DAVE ROSS

Confusion might be the only weapon to combat Donald Trump’s campaign

Mar 3, 2016, 7:51 AM | Updated: 11:47 am

Current polls peg the anger rate among Republican voters at 60 percent. If the party sabotaged Trum...

Current polls peg the anger rate among Republican voters at 60 percent. If the party sabotaged Trump, what do you suppose the anger rate would be then? KIRO Radio's Dave Ross asks. (AP)

(AP)

The empire strikes back.

“I asked someone involved with the anti-Trump effort to rank the Republican panic on a scale of one to ten and he said eleven,” CBS News Political Director John Dickerson explained.

As the Super Tuesday results were confirming Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party, big time Republican backers were scrambling to set up an anti-Trump SuperPAC to take him down.

Related: Romney says safe future greatly diminished with Trump

Democratic strategists were laughing out loud!

Even Republican strategists couldn’t believe it.

“I have never seen this kind of cluelessness,” CNN Analyst Jeffrey Lord said.

Dickerson says the problem is that it’s a little late in the game. There’s certainly plenty of anti-Trump energy among members of the Republican brain trust.

“But harnessing that panic requires politicians and party regulars to organize themselves quickly and there’s no leader of this effort…,” he explained. “And there’s no guarantee. Attacks from the establishment could very well make Trump stronger.”

Both parties have superdelegates who can block a candidate that makes the party nervous. But while the Democrats’ superdelegates are free to vote as they want, Republican superdelegates have to follow the will of their states. So all that’s left, John says, is to create confusion.

Related: The Republican Party is about to become a subsidiary of the Trump Organization

“[By] launching a withering set of ads immediately in delegate-rich states like Ohio and Florida, which vote on March 15, the hope would be to tear Trump down and give some other candidate a chance to win,” he said. “Then, there’d be no clear winner and the delegates could be persuaded to pick someone other than Trump in the possibly more controlled environment of the convention.”

Current polls peg the anger rate among Republican voters at 60 percent. If the party sabotaged Trump, what do you suppose the anger rate would be then?

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Confusion might be the only weapon to combat Donald Trump’s campaign