Illinois Primary Last Stand for GOP Establishment

The March 15 Illinois primary election will serve as a desperate last stand effort by the  GOP Establishment to slow the Trump bandwagon, which appears headed to the party’s  nomination. 

Just a few short months ago, Republican operatives would have given Donald Duck as  much chance as Donald Trump, a one-time Manhattan liberal, of winning the GOP nomination. What has happened? 

This past Tuesday, Trump won all Southern states but Ted Cruz’s Texas decisively. His juggernaut can now be slowed only by wins for Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio in their  home states of Ohio and Florida on March 15 (where both trail Trump in recent polls), combined  with something less than Trump domination in Illinois. 

 Little has been written of the Illinois primary thus far for the understandable reason that  the media focus has been on the rollout of primaries up to this point. A February 24 We Ask  America poll did find Trump leading both Rubio and Cruz in Illinois by nearly 2-1 margins, with  Kasich trailing in single digits. 

Illinois offers two concurrent contests for the presidential candidates. At the top of the  ballot is the “beauty contest” preferential vote. Whoever wins a plurality here picks up 10  delegates.

Down the ballot is the more important contest for three delegates in each of the state’s 18  congressional districts. Voters will find names of people they have never heard of running for  delegate, followed by the names of their preferred presidential candidates in parentheses. 

To win, delegate candidates must garner more votes than anyone else, so if delegate  candidates who prefer Trump best the others with, say, 33 percent of the vote, the Trump  delegates win. 

Barring dramatic changes in voter attitudes in the next few days, it looks as if Trump may  run the table March 15 across Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Missouri, which would make Trump’s  nomination almost unstoppable. 

In an incisive piece in the February 27 Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speechwriter  and now columnist Peggy Noonan decried a “protected” class that has become insulated in their  gated communities, insensitive to the struggles of the unwashed and “unprotected” outside. 

Noonan sees immigration as “the issue.” The unprotected have suffered from low-wage  job competition while the protected benefit from having more low-wage workers available. Maybe even worse, the protected, coming from both parties, are insensitive to the  vulnerability and anxiety that immigration imposes on the unprotected.  

I would add the issue of the corporate out-migration of jobs to other shores. This may  make all the sense in the world to business leaders seeking to compete globally, but it appears  callous, indeed cruel to those whose job futures are bleak. 

[Trump reminds me a bit of the Gracchi brothers in the late Roman Republic, who went  around the Roman Senate and directly to the masses with programs of land for the landless.

[Great tumult ensued, and the brothers ultimately were assassinated by the senatorial  class, which owned most of the land, yet the days were numbered for the Republic and the  Senate.] 

The 2016 election realities also hammer additional nails into the coffins of political party  organizations.  

Flawed though they surely have been, political party organizations have served the useful  purposes throughout our history of recruiting and supporting candidates who were generally safe,  that is, who would return favor to their party and not rock the boat unnecessarily on the social  and economic fronts. 

Today, the old “labor model” of political parties, in which precinct captains and local  party leaders would carry the campaigns for their candidates, has been pushed aside by a “capital  model.”  

The latter model relies on big money to recruit candidates and conduct their campaigns  from centralized offices, relying on television and digital media in place of people. I am talking about shifts, not absolutes. There are still people rallying to campaign work,  though mostly to candidates rather than to party organizations, and money has always been  important, though much less so in the past than today. 

A pedestrian illustration. In my three contested campaigns for the state legislature, I  remember never spending more than $4,000 ($26,000 in today’s dollars). I had to raise the  money myself and run my own campaigns, with the help of local party folks. 

This year in Illinois there are state legislative candidates who have already received more  than $1 million for their contested campaigns!

The candidate is but a pawn in this game, with the money contributed and then spent  centrally by big money political elites or by remnants of old political machines. Tumultuous, troubling times in American politics.