Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel — the subject of my latest Bloomberg column – have led some Republicans to speculate about whether their convention could nominate someone else. (Some of that speculation appears on NRO today.) Even if this were realistically possible, it strikes me as a bad idea. I wish Republican voters had chosen someone else as their candidate, but they chose Trump.
In the last contested races, his vote surged, apparently because a lot of Republican voters wanted to put an end to the nomination fight. Since then, most Republicans have indicated to pollsters that they will vote for Trump. And there has been no bombshell providing information to which primary voters had no access. Nothing about the Curiel affair has been at all surprising. IfRepublican voters showed signs of buyers’ remorse — if polls showed that most Republican voters wanted someone else as the nominee, for example–then a convention switch might make sense. But they don’t show that.
Trump won a majority of delegates, and he won them fair and square. (Yes, delegates are theoretically unbound, but everyone voted in the expectation that his vote meant something.) I probably won’t be voting for him in the fall, but I can’t see how he can legitimately be denied the Republican spot on the ballot.
Against Dumping Trump