The Establishment’s Only Hope … Donald Trump?

Come March, the Establishment may find itself forced to do the one thing it would despise above all others — covertly allow Donald Trump to re-enter the conversation and regenerate some Trump-mania.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has surged into a statistical dead heat for first place nationally with the real estate mogul, according to a poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University. The Cruz leap comes on the heels of several recent polls showing the outsider has opened a substantial first place lead in Iowa.

In the hypercharged anti-Establishment environment of 2016, the campaign of Establishment darling Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will look to large, more moderate blue states to produce enough delegates to top one of the leading insurgents. But getting to those states, held later in the contest, will prove difficult if Cruz can generate unstoppable momentum in the early conservative blitz across large, red states, many with substantial evangelical populations.

The solution? Make sure he has some competition among conservatives and that their vote is divided. That is, help Trump.

Cruz has all the momentum as we begin two weeks of holiday distraction. And he’s got a large, impressive organization to quickly regain the initiative in the new year.

For all the Establishment’s Trump paranoia, they hold nearly the same degree of disdain for the populist, anti-Washington rhetoric and record of Cruz, and it’s now Cruz who may pose the greater threat for the nomination. The immense strength Cruz is building in Iowa is largely based off of big margins with the same type of voters who will dominate the early March phase of the GOP contest.

In 2016, the dynamic has changed and deeply conservative, evangelical-heavy states have been moved up in the primary schedule. The unofficially dubbed “SEC Primary,” on March 1 contains seven large southern states, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the total Republican delegates.

Four of the top five states with the highest proportion of evangelicals in the nation are among those seven. One of the others is Cruz’s home state of Texas, and all bleed conservatism.

A sweep of these contests by Cruz would generate such a massive snowball of momentum that Rubio would be unlikely to pull out of the resulting tailspin even by pulling off wins in large, more moderate states with winner-take-all primaries.

The Rubio campaign needs Cruz-mentum to be dulled, or better fully tarred and feathered by the noise, bluster, and bashing of their most menacing adversary — Trump.

And so it may be the only hope for the Establishment’s favorite son, Rubio, to keep Trump alive in the contest, for Trump to distract, prod, and hammer Cruz as the usurper of his populist movement.

A resilient, but wounded, Trump would no doubt pull delegates away from Cruz, whom multiple polls show as the clear second-choice pick of most Trump supporters.

Trump could lower the bar for Rubio to skip over Cruz, or at the very least for the renegade conservative pair to each stay below the 50 percent delegate threshold.

The way they would do it isn’t awfully complicated.

The Establishment, weakened in the 2016 outsider environment, remains well-armed with a huge arsenal of corporate cash. 

The Establishment, weakened in the 2016 outsider environment, remains well-armed with a huge arsenal of corporate cash. The various Establishment-aligned super PACs could easily focus an intense barrage of negative ads on Cruz in the new year, timed to coincide with a reduction in the constant Trump bashing from Establishment groups and figures.

Many of the best-funded Establishment-controlled groups have held their powder dry to this point. The Karl Rove-created American Crossroads Super Pac spent $8 million supporting Mitt Romney during the 2012 primaries and over $104 million through the general election. But the group has spent just a measly $20,000 so far in 2016 attacking Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

To break up the take from early conservative states would allow Rubio the chance to re-emerge and generate momentum of his own with wins in the more moderate states of Florida, Illinois, and Ohio on March 15, the first day of winner take-all contests.

Unfortunately for Rubio, the Establishment’s favorite son trails both Trump and Cruz in Illinois and his home state of Florida in recent polls of GOP voters in those states. There are no recent polls from Ohio.

A Florida Times Union poll of GOP voters in the Sunshine State finds Rubio trailed Trump by 15 points, and Cruz by 5.

That is, of course, before the Establishment lays it all on the line to boost the Florida senator in the states critical to keep his chances alive

Ultimately, the Establishment may acknowledge both Trump and Cruz can’t be fully subdued, and decide to pursue a strategy to keep both alive, and fighting for the same space, to give Rubio the upper hand.