Political commentator, author, and former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton Dick Morris tells Breitbart News that party rules could turn the GOP Presidential nomination into a two-way race by March 1.
Morris explained he sees the GOP primary as a two-way race between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Morris ruled out the possibility that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) would get the nomination, because of the Senator’s continued support for granting citizenship– and therefore voting privileges and welfare access– to illegal aliens.
“Rubio will never win this election and this nomination because of his position on amnesty,” Morris told Breitbart.
I think that’s just a deal breaker. Paul Begala once called it a ‘silver bullet,’ and I think that’s exactly what it is because Republican voters fear it as permanently changing the nature of electoral politics. They feel– correctly, I think– that if you let 11 million new people in to vote, all of them are going to vote Democrat and you’ll never win another election. And that’s basically what they see amnesty as being, so I don’t think Rubio will ever overcome that.
Instead, Morris argues the race will come down to Cruz vs. Trump: “This 12-lane highway has got to merge into a two-way highway and I think the only candidates that are going to make that cut are Trump and Cruz,” Morris explained.
“Everybody is wondering how this… [broad, multi-candidate] field is going to reduce to a two-or-three [person race] or a manageable number, and the answer is that it has to happen by March first, whether the candidates want it to or not,” Morris told Breitbart.
Morris elaborated in a recent column:
On that date, 14 states will select their delegates to the national convention. A total of 701 delegates will be selected, more than two-thirds of the total needed to win the nomination. But, of these, 388 will be awarded by proportional representation with a minimum threshold to qualify for delegates. To have a shot at 298 of these delegates (including Texas’ 152) a candidate will need to win at least 20 percent of the vote. Anyone falling short of that total won’t get in on splitting the delegates by proportional representation.So, if Trump gets, for example, 35 percent in a given state and Cruz gets 30 percent, they will divide the delegates proportionately. But if Rubio, Bush, Paul, Kasich, Christie and the others get less than 20 percent of the vote each, they will get no delegates at all. There is little chance of the field whittling down sufficiently for any of these candidates to break the 20 percent threshold, and certainly it would be impossible for more than one to do so.Thus, de facto, the GOP nomination process will be a two-way race after March 1. Like a freeway that merges from a dozen lanes to two, there will be a mess of traffic and angry campaign managers, but the process is inexorable.
When asked about the donor-class and establishment media’s efforts to prop up Rubio’s candidacy, Morris said, “Rubio is not at 20 percent in any place. I don’t think you can find a single state where Rubio is at 20 percent. Not in Florida, not in New Hampshire, not in Idaho, not in Iowa, not nationally. He’s basically around 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 points in any state. He’ll never make the 20 percent threshold, which means that as long as Trump is as popular as he is and Cruz is doing as well as he is, and the field below them is as divided as it is, Rubio cannot get 20 percent.”
“Nobody understands these ground rules,” Morris told Breitbart.
The metaphor is like in 2008, nobody understood– except Obama’s people– about how the delegates were chosen by proportional representation. So Hillary went all out to win big states, and she did on Super Tuesday. And Obama said, ‘to hell with that, I’m going to go into the tiny states.’ So Obama captured Idaho by a margin of 10-to-1… and Hillary carried New Jersey by 55-to-45, which turned out to be a margin of 9 delegates also. So New Jersey was equal to Idaho– even though she spent vast amounts of money in Jersey, and [in] Idaho almost nothing. And that insight proved to be the essential element for how Obama developed a lead over Hillary immediately after Super Tuesday.
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