If Donald Trump is just one delegate shy of the full 1,237 he needs to clinch the GOP presidential nomination, he'll lose the whole thing, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday.
"All I can tell you is Donald Trump says he's going to get 1,400 delegates," the South Carolina Republican, who dropped his own bid for the 2016 nomination, told
CNN's "At This Hour" program with John Berman and Kate Bolduan. "Mr. Trump, you better get 1,237 because if you get 1,236 you're in trouble."
"Maybe" there would be one unbound delegate from somewhere who would support Trump, Graham said, but more likely, "there will be people like me and others trying to say you fell short, and let's revote on the second ballot."
And if that happens, Graham said, "I'd like to help make the argument that if you make Donald Trump the nominee of the party, it will be the disaster of all disasters for the Republican Party."
After all, he said, Abraham Lincoln was in second place and ended up winning in an open convention, so "it worked out pretty well for him."
Graham said Thursday he doesn't know yet if he'll be going to the convention, but if he gets to be a delegate from his state, "if Donald Trump doesn't win on the first ballot, most of the South Carolina delegates are going to vote for Ted Cruz. Stop whining about it. That's just the way the rules are."
But if he is a delegate, Graham said, he'll have to vote for Trump if it's on the first ballot, but "on the second ballot I'm going to vote for Ted Cruz because I can."
Meanwhile, Graham ruled himself out of being a nominee, and said he thinks the only ones who deserve to be nominated are Trump, Cruz, or John Kasich, the final three people in the race.
"This is an outsider year," said Graham. "I disagree with Ted Cruz on many issues tactically, but we're in the same party. He represents an outsider much more than I do. I'm respectful of this movement within the Republican Party even though I don't agree with it."
Graham also does not believe Kasich will drop out of the race, even though he has only won his own home state of Ohio, and Kasich and Cruz are hurting each other in some states.
"Here is my advice to Ted Cruz, work with John Kasich in a strategic fashion to deny Donald Trump the 1,237," said Graham. "I'm not so much worried about 2016 as I am about the future of the party. If we jump over Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and pick an insider, that's probably the end of the Republican Party as we know it."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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