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 That seems a long shot.
Republican Party leaders came away from Super Tuesday - the 2016
presidential campaign's biggest day of state-by-state nominating
contests for the Nov. 8 election - without any clearer consensus
about how to slow front-runner Donald Trump's march to the
nomination.
They fear Trump's divisive rhetoric - which includes calls to build
a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, deport 11 million illegal
immigrants and temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country -
will tarnish the party's image and ensure Democrats hold on to the
White House and possibly retake the Senate.
The billionaire businessman won the largest number of Super Tuesday
contests, taking seven states, but fell short of the 10 states some
polls had predicted. Cruz won two, and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida notched his first win, in Minnesota.
That made Cruz and Rubio unlikely to withdraw from the race before
the next big nominating contest in two weeks. The same goes for Ohio
Governor John Kasich, who has said he will continue his candidacy
through his state's primary on March 15.
 “So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the
nomination remains more likely, and that would be a disaster for
Republicans, for conservatives and for the nation,” Cruz said.
Trump's failure to win a clean sweep of the primary contests on
Tuesday buys the establishment wing of the party time to intensify
its counterattacks against the New York real estate mogul and
political outsider. While they have yet to coalesce around a single
strategy, anti-Trump Republicans have begun taking action.
Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, claimed credit for
slowing Trump in some primary states by running attack ads.
“Donald Trump can be stopped,” said the group’s president, David
McIntosh, in a statement. “And he must be, before he costs
conservatives the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court."
DISTASTE, BUT NO CONSENSUS
The New York Times reported that several financial backers of the
Republican Party organized a phone call on Tuesday to get funding
for an anti-Trump effort. Helping lead the call were the hedge-fund
manager Paul Singer, Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts, and Meg
Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise chief executive. The
newspaper said it was unclear what kind of political offensive might
emerge from those discussions.
A recently launched political action committee dedicated to blasting
Trump, Our Principles PAC, said it was ramping up fundraising and
planned daily attacks against Trump before upcoming primaries in
March.
It said the campaign would focus on Trump’s business record and
include a video where he declined in an interview to disavow former
Ku Klux Klan official David Duke. Trump, who later rejected Duke's
support, said he had not clearly heard the interviewer's question.
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On Capitol Hill, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul
Ryan, who will preside over the party's nominating convention in
July, made clear he disapproved of Trump's rhetoric in comments that
suggested he was not ready to welcome Trump into the establishment
fold.
"If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there
must be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause
that is built on bigotry," Ryan, the party's 2012 vice presidential
nominee, told reporters.
Trump ratcheted up the tension during a news conference in Palm
Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night, warning Ryan he would pay "a big
price" if he stood in Trump's way.
Despite the establishment's distaste for Trump, there appears to be
no consensus on the best way to stop him.
“As long as both Cruz, Rubio and Kasich remain in the race, then
Trump will continue to prevail in upcoming primary states and he
will vacuum up the delegates while the vote splits among the
remaining candidates,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican operative in
Washington.
Rubio and Kasich have set their sights on delegate-rich contests in
the heavily populated states of Michigan, Florida, Ohio and Illinois
later this month. More than 1,200 delegates are required by the
party to secure its nomination.
The goal for the remaining campaigns will be to keep Trump from
amassing those delegates for as long as possible, with the hope that
an increasing tide of criticism from the candidates, party leaders
and political action committees will drain his support.
But Bonjean said the party would have to find a way to thwart Trump
before he walked away with the nomination. “The odds of stopping
Trump are getting much lower with every state put away into his
corner,” he said.
(Editing by Peter Cooney)
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