How a third party candidate could give us a Republican president -- a plan hiding in plain sight.

It hasn't happened since the election of 1825, but the doomsday solution for Republicans has been hiding out in plain sight.  It's in both Article II and in the 12rh Amendment of the United States Constitution.   As Adam Phillips points out in an almost unnoticed sidebar article on Huffington Post, titled "How Paul Ryan Will Pick the Next President," there is method in conservatives' hint that they will run a third-party conservative candidate if Trump wins the Republican nomination.   Pundits have dismissed that idea, saying that it would split the Republican vote and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton.

But Phillips spells out how that might work otherwise -- and result in a Republican president. The frightening truth is that it is very plausible and scary as hell.  In fact, this was in Michael Bloomsberg's op-ed explaining why he was dropping his third party bid, but no one paid much attention to Bloomberg's words: 

In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president. 

As Phillips' so correctly points out, here's how it could happen:  
1.  Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee.

2.  This group of conservatives form a third party (plans are in the works) and run a moderate establishment candidate, probably Mitt Romney, as president, and John Kasich, as VP.

3.  In the November election, none of the three parties wins a 5o%+ majority of the electoral votes.   Remember, it's not the popular vote, but the electoral vote -- and it's a majority, not a plurality.

4.   The actual election of the President and Vice President takes place, not in November, but later in a meeting of Congress when the Electoral College presents the votes of electors that have been chosen as a result of the November election.

5.  According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution, and further clarified in the 12th Amendment, if no one has a majority of electoral votes, then the House of Representatives elects the president (not the whole Congress, as Bloomberg said).   Republicans control the House, and they would pick the next president. 

6.  Each state gets one vote only, and the representatives of each state have to decide for whom to cast their state's vote.  Wyoming would have one vote, California would have one vote, New York one vote, Rhode Island one vote.

Phillips concludes:
"Worst case scenario, they prevent Donald Trump from winning the White House. Best case scenario they pull enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to prevent her from securing the necessary majority of 270 electoral votes."

And then we wind up with a Republican president chosen by the Republican controlled House of Representatives.  Perhaps this is what Romney has in mind, since he has stepped into the fray -- denouncing Donald Trump, saying he will vote for Ted Cruz in the Utah primary but not saying he endorses him.   He would accept a draft, no doubt, to save the nation from the disaster he thinks would be Donald Trump.

As Phillips elaborates:
"A moderate conservative third-party would definitely pull enough votes away from Trump to tank his candidacy, but the right candidate could also spoil it for Clinton. . . .  In this cycle, however, a third party spoiler candidate could in fact carry a handful of states. . . .  If you are an establishment Republican right now, this is actually an even better outcome than a brokered convention: Because you have even greater control over, not only the conservative nominee, but the ability to handpick the next president. . . ."

This hypothetical third party, with the right nominees, say Romney and Kasich, might actually win a few states.   Kasich might bring in Ohio, and possibly Michigan, both of which he won big in the primary.   Romney might bring in Utah (Mormons) and a few other western states.    In a close race between the Democratic and Republican nominees, it wouldn't take many electoral votes to deny them both a majority.   And then the House Republicans get to choose. 

I don't know why Democrats aren't more worried about this scenario of a third party throwing it to the House Republicans to pick #45.

Ralph