Republican party elites are struggling to gain steam with their “Dump Trump” campaign.
Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney led the charge this week with his unprecedented public attacks on front-runner Donald Trump.
Romney followed up his speech by pushing for a brokered convention on Friday.
Reuters reported:
A plan to block Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump struggled to gain traction on Friday as rival candidates rejected it, while Democrats reveled in the chaos they hoped would boost their chances of keeping the White House.
The country’s top elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said he was not interested in an effort to draft him into the White House race.
And U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative presidential hopeful, ruled out a deal to pick a compromise Republican candidate at the party’s July convention, which senior party figures see as their best chance to stop the unpredictable billionaire.
“The D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the establishment. If that will happen we will have a manifold revolt in this country,” Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
“You want to beat Donald Trump, you beat Donald Trump with the voters,” he said.
Party leaders worry Trump would not be able to beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the election, but time is running out after he won most of the states that voted in this week’s Super Tuesday.
Senior Republicans also fear Trump’s plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and ban Muslims from entering the United States will turn off voters in November and upset U.S. allies.