For the GOP, three candidates might be better than one

The 2016 election has had its fair share of movements — from #MakeAmericaGreatAgain to #Drumpf and #NeverTrump. What should worry the Republican faithful, however, is that the most successful movements of the cycle have pitted parts of the GOP’s coalition against one another. Of course, all primary elections reveal the hidden tensions inside an alliance, but this year is distinctly different.

{mosads}For the first time since the public has been given a voice in the presidential primaries, the electoral process is unlikely to create a legitimate “presumptive nominee” on the Republican side. Given his ideological promiscuity and flaws as a general election candidate, Donald Trump has been unable to gain the support of major figures in the party establishment. And, if the recent Oregon primary is any indication, at least a third of the Republican electorate is still willing to vote for two zombie candidates (Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz) rather than fall in line behind Trump. Indeed, hints of an independent candidacy on the right continue to be part of mainstream discussion, weeks after Trump was crowned the “presumptive nominee.”

The GOP is not rallying around Trump. And, without a clear flag-bearer, the alliance of Trump’s pugnacious populists, Cruz’s fiscal and religious conservatives and Kasich’s moderate Rust Belters may unravel just enough to allow the Democrats to control the White House for another four years.

In two recent articles, I have argued that the optimal way for the Republican establishment and Donald Trump to navigate these stormy electoral seas is to pursue the strategy used by the Whigs in the 1836 election: nominate three candidates for president, not one! This maneuver would enable the GOP to run the one candidate in each state who is most able to defeat the Democratic nominee (i.e., Kasich in Ohio, Trump in Florida and Cruz in Wisconsin). I also proposed an optimal division of the states among the three front-runners that would prevent Clinton from getting 270 electoral votes, and thus send the election to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives (which, according to the Constitution, chooses the president in the event that the election does not give one candidate 270 electoral votes).

However, the case for uniting #MakeAmericaGreatAgain and #NeverTrump under the #GOPTripleThreat movement goes beyond electoral strategy. A Republican triple team would unite conservatives around the two core principles held dear by all the diverse threads of the party: a preference for localism over nationalism and a fear of executive power.

If the presidential election were to be decided by the House of Representatives, we would see a powerful shift in both symbolic and institutional authority from the executive branch to the legislative branch. The modern era of elite political polarization has resulted in a do-nothing Congress that is so riven by partisan divisions that is has ceded legislative authority to the president and the Supreme Court. Because Congress is unable to muster the votes to override executive orders, presidential signing statements and the Supreme Court’s interpretations of statutes, more policy is decided in these branches of government. An election in which the Congress picks the president would provide a corrective to the currently misalligned separation of powers.

Finally, an election in which the Republicans are campaigning for different standard-bearers in each of the states would be a return to the localist tradition of the conservative movement. In the 1836 election, the Whig Party believed the “Democratic disease” required cures that were specific to the infected area. Today, this sort of precision medicine in politics is a natural consequence of the recent efforts of both political parties to micro-target voters. Except instead of focusing on the divisions that Republicans abhor discussing — demographic groups and social classes — the party would focus on geographic boundaries, which have always provided for Americans a sense of belonging and pride. After all, it the GOP that so often cloaks itself in the symbolism of small-town values and states’ rights. For the increasingly national GOP — divorced from the small communities that founded it — this would be a remedy to a common complaint by the Tea Party, Trump and the #NeverTrumpers.

Whether your objections to possible Republican nominees are based on electability or principle, my message to the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain and #NeverTrump movement is simple: unite forces under the #GOPTripleThreat movement.

Tomkowiak is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University, who is studying American politics through a comparative and historical perspective. Follow him on Twitter @itomkowiak.