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Republicans hoping to halt Donald J. Trump’s
march to their party’s presidential nomination emerged from the
weekend’s voting contests newly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s uneven
electoral performance and by some nascent signs that he may be peaking
with voters.
Outside
groups are moving to deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads
across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a
liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger. Mr. Trump’s reed-thin
organization appears to be catching up with him, suggesting he could be
at a disadvantage if he is forced into a protracted slog for delegates.
And
vote tallies on Saturday made clear that Mr. Trump has had at least
some trouble building upon his intensely loyal following, leaving him
increasingly dependent upon landslides in early voting.
In
Louisiana, where Mr. Trump amassed a lead of more than 20 percentage
points among those who cast votes before Saturday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas effectively tied him among voters who cast their ballots on Saturday.
“Trump
has to worry about the consistent late-voter rejection of his
candidacy,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican
presidential candidate.
Mr.
Trump’s losses to Mr. Cruz in Kansas and Maine on Saturday, coupled
with closer-than-expected victories in Louisiana and Kentucky, have
heightened the prospects for a two-man race, though many Republican
leaders eye Mr. Cruz warily.
As
his rivals have despaired over the race’s vulgar turn, Mr. Trump struck
a subdued tone, by his standards, as returns came in late Saturday
night. He aborted his first attempt to take the stage and left the room
after asking reporters if the race in Kentucky had been called.
When
he finally did speak, some of his usual bombast was missing, even as he
insisted that it was time for Senator Marco Rubio to quit the race and
that Mr. Cruz cannot win more moderate northeastern or coastal states.
“Donald
Trump was uncharacteristically low energy,” Mitt Romney, the Republican
nominee in 2012, said in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”
taunting Mr. Trump with the insult Mr. Trump had employed against Jeb
Bush. Yet despite the renewed optimism of his opponents, the path to
deny Mr. Trump the nomination remains narrow and arduous.
Mr.
Cruz’s emergence as the most credible alternative to Mr. Trump has
proved both a boost and a complication for those seeking to derail the
New Yorker. Mr. Cruz has tried to undercut calls for a contested
convention to deny Mr. Trump the nomination, which Mr. Cruz says would
yield a “manifest revolt” among voters. But Mr. Cruz has done little so
far to threaten Mr. Trump’s lead in the delegate race.
Much
of Mr. Cruz’s late-breaking support on Saturday seemed to come at the
expense of Mr. Rubio, not Mr. Trump. And the Cruz campaign’s message of
ideological purity and religious faith is a less natural fit for many of
the delegate-rich Midwestern and coastal states that remain on the map.
“Saturday
proved that Trump can be contained and even beaten,” said Scott
Jennings, a longtime Republican strategist, who looked ahead to this
summer’s Republican convention in Cleveland. “The question is whether
the field is going to allow for it moving forward. The most likely
scenarios remain that Trump gets enough before Cleveland, or nobody
does. The latter moved a little closer to realistic Saturday.”
Mr.
Rubio’s path is much less certain, despite his lopsided victory in
Puerto Rico on Sunday. Even his supporters said that the results on
Saturday seriously undercut the premise of his bid: that he is the only
candidate who can unify the Republican Party and defeat Mr. Trump.
“Look,
I’m supportive of Marco; I’m very hopeful,” said Mel Martinez, the
former senator from Florida, who had supported Mr. Bush. “But it’s a
great concern that time has kind of caught up with this whole thing.”
The
Stop Trump forces are beginning to pour money into television ads, with
a particular focus on the big states voting on March 15. Four different
groups have reserved at least $10 million in airtime in Florida so far,
according to trackers of media spending. That number is expected to
grow, but television stations in Florida are already awash in such ads.
Two
from the American Future Fund, which has spent $2 million so far in
Florida and Illinois, show decorated veterans assailing Mr. Trump as a
poseur on military matters. Michael Waltz, a retired Special Forces
colonel, blisteringly calls Mr. Trump a draft dodger and, effectively, a
coward. “Donald Trump hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” he
says. “Don’t let Trump fool you.”
And
a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, Tom Hanton, bluntly questions Mr.
Trump’s toughness: “Trump would not have survived the P.O.W. experience.
He would have been probably the first one to fold.”
Separately,
Club for Growth Action, an arm of the anti-tax group that was the first
to run ads in Iowa against Mr. Trump, has placed $2 million in
commercials attacking him in Illinois on top of $1 million in Florida.
Election 2016
Democratic Debate: Analysis
Here's how we analyzed the Democratic debate.
A
third group, Our Principles PAC, which was created to defeat Mr. Trump,
has reserved $3.5 million in Illinois and Florida and is also sending
direct mail to voters’ homes in Florida. A group supporting Mr. Rubio,
Conservative Solutions, is spending several million dollars in Florida
as well.
The
deluge of negative messages from a patchwork of groups — highlighting
claims by angry customers of Mr. Trump’s defunct educational company and
his history of shape-shifting positions — already appears to have hurt
Mr. Trump’s cause.
In
conversations with some of his allies, who insisted on anonymity to
relay those private talks, Trump campaign aides have expressed concern
about the money being spent against him on television. The Trump
campaign has no pollster, so it is governed by public polling and what
the candidate himself observes while watching cable news.
This
off-the-cuff approach, and a string of self-inflicted wounds — refusing
to clearly and immediately reject the support of the white supremacist
David Duke, boasting about his sexual endowment on the debate stage and
withdrawing from the Conservative Political Action Committee’s
conference over the weekend — have fueled days of unfavorable coverage
of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
“Trump
has total disdain for the professional political class,” said Scott
Reed, a veteran Republican strategist. “He thinks they’re all about
making money. Pollsters are hacks. Organization doesn’t matter. Their
idea of a political organization is taking phone calls from some elected
officials who wanted to endorse and making it work in the schedule. And
that’ll catch up with you eventually.”
Still,
members of the Republican establishment have been left to grapple with
what was once unthinkable: rallying around Mr. Cruz, a senator who built
his reputation bashing them.
“Some
hope with Ted, no hope with Donald,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina said on “Meet the Press,” summarizing the party’s dim view of
its remaining options. Neither, he suggested, would be likely to expand
the Republican tent: “We’re in a demographic death spiral.”
Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Graham joked about murdering Mr. Cruz on the Senate floor.
And
yet, Mr. Graham said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cruz after
Super Tuesday — part of efforts by the Cruz campaign to reach out,
discreetly, to donors and party officials who might be interested in
rallying around him.
With
Mr. Rubio faltering badly across the board on Saturday, Mr. Cruz is
moving to compete aggressively in Florida. He has also weighed the
merits of a significant push in Ohio, the home state of Gov. John
Kasich.
Both
states are winner-take-all, and the Cruz campaign insists it would only
dedicate substantial resources if it thought it could win outright. But
the effort is risky: It could boost Mr. Trump, if Mr. Cruz diminishes
his non-Trump rivals without a victory.
The
Cruz campaign says it can reach the requisite delegate threshold of
1,237 without winning Florida or Ohio, thanks to its superior
organization in later-voting states, many of which are closed to
non-Republicans.
But
several party strategists have disputed this math, even if the contests
on March 15 force some of Mr. Cruz’s competitors from the race.
A
moment of reckoning for Mr. Rubio will come Tuesday in Michigan, a
state that has concentrations of the kinds of voters he performs well
with: professional, younger, highly educated and upper-income. But a
poll released on Sunday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed
Mr. Rubio trailing Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump received 41
percent, followed by Mr. Cruz at 22 percent, Mr. Rubio at 17 percent and
Mr. Kasich at 13 percent.
Despite
this, some Michigan Republicans say that Mr. Kasich may emerge as the
state’s establishment choice. And in a race that has often felt like a
reality television show, Mr. Kasich secured an apt endorsement on
Sunday: that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will replace Mr. Trump as the
host of “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
Correction: March 6, 2016
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of a Conservative Political Action Committee conference. It was in National Harbor, Md., not Alexandria, Va.
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of a Conservative Political Action Committee conference. It was in National Harbor, Md., not Alexandria, Va.
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