Is Donald Trump’s presidential bid terrifying you?
Try to relax. The bullying billionaire probably can’t make it to the White House.
He needs to win a majority of all voters, not just Republicans. That will be tough when nearly two out of three of Americans already abhor him. And his bid could fracture or destroy the GOP.
Barring credible reports that he’s an al-Qaeda operative or widely streamed footage of the guy having sex with multiple members of the Clinton family, Trump’s bound to keep winning primaries.
He might even arrive at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland with 1,237 delegates, the usual threshold for automatically becoming the party’s nominee.
Thanks to number-crunching by services like PredictWise, we know that people who bet on these things were giving Trump an 80 percent chance of winning the nomination following the high-stakes Florida and Ohio primaries. The website, which calculates political odds, was only giving him a 20 percent shot at winning the whole presidential race at that point.
That’s less than the 28 percent chance the same website says the Republican Party has of claiming victory in November. In other words — if you ask pollsters and bookies — far more voters would support a Republican who isn’t Trump than would support Trump in all his publicity-mongering glory.
Which is why this year’s Republican National Convention promises to be the most unruly gathering of its kind in decades. Someone may become the party’s nominee without winning the most delegates.
John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz are eager to volunteer. When right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt asked about this prospect in a recent debate, they all said “coronate me” in the most selfless tone they could muster.
“If we nominate Donald Trump, Hillary wins,” Cruz predicted.
“Math doesn’t tell the whole story in politics,” Kasich said.
“I believe that at the end of this process this nation will make the right choice,” Rubio declared.
Since GOP voters aren’t…