Inside the GOP effort to draft an independent candidate to derail Trump
Article publisher:
Washington Post
Article date:
15 May 2016
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
A band of exasperated Republicans — including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a handful of veteran consultants and members of the conservative intelligentsia — is actively plotting to draft an independent presidential candidate who could keep Donald Trump from the White House.
These GOP figures are commissioning private polling, lining up major funding sources and courting potential contenders, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republicans involved in the discussions. The effort has been sporadic all spring but has intensified significantly in the 10 days since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination.
Those involved concede that an independent campaign at this late stage is probably futile, and they think they have only a couple of weeks to launch a credible bid. But these Republicans — including commentators William Kristol and Erick Erickson and strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson — are so repulsed by the prospect of Trump as commander in chief that they are desperate to take action...
To many political professionals, the notion of winning the presidency from outside the two-party system is pure fantasy. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spent considerable time and money studying his chances for an independent run only to conclude in March that there was no plausible path...
Further tempering the current talks on the right are fears that an independent conservative candidate could forever be a pariah by splintering the Republican vote and ensuring victory for the Democratic nominee.
“The career of the individual would come to an end, and he would have a difficult spot in history for being responsible for putting Hillary Clinton in the White House,” said Patrick J. Buchanan, a conservative who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket.
Buchanan was dismissive of the current efforts. “These are the mice trying to bell the cat — only they can’t get one mouse to go out and do it,” he said...
Some anti-Trump Republicans are downsizing their ambitions to a more focused, state-specific effort. Murphy, who ran a super PAC for former Florida governor Jeb Bush in his failed 2016 bid, is pushing one such proposal. Murphy envisions an independent candidate on what he termed “an honorable mission” in Colorado, New Hampshire and Ohio — three battleground states with relatively lax ballot-access rules...