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Every Trump critic had “Oh, hell” moments during the primary season. They were when Donald Trump demonstrated a keen, gut-level political instinct that even an exceptionally talented conventional politician would be hard-pressed to match. An example: During a Republican debate in Florida in February, Trump was asked about former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s comment that his country wouldn’t pay for Trump’s “[expletive deleted] wall.” “The wall just got 10 feet taller,” Trump shot back. The rejoinder was funny and memorable. A Republican senator told me that his cellphone instantly lit up with constituents thrilled at what Trump had said. In...

Ted Cruz’s team knew that Donald Trump would run away with his native New York Tuesday. And they expect he’ll win the lion’s share of delegates at stake next week when a slate of northeastern states votes. So they’ve spent the last two weeks looking ahead, quietly laying the groundwork for a kitchen-sink campaign in a state they can’t afford to let Trump win: Indiana. The Hoosier State doesn’t vote until May 3, and Cruz certainly isn’t ignoring the contests in between. He spent time this week in both Maryland and Pennsylvania, the two states his campaign is confident will...

The conventional wisdom is that though Ted Cruz can excite the conservative-activist base of the Republican party, he can’t beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. But the recent head-to-head polling tells a different story. Unless your name is George W. Bush, it’s tough to win 270 electoral votes without winning the popular vote. And Cruz is hanging in there against the Democratic front-runner. The RealClearPolitics average puts Clinton at 46.4 percent and Cruz at 43.9 percent; the most recent McClatchy-Marist survey has it a tie. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, hasn’t led Clinton in any national poll...

Call it a high-tech lynching. In the wake of Donald Trump’s being shut out in Colorado — final delegate count: Ted Cruz, 34; Trump, 0 — his fans have formed virtual mobs, and on Sunday a particularly passionate Twitter user tweeted out the home address and phone number of Steve House, chairman of the Colorado GOP. House’s personal information has been retweeted more than 1,100 times. He says he’s received some 3,000 phone calls, most of them uncomplimentary: Meanwhile, the same Trump partisan also tweeted information for the state’s national committeewoman, Lily Nuñez, and committeeman, George Leing. Of course, the...

Today, the Missouri Secretary of State finally released the certified results of the March 15, 2016 Republican Primary. Donald Trump received 383,631 votes (40.84 percent), and Ted Cruz received 381,666 votes (40.63 percent). The miniscule difference in vote was 1,935 out of 939,270 votes cast. Based on the state’s winner-take-all system, Trump ended up with 37 delegates to Cruz’s 15. Under Trump’s definition of ‘stealing,’ did he steal from Cruz, or were those the rules? The result in Missouri is even more lopsided. While only 1,935 votes out of 939,270 cast separate Trump and Cruz, Trump won over 70 percent...

Donald Trump is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates (46 percent) than of votes (37 percent). Unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t. Trump’s latest tantrum is over Colorado, where Ted Cruz just swept all 34 of the state’s available delegates. Trump is calling the results “totally unfair” and on Twitter he asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State...

It's now likely Republicans are headed toward a contested convention in July. But they might be headed toward more than that — the party could be on its way to an internal version of the 2000 election, the race in which the candidate who lost the popular vote won the presidency, leaving injured feelings and diminished faith in the legitimacy of the electoral system.* And it could be worse than that. The 2000 winner of the popular vote, Al Gore, lost the presidency because of the constitutional structure under which electors, not popular vote totals, determine who enters the White...

This is probably just the right balance for Ted Cruz: Senior Republicans have been asking Cruz to apologize to [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell so they can unite behind his bid to defeat Donald Trump. But Cruz did offer some kind words for McConnell Thursday. “Now I will tell you this, I am happy to praise Mitch McConnell and praise him effusively for his stand, along with (Senate Judiciary Chairman) Chuck Grassley, saying we are not going to hold hearings on a replacement” to the Supreme Court, Cruz told Bash. “Mitch McConnell’s doing the right thing, Chuck Grassley’s doing the right thing,...

It’s not the will to win that matters. ... It’s the will to prepare to win that matters. — Paul “Bear” Bryant HOUSTON -- People here at Ted Cruz’s campaign headquarters are meticulously preparing to win a contested convention, if there is one. Because Donald Trump is a low-energy fellow, Cruz will be positioned to trounce him in Cleveland, where Trump’s slide toward earned oblivion would accelerate during a second ballot. Wisconsin has propelled Trump, a virtuoso of contempt, toward joining those he most despises: “losers.” In the 1992 general election, Ross Perot, a Trump precursor, won 21.5 percent of...

Trump Tries the Art of Intimidation by JOHN FUND April 3, 2016 Seven months ago, after he signed a pledge to support whoever won the GOP nomination, Donald Trump said, “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.” That was then. Today we see a different Trump. On Sunday, he told Chris Wallace of Fox News that while he wanted “to run as a Republican,” he wouldn’t rule out an independent or third-party race this fall. “We’re going to have to see how I was treated,” he warned. GOP leaders should have known better than to...

Donald Trump has made his first threat to sue over the procedures for selecting delegates to the Republican convention. It surely won’t be his last. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ted Cruz may come out of Louisiana with as many as ten more delegates than Trump, even though the mogul narrowly beat Cruz in the popular vote there. In a tweet, Trump pronounced it “unfair,” and worthy of litigation. The Louisiana delegate picture isn’t evidence of anything untoward. Trump and Cruz both won 18 delegates on election night. Marco Rubio, since dropped out, won five, and another five are...

What’s it like to have a friend run for president? In the new issue of National Review, I have a piece about Ted Cruz. I’d like to expand on it here in Impromptus. I think that both pro-Cruz people and anti-Cruz people will find certain things of interest. Same with people in between. Okay, here we go … It’s really strange to have a friend running for president. It’s strange enough to have a friend in the U.S. Senate. There are only a hundred of them, you know. It’s the house of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert Taft … When...

Defend Heidi Cruz by MONA CHAREN March 26, 2016 Is Trump the political genius that some have been hinting? Who else, without staff or experience, could rocket to the top of the polls and remain in that perch month after month despite everything? Maybe it’s genius, or maybe its shamelessness. The latter can be mistaken for the former. This week’s new slog in the mud demonstrates one of Trump’s techniques to perfection — he flings filth at an opponent and then invites the docile press to conclude that “both sides” are engaged in unseemly brawling. (This is usually John Kasich’s...

"Ronald Reagan is dead, and he's not coming back." "I wish more conservatives could come to grips with this relatively simple fact. We are now in something like the fifth round of the pin-the-tail-on-the-next-Reagan game and it's getting old. Catering to the conservative base, the GOP presidential candidates keep trying to put on the Reagan mantle the way Cinderella's ugly stepsisters tried to cram their dogs into her glass slipper. Not gonna happen." I wrote the above nine years ago. I'm not plagiarizing myself to save time, but to point out that Reagan obsession on the right has been a...

Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn't appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona -- 70,587 of them at this writing. That was 17,595 more than the 52,992 votes cast there for John Kasich, even though Kasich was an active candidate on March 22 and Rubio had "suspended" his campaign after his defeat in Florida seven days before. One lesson from this is that...

It’s the End of the Line for GOP as We Know It By JONAH GOLDBERG March 23, 2016 (snip) Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican party as we know it. Over the weekend, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus showed the first public signs of acceptance about what’s in store for the party. He finally acknowledged that the Republican nominee was probably going to be determined on the convention floor in Cleveland. Priebus explained, rightly, that the rules are the rules, and that if Trump can’t secure the required 1,237 delegates before Cleveland, it’s anyone’s game. “This is a...

Donald Trump and his backers want to redefine mathematics, and have the GOP nomination handed to him with a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, being sufficient... The Republican party has held 39 national conventions since its first in 1856. At each and every one, a majority of delegates was needed for someone to get the nomination...