Anti-Trump forces gathering strength
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AS Cleveland braces for the Republican convention next week, anti-Donald Trump forces are mounting a last-gasp effort to block the billionaire from securing the party’s White House nomination by urging delegates to vote their “conscience.”
The “Stop Trump” movement began its final stand early yesterday, seeking to change party rules in order to unbind most of the convention’s delegates and allow them to break from primary election results supporting the New York tycoon.
Trump’s campaign and Republican leaders thought they had safely averted such a divisive showdown in Cleveland.
But if the insurgent movement is able to draw support from 28 delegates in the convention’s 112-member Rules Committee that gaveled in for its meeting yesterday, it would send a so-called “minority report” to the convention floor for a vote early next week.
It is their moment of truth, and a long-shot, given they are trying to do something that 16 Republican presidential candidates could not: defeat Donald Trump.
But organizers such as Regina Thomson, a co-founder of the Free The Delegates movement, say they have wind in their sails going into the crucial rules meeting.
Thomson declined to offer specific numbers — “we’re not going to tell the Trump camp and the world where we’re at with it,” she told reporters.
But she made a stunning claim that, should it prove true, could thoroughly upend Trump’s convention.
“About 70 percent of those that we’re talking to do not want to have to cast a vote for Donald Trump,” she said.
Kendal Unruh, a Colorado teacher and delegate on the committee who is leading the block Trump effort, told MSNBC on Wednesday: “The momentum is phenomenal.”
Thomson said Unruh is confident they have the votes to advance the minority report.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has stressed that the chances of such an effort succeeding are slim, but on Wednesday the committee offered a neutral assessment.
“We will support the will of the voters and the delegates,” RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said.
Unruh, Thomson and their teams have mounted a furious — and well-funded — effort to help convince delegates to vote for the “conscience clause.”
“You already have the right to do this,” Thomson said she was telling delegates, citing evidence of 248 previous times during national conventions in which delegates cast their votes according to their conscience.
“Yes, there will be angry people,” Thomson acknowledges about how her fight could traumatize many in the party.
“But we firmly believe that the number of committed conservatives who will not vote for him (in November) will make those 3 million evangelicals who stayed away from Mitt Romney in 2012 pale in comparison.”
Even though recent national polling shows the race between the real estate mogul and Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowing, anti-Trump operatives fear his divisive rhetoric could lose them millions of core voters.
But if not Trump, then who?
Thomson refused to put forward a name, saying the movement was simply there to open a door for a potential candidate.
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