CLEVELAND ― Consider an alternate universe in which Donald Trump did not run for president.
The Huffington Post asked more than 20 delegates here at the Republican National Convention what would have happened if Trump had never run ― who would have won the Republican nomination? ― and the conclusion is a pretty simple cop-out: No one has a damn clue.
Many delegates are willing to offer their theories. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would have retained most of his own supporters and picked up the lion’s share of the Trump voters. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) would have surged at the right time and the establishment vote would have coalesced behind him. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wouldn’t have had Trump impaling him at every turn, and the other candidates would never have been able to overcome his massive early money advantage.
On a very basic level, the answer to the question seemed to be less about what would have really happened in this fictitious universe and more about who each delegate liked.
“If Trump wasn’t in it, it probably would have been Scott Walker,” pro-Trump delegate David J. McElwee of Pennsylvania said. “Or Cruz.”
Pressed about why it would have been Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was the first major candidate to drop out, McElwee explained that Walker had “a lot of knowledge in running the state” and “putting the unions in check.”
Even when delegates were able to check their own biases, their insights didn’t get much better than conjecture.
“I like to think Ted Cruz would have won, but he would have run into the same establishment road blocks that Trump ran into,” Illinois delegate James Devors said, adding that he didn’t think Cruz had the same political abilities to run over the GOP establishment.
“Chances are we would have been stuck with Jeb Bush,” Devors said.
California delegate Deanne Tate-Johnson noted that she, too, thought it would have come down to a contest between Cruz and Bush ― Cruz because the voter dynamics point to a majority, Bush because of his superior campaign and money advantages ― but she thought Bush would have probably won.
“Cruz tried to play the game, he got a little foot into it,” Tate-Johnson said, “but I think he would have gotten trampled, even though most of us would have probably ended up supporting Cruz.”
It may be a fun parlor game to consider a world where Trump had never run (in yet another alternate reality where we sit around parlors talking about politics). But, to get a little too philosophical about it, there’s a limit to what we can know about a 2016 race without Trump.
And many delegates were epistemically modest enough to acknowledge that.
“I can tell you right now, if Trump had not been in this race, there is no way to tell what would have happened,” Texas delegate David Wylie said. “Because, from the beginning, he completely upset the apple cart.”
Another Texas delegate, Nelson Spear, compared the question to an online computer game.
“You ever play those Sims games?” Spear asked, noting that he can’t play too much himself because it “eats up” too much of his time.
“I find that when you play those games and you say, ‘OK, I’m going to take this route,’ and you go, ‘Brrrrrmmm,’” Spear said, steering his hands to the right. “And it ends up one [way] ― then, if you back up, what I do is, I like to save my game, when I played it, and I say, ‘Well, let’s see what happens if I take the right fork instead of the left fork.’”
“It’s a completely different,” Spear said, trailing off. “And something totally and completely unexpected. So there’s no way for me to intelligently say.”
Even members of Congress, who have a little more experience in politics, were largely dumbfounded by the question.
Rep. Mark Meadows, who is serving as a delegate here for North Carolina, said it would be hard to say because the dynamics would change with Trump gone. “If not Trump, probably Cruz. If not Cruz, probably Rubio,” Meadows eventually theorized.
Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) also thought it came down to Cruz and Rubio, with Rubio having the slight advantage.
“I mean, I could easily be persuaded out of this, but my instinct is Rubio would have been the alternate reality,” Roskam said, adding that Rubio was surging at the right time and represents the aspirational nature of the party.
What the question ended up revealing is how little Republican insiders understand about this election. How Trump ended up on the stage accepting the nomination is still a mystery ― even to many of his supporters. And the universe where Trump didn’t run isn’t the one we live in.
We live in the strange reality where he did run, and the even stranger reality where he won.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.