After three months of campaigning, narrowing the field and weathering caucuses and primaries, there is now a dawning reality for both Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich that they are outsiders when it comes to winning the Republican nomination for the White House. And if billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump hasn’t yet got a lock on the party’s nomination, he certainly has the key. That reality is the only reason why Cruz and Kasich have agreed to cede certain states to each other to try and stop Trump’s coronation before the party is scheduled to meet at the Cleveland convention in July — or at least make that convention a contested one.
In coordinated statements on Sunday, the Cruz and Kasich campaigns said that the Texan senator would concentrate his resources in Indiana while the Ohio governor would put all his efforts into New Mexico and Oregon. Trump is dismissing the move as “desperation”. The mathematics of the deal are intriguing. Trump needs 1,237 delegates to win outright and he has 845 now. There are still 733 delegates to be decided in the remaining caucuses and primaries — and Cruz has 559 and Kasich, 148. There are another 171 delegates belonging to Marco Rubio who dropped out last month, and other also-rans have less than a dozen between them. What will happen to them?
That the Republican race has now come down to this horse-trading speaks less of the desperation of the non-Trump candidates than it does of the fact that together, this field has failed to inspire mainstream Republican voters. Both Cruz and Trump alike border on right-wing extreme, while Kasich is less than inspiring. That there is a Republican winner between the three makes American voters lost for choices.