Midwestern states themselves, by winning some mixture of ideological conservatives turned off by Trump and swing-vote suburbanites who don’t much care for Hillary. And it’s hard to imagine the kind of candidate who could win the Libertarian Party nomination also being the right candidate for that (extremely difficult) job.
So instead, the optimal fantasy scenario might involve two independent bids: One to win the libertarian cluster of Western states, and one to try to eke out a plurality somewhere in the Greater Midwest (and/or maybe in Virginia). But failing that, you might just want the Midwestern play, because again that’s the only place where a major Hillary-leaning state would even be remotely winnable for a not-Trump candidate.
But who would you want making it? Well, probably someone who had recently won a statewide election in the Midwest with at least sixty percent of the vote. Someone who runs well ahead of Hillary in head-to-head polling nationally, and way ahead of her in the state where he’s best known.
Someone who … oh, God help us, this has been John Kasich’s plan all along.
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PAUL KRUGMAN>
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