All Political Establishments Collude
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Gov. John Kasich are apparently working in concert to keep the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, away from the GOP nomination. This game of ‘keep away’, or as I knew it growing up – ‘Piggy In the Middle‘ – is going on all around the Western world at the moment as populations fall out of love with their ruling classes.
Cruz and Kasich are apparently planning to undertake this strategy across Oregon, New Mexico, and Indiana – with Kasich being allowed by the Cruz campaign to focus on the first two while Kasich will move out of the way for Cruz in Indiana. But where else have we seen tactics like this?
FRONT NATIONAL, FRANCE
In December last year, despite polling record results in the first round of voting, the Front National failed to win a single region in the French local elections.
FN leader Marine Le Pen lost out in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais Picardie region after the Socialist Party, led by French president Francois Hollande, instructed its candidate to pull out of the race before the second round, paving the way for the centre-right Republicans to win by nearly 15 per cent in the second round of voting.
The “rounds of voting” sound very European, until you consider that Americans have the same thing, just at their party conventions rather than at the general election.
While the Front National had topped the popular vote in six of 13 regions, the second round of voting saw establishment voters rush to support the specific mainstream party they had been left with in the next round. It’s worth noting that they plan the same tricks at next year’s French presidential elections too, where Ms. Le Pen is currently leading in the polls, but wherein she will likely lose in the following rounds.
This is effectively Ted Cruz’s pitch.
The Washington Post reports: “The GOP race now rests on two cliffhangers: Can Trump lock up the nomination before Cleveland? If not, can Cruz cobble together enough delegates to win a second convention vote if Trump fails in the first?
“…based on the delegate selections made by states and territories, Cruz is poised to pick up at least 130 more votes on a second ballot, according to a Washington Post analysis. That tally surpasses 170 delegates under less conservative assumptions — a number that could make it impossible for Trump to emerge victorious.”
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