Newsletter: Essential Politics: GOP aims for a Hail Mary pass against Trump

It’s not every day that senior members of a political party think up a nominating strategy that ends -- in the best case -- with a bitter civil war erupting at their national convention.

Not common, either: A presidential candidate debate in which one of the men on stage comments on the size of his genitals.

But, then, in the eight-and-a-half months since Donald Trump started running for president, unprecedented has become the new normal. We may as well get used to it.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington Bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in the presidential campaign and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

As my colleagues Noah Bierman and Seema Mehta explained in their story laying out the latest stop-Trump strategy being pushed by senior GOP leaders, the odds are long, and what would pass for success would be considered a fiasco in any other year.

After weeks of hoping that from among Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich a single candidate would emerge who could take on Trump one-on-one, the new strategy calls for keeping all three men in the race. The hope is that each can win enough states that collectively they could deny Trump a majority going into this summer’s GOP convention.

Bierman examined the delegate math and explains how dicey the whole strategy is. As the race unfolds over the next few weeks, keep watch on the delegates in both parties with our Delegate Tracker, which shows where each candidate stands and where they have won support.

The plan, backed by some of the party’s wealthiest donors, as well as former nominees Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain, takes as a given that Trump would have more delegates than any of his rivals, but aims to deny any candidate a victory on the first ballot at the convention. After that, under party rules, delegates would be free to vote for anyone.

Romney gave the anti-Trump effort a high-profile boost with a widely covered speech Thursday in which he lambasted Trump as a “phony” and a “fraud.” Read the transcript of Romney’s anti-Trump speech here.

An appeal from him might sway some voters on the fence, but probably won’t mean much to Trump’s core supporters. Many are less affluent Republicans who may have voted for Romney in 2012 over President Obama, but have never really accepted the sort of Republican orthodoxy he represents.

As Lisa Mascaro reported, those voters, sometimes referred to as “big-government Republicans,” like Trump’s calls to protect Social Security and Medicare and embrace public spending, so long as it’s not directed to people they consider undeserving -- who are often minorities.

Success in the anti-Trump effort depends almost entirely on Rubio being able to carry his home state of Florida, which gives all its delegates to the winner of its March 15 primary. If Trump pockets Florida’s 99 delegates, the arithmetic for the anti-Trump strategy becomes all but impossible.

Rubio trails Trump by about 20 points in an average of the latest Florida polls.

You can follow the outcome of all the primaries, as we post live results, speeches and analysis on Trail Guide.

Florida’s voters will see a lot of anti-Trump ads over the next 10 days. Who’s paying for many of them will remain unknown. Joe Tanfani explains why that is in his story about the biggest of the so-called dark-money groups funding the anti-Trump effort. Because these groups don’t have to disclose their donors, voters can’t find out who is paying to influence them.

“That’s the beauty of dark money,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Kasich, who has also been attacked by dark-money groups. “They can attack us, and you never know where it comes from.”

In addition to relying on secret money, the GOP establishment strategy would mean overriding the will of the millions of voters who by June will have cast ballots for Trump and handing the nomination to someone who either got many fewer votes or didn’t run in the primaries at all. Since the modern primary system developed, a move to disregard a party’s own voters that way has never happened -- for obvious reasons.

But however preposterous the scheme seems, it offers a big bonus for Californians: For the first time in decades, the state’s June 7 primary may actually decide the race.

Not so on the Democratic side.

Hillary Clinton followed her landslide victory in South Carolina last weekend with an equally impressive sweep of the South in the March 1 Super Tuesday primaries. As consequential was her more narrow victory in Massachusetts, a state with a mostly white, liberal Democratic electorate that should be one of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ strongest backers.

If Sanders couldn’t beat Clinton in Massachusetts, his chances of beating her elsewhere are slim. Almost immediately on Wednesday morning, as Michael A. Memoli wrote, groups on the Democratic left began issuing statements praising Sanders for raising important issues, but calling for the party to start unifying against Trump.

Sanders has the money to stay in the race until June. He will continue to press Clinton from the left and likely will win several smaller contests, and perhaps some major states.

In Michigan, where he currently trails Clinton in advance of a primary on Tuesday, Sanders has been emphasizing his opposition to most international trade agreements. That stance that puts him in opposition not just to Clinton, but also Obama, as Cathy Decker noted. But with his chances of victory almost gone, and Clinton having clearly held the votes of African Americans, Sanders has less reason to try to appeal to Obama loyalists.

Clinton, who had her own experience in 2008 of fighting on until the final primary, almost certainly will do nothing to try to push Sanders aside. But barring major surprises, the Democratic race has come to its expected result -- a Clinton atop the ticket for a third time.

Meantime, the Clinton campaign is hard at work trying to come up with a plan for something that until recently, they did not expect -- a race against Trump. It’s not so easy, as Evan Halper reported.

One thing that makes running against Trump hard is his ability to switch major positions at a moment’s notice. Noam N. Levey took a careful look at one of the most prominent examples, Trump’s healthcare plan, which has gone through several iterations, each markedly different from the other.

The current version, Levey notes, is a somewhat vague mix of standard Republican proposals, several of which conservative health experts say would have little effect on patients’ health or their pocketbooks.

And if all the anti-Trump efforts fail? What might a Trump presidency look like? We took an early look and invite you to read along.

That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in the 2016 campaign with our Trail Guide, at our politics page and on Twitter at @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.