Cleveland (AFP) – 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 Thursday, 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 billionaire.
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 Thursday, 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 to be sure, given they are trying to do something that 16 Republican presidential candidates could not: defeat Donald Trump.
But organizers like 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 AFP in the corner of a downtown hotel lobby where she worked her smartphone and urged fellow delegates to vote against their presumptive nominee.
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,” Thomson said.
“The momentum is phenomenal,” Kendal Unruh, a Colorado schoolteacher and delegate on the committee who is leading the block Trump effort, told MSNBC on Wednesday.
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.
– If not Trump, who? –
Unruh, Thomson and their teams have mounted a furious — and well-funded — whipping effort to help convince delegates to vote for the “conscience clause” and block Trump.
“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 insisted on casting their rebellious 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 three million evangelicals who stayed away from Mitt Romney in 2012 pale in comparison.”
Even though recent national polling shows the race between the billionaire real estate mogul and Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowing, anti-Trump operatives fear his divisive and combative rhetoric could lose them millions of core conservative voters.
But if not Trump, then who?
Thomson and Unruh both backed US Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries. But Thomson refused to put forward a name, saying the movement was simply there to open a door for a potential candidate to walk through.
This week the conservative-leaning editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump to welcome the unbound delegate challenge, saying it would be a welcome test for the candidate in Cleveland after such a provocative primary season.
“Winning on the floor would add to the legitimacy of his nomination and help unite the party despite his critics,” the board said.
If Trump can’t win over a majority of delegates, “he’s probably a loser in November.”
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