Why Donald Trump's Wisconsin loss only spells greater chaos for the GOP

When the 2016 presidential election is over and the history of this year's mind-boggling GOP nomination contest is written, its authors may well decide that Jeb Bush managed to capture the character and mood of the moment better than anyone. Donald Trump "is great at one-liners," Bush suggested in the GOP debate held on Dec. 15. "But he's a chaos candidate."

And so he is — and not just because the astonishing success of Trump's highly unorthodox campaign has spread conflict and disarray among members of the Republican establishment and conservative movement.

A more ominous form of chaos became significantly more likely with Trump's unsurprising but decisive loss in Tuesday's Wisconsin primary. Trump still has a very good shot of prevailing in several delegate-rich northeastern states in the coming weeks. But the likelihood of him securing the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination outright, prior to the Republican National Convention in July, has declined. It's not impossible. But Trump now looks liable to fall short of that goal while remaining firmly in the delegate lead all the way to the end of the primary season.

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Such an outcome would set up the scenario for which the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and John Kasich, as well as the noisy #NeverTrump faction of the party, have been clamoring for weeks: a concerted, well-planned effort to deprive Trump of the nomination after he falls short on the first ballot at the convention.

That's when true Trumpian chaos will break out — certainly on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, and possibly on the streets outside.

But the real source of that pandemonium will be the chaotic thinking of the candidates and pundits who dreamed up and sought to justify the #NeverTrump plot in the first place.

I detest and fear Donald Trump and what he represents. I think those who have voted for him have been civically irresponsible. But attempting to wrest the nomination from him and bestow it on another candidate (presumably runner-up Cruz) after Trump has won a clear plurality of both the votes and the delegates is an act of unjustifiable recklessness.

Those on the other side have spent the past several weeks convincing themselves that an attempt to anoint someone other than Trump as the nominee isn't outrageous at all. In fact, they claim, it's perfectly justified, since there is nothing legitimate about the party permitting a candidate who is opposed by a clear majority of the party to walk away with the nomination.

I submit that this line of reasoning only appears persuasive when making a highly dubious assumption, which is that there is such a thing as a coherent "Not Trump" majority faction in the Republican Party that Cruz would be vindicating by becoming the nominee.

There is no such coherent majority faction. This isn't a contest between Trump and Not Trump — with the latter candidate winning the popular vote but somehow being denied victory by arcane and unfair rules of delegate allocation.

There is, instead, a field of candidates, each of them campaigning for votes. Prior to Tuesday's primary, Trump had won roughly 7.8 million of them. Cruz had won about 5.7 million. Then there was Marco Rubio (still in third place) with 3.4 million, John Kasich with 2.8 million, and so forth down through Ben Carson and several other candidates with considerably fewer than a million votes each.

The #NeverTrump movement is claiming, in effect, that the combined 13 million or so votes that have been cast for Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, Carson, and the others should be considered a vote for Not Trump — and that, as the presumptive runner-up, Cruz should be the one to serve in the Not Trump role on ballots in November.

That is, quite simply, ridiculous.

Don't agree? Let's consider how this kind of reasoning would have played out four years ago.

At this point in 2012 — the day of the Wisconsin primary — Mitt Romney had won 4.6 million votes. And his opponents? If we combine the votes won by Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul, the tally for Not Romney was 6.7 million.

Now of course Romney went on to win a majority of the delegates, as Trump is increasingly unlikely to do. But we're talking about the beginning of April in both election cycles. And at this moment, Romney had earned 39.8 percent of the votes cast compared with Trump's 37.1 percent.

That's it: a total of 2.7 percentage points separating the frontrunners.

If someone had floated the idea at the time of the 2012 Wisconsin primary of depriving Romney of the nomination and handing it at the convention to runner-up Rick Santorum — who, incidentally, had won almost the same portion of the vote (27 percent) that Cruz has in this cycle — that person would have been considered mad. And the judgment would have been correct.

Trump is a different, and far more alarming, kind of candidate than Romney, in all kinds of substantive and stylistic ways. But as a matter of electoral politics, he's no different than anyone running for president. And the disturbing but undeniable fact is that more Republican voters prefer him than any other candidate — and, despite recent Trump stumbles, it's extremely unlikely that anyone (including Cruz) is going to catch him in the scramble for votes between now and the close of primary season in early June.

The day after a solid Cruz win might not be the ideal time to suggest it, but the #NeverTrump Republicans really do need to get a grip. They can't stop the Chaos Candidate by giving in to the chaos he managed to stir up in their thinking.