'All the way to Cleveland'

A Republican Party desperate for clarity didn’t get much in a spate of mid-March primaries that may have sent the GOP hurtling toward its first contested convention in 40 years.

“What we all thought would never happen—a convention fight—now has a better-than-even chance of occurring,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told The Wall Street Journal. “We haven’t seen a presidential election like this before, and we’re unlikely to see one like it again.”

As snow began melting into spring, billionaire businessman Donald Trump maintained a stranglehold on his front-runner status, but losses to three different challengers in the campaign continued to siphon critical delegates. If Trump, who has about half the delegates he needs, arrives in Cleveland this summer for the Republican National Convention without the necessary 1,237, Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s emphatic home-state win will be a big reason why.

Yet Kasich’s victory also made a contested convention the only plausible way for anti-Trump conservatives to deny Trump the GOP nomination. Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s closest challenger, badly needed a one-on-one matchup and now won’t get it. Despite only one primary win, Kasich vowed to go “all the way to Cleveland,” seemingly guaranteeing the anti-Trump vote will remain splintered throughout the primary calendar.

In Florida, splintered opposition was a moot point, even though anti-Trump groups poured some $16 million into attack ads. Trump still won 46 percent of the vote, eclipsing the combined totals of Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio.

Rubio immediately suspended his campaign and urged his supporters not to give in to the fear and frustration that has dominated the GOP primary season: “While it is not God’s plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever … the fact that I have even come this far is evidence of how special America truly is, and all the reason more why we must do all we can to ensure that this nation remains a special place.”

Rubio’s exit means his 169 delegates will be unbound heading into the convention, roughly doubling the pool Trump can try to move into his camp in order to secure the nomination on the first ballot. If he doesn’t, almost all delegates will become free agents for the second ballot.

Many Rubio supporters began calling for the party to unite behind Cruz, the only challenger left with a mathematical chance of winning the nomination—and the only one with a realistic chance of catching Trump. With few signs that will happen, some conservatives have started making contingency plans: Even before voters went to the polls on March 15, a group of influential conservative activists had scheduled a meeting in Washington, D.C., to discuss a potential third-party candidacy in case the general election features Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the meantime, Trump has a long way to go before he becomes the Republican standard-bearer, and the possibility remains that the eventual nominee may not even be currently in the race. When a reporter asked House Speaker Paul Ryan, the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, if he would accept a presidential nomination at a deadlocked convention, he wouldn’t rule it out: “Who knows?”