Unconventional #29: The math that makes dumping Trump such a long shot. Plus: How Sanders is still winning (and more!)

Unconventional is Yahoo News’ complete guide to what could be the craziest presidential conventions in decades. Here’s what you need to know today.

1. The case against ‘Dump Trump’

Here at Unconventional we’ve been watching the whole “Dump Trump” phenomenon pretty closely.

We’ve explored the history of dark-horse convention candidates. We’ve explained the theory that Republican delegates are already technically free to nominate someone else in Cleveland, despite the widespread belief that they are bound by the results of the primary votes in each state. We’ve interviewed North Dakota Rules Committee member Curly Haugland, who has written an entire book on the subject. And we previewed the rebels’ actual convention plans with Kendal Unruh, the leader of Free the Delegates — the most-organized Dump Trump effort to date.

Now, for the sake of fairness, we’d like to examine the other side of the equation. Here’s why — despite the thousands of people who’ve participated in their calls and the hundreds of delegates who’ve apparently signed on — the Dump Trump forces will still face nearly insurmountable odds in Cleveland.

Let’s start with the math. When assessing The Donald’s current chances of emerging from the RNC as the Republican nominee, there are four figures you have to factor in:

1,542. 899. 57. 18.

The first (1,542) is the number of delegates Trump won during the primaries — well over the 1,237 required to cement one’s presumptive-nominee status. The second (899) is the number that all of his rivals won combined. (Another 31 delegates are unallocated.) In accordance with various state laws and party rules, Trump’s delegates have committed to vote for him on the first ballot; the same goes for the other candidates’ delegates.

To block Trump on the first ballot, his detractors would have to deny him a 1,237-vote majority by persuading at least 306 Trump delegates to break their commitments and vote for someone (anyone) else. That’s a tall order.

To actually choose a different nominee, meanwhile, every single one of these non-Trump delegates would then have throw his or her weight behind the same (currently nonexistent) alternative candidate — and another 32 delegates would have to join the cause as well.

In our interview, Kendal Unruh claimed that more than 400 delegates have told her that they will not vote for Trump in Cleveland — no matter what. But how many of them were planning to vote for Trump to begin with? Again, 899 delegates have already committed to cast their initial ballots for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and other candidates not named Donald Trump. In all likelihood, Unruh has recruited most of her 400 comrades from this delegate pool — meaning that Trump’s massive delegate majority is still intact.

As a member of the Rules Committee, Unruh plans to flip Trump delegates by passing a so-called “conscience clause,” which she believes will provide them with the cover they need to break their commitments and vote for a different candidate.

This is where the numbers 57 and 18 come in. The Rules Committee has 112 members; Unruh needs 57 votes to pass her new rule. The problem is that she only has 18 (at most).

“I’ve got 12 solids, four soft, then, of course, Guy and I,” Unruh told Unconventional on Thursday. (Guy is Guy Short, her fellow Rules Committee member from Colorado.)

Unruh’s chances of getting to 57 are slim; most of the rest of the Rules Committee is not predisposed to rebellion. Last week, Politico reached out to all 112 members to see where they stood on the idea of dumping Trump. Here’s what they discovered:

In other words, at least 91 Rules Committee members have either openly rejected a Dump Trump rule change or would be extremely likely to do so in Cleveland. For now, at least, Unruh’s math doesn’t add up.

Making matters worse for the Dump Trump crowd is the fact that the (previously disengaged) RNC and the (previously disorganized) Trump campaign are now teaming up to fight back.

“While party people are not necessarily Trump people, and Trump people are not necessarily party people, the two sides are now locked in a marriage of convenience,” The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters reported Sunday. “Mr. Trump is trying to protect his nomination, while the party is trying to protect the integrity of its nominating process.”

Together, according to Peters, they have hired “about a dozen operatives to ensure that the nominating vote goes off without a hitch.” Associates of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus are interrogating rookie delegates about their intentions; Priebus loyalists are running the Rules Committee and working to bar unpredictable delegates from other key convention bodies. Meanwhile, RNC lawyers are helping state bosses deflate local Dump Trump efforts, which has led GOP chairs to warn (and even threaten) wavering delegates in Minnesota, Washington and elsewhere.

If the Trump campaign continues on its current trajectory — trailing in the polls, occasionally stumbling, but basically holding itself together — the Manhattan mogul won’t get fired in Cleveland. The conscience clause will fail. Unruh & Co. will issue a “minority report.” Even if that measure somehow attracts the 28 Rules Committee votes required for it to proceed to the convention floor, it will stand almost no chance of passing once there. The drama could be divisive. Rogue delegates may kick and scream during the balloting process. But ultimately, they won’t sink Trump.

At this point, the only way that Trump will implode at the convention is if his campaign implodes first. And the only person who can control that is Trump himself.

None of which, however, has stopped his opponents from releasing…

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2. … the first wave of ads calling for GOP delegates to Dump Trump in Cleveland

Free the Delegates isn’t the only group determined to thwart Donald Trump’s nomination. There are at least two others: Delegates Unbound and Courageous Conservatives.

Both have begun to advertise in recent days.

Founded by Republican strategists M. Dane Waters, David B. Rivkin Jr., and Eric O’Keefe, among others, Delegates Unbound plans to spend $2.5 million to $3.5 million between now and the convention to convince GOP delegates that they’re free to vote their conscience — and that their consciences should instruct them to vote against Trump.

The first Delegates Unbound ad is called “Follow Your Conscience.” It’s airing now, mainly on Fox and Fox News. The group spent $70,000 on the buy. It compares Trump (unfavorably) to Ronald Reagan.

And in our view, it’s unlikely to change many minds.

Why? Establishment delegates aren’t voting for Trump because they think he’s the second coming of The Gipper. They’re voting for him because they think the alternative — alienating his 14 million primary voters and sparking a GOP civil war — would be worse.

But watch for yourself — and drop us a line on Twitter (@andrewromano) to let us know what you think:

As for Courageous Conservatives — a pro-Ted Cruz super-PAC run by New Jersey tea partier Steve Lonegan that has now pivoted to the cause of unbinding the delegates in Cleveland — they’ve decided to stay local (at least for the time being). Their new Iowa radio ad urges conservatives to call Steve Scheffler, a national committeeman from Iowa who is trying to quash the revolt, and demand that he “let our delegates pick the best Republican to fight for our conservative values.”

Check it out here:

Scheffler, for one, isn’t convinced.

“Don’t bellyache to me that you don’t like the process. It is what it is,” he told the New York Times. “The voters have spoken. Why would 112 people say, ‘We don’t care what you did, we’re going to set our own rules?’”

Scheffler also noted that he doesn’t plan to check his voice mail until after the convention.

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3. Sanders wins big platform concessions from Clinton — but not big enough

For anyone who has forgotten why Bernie Sanders has yet to concede to Hillary Clinton — even though she currently has the support of 2,811 Democratic delegates, or 428 more than she needs for the nomination, and even though Sanders himself has admitted that he plans to vote for Clinton in November because “it doesn’t appear that I’m going to be the nominee” — what happened Friday in St. Louis should serve as a reminder.

After “several late nights and long hours of policy exchanges between the two campaigns and the DNC,” according to the Associated Press, the 15-member Platform Drafting Committee met for nine hours Friday to live up to its name and write a first draft of the 2016 Democratic Party platform.

You might recall that last month Sanders was awarded more seats on the drafting committee — five — than any runner-up in Democratic history. The idea, according to DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was to “make this the most representative and inclusive [platform] process in history.”

There was no guarantee, however, that Sanders would be able to rewrite the entire platform. The views and voices of the Vermont senator’s high-octane liberal appointees — philosophy professor Cornel West, Arab American Institute President James Zogby, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, environmental activist Bill McKibben, and Native American activist Deborah Parker — would certainly be heard. But they would not necessarily be heeded, given that Clinton would still control six seats on the committee and the DNC four.

Then came St. Louis. When the dust settled Friday, Sanders had won some serious concessions.

The platform draft calls for a $15-per-hour minimum wage and, like Sanders, describes the current hourly rate of $7.25 as a “starvation wage.” Clinton had previously argued for $12 nationally, plus higher wages in certain areas.

The draft goes on to declare that the federal government should increase Social Security benefits by asking wealthy Americans to pay higher taxes — a populist position that Sanders propelled into the Democratic mainstream and which both Clinton and President Obama subsequently adopted.

The draft also says that the death penalty should be abolished. Clinton argued during a debate this year that capital punishment should only be used in limited cases involving “heinous crimes.” Sanders believes the government should not use it at all.

Finally, the document tackles financial reform by advocating for “an updated and modernized version of Glass-Steagall,” the Depression-era law that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in investment-banking activities. Sanders has long pushed for a revival of Glass-Steagall. Clinton has opposed the idea.

That’s four sizable victories for Sanders — and four substantial compromises from Clinton.

In a statement Saturday, the Clinton campaign applauded the draft platform, calling it “the most ambitious and progressive platform our party has ever seen.”

That’s probably an accurate statement. And this is exactly what Sanders has been saying he wants all along — “the most progressive platform ever passed by the Democratic Party.”

So was he ecstatic when word of his platform victories reached him?

Hardly. He’s still Bernie Sanders, after all. And he still wants more.

In an interview Sunday with CNN, Sanders acknowledged that his platform team “made some good gains.” But he also insisted that there was “more to do.”

Sanders is right that he didn’t get his way on every issue. His team wanted to insert language into the draft platform opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but Clinton and DNC forces insisted on a vaguer line about there being “a diversity of views in the party.” (Obama has championed the TPP, and it would be odd for a Democratic platform to contradict a Democratic president.)

The panel narrowly rejected amendments that would have imposed a tax on carbon and a national freeze on fracking as well. And in the most passionate exchange of the day, Clinton and the DNC defeated a Zogby-led amendment that would have called for “an end to [Israeli] occupation and illegal settlements” in the West Bank and urged an international effort to rebuild Gaza, choosing instead Clinton’s language about a “two-state solution” that “provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity.”

“We lost some very important fights,” Sanders said on CNN. “We’re going to take that fight to Orlando, where the entire committee meets in two weeks. And if we don’t succeed there, then we’ll certainly take it to the floor of the Democratic convention.”

That’s Sanders’ prerogative. It may be what he needs to do to bring his supporters around and unite the party — that is, to fight for every last concession he can get. First in Orlando, where the larger Platform Committee will approve the document’s final language in early July; and then, if unsuccessful, with floor fights in Philadelphia, which Sanders can trigger with the support of a mere quarter of the Platform Committee members.

At a certain point, however, Sanders will have to step back and acknowledge that he lost, that Clinton won, and that he has already had a bigger impact on the Democratic Party than any runner-up in recent memory. That moment will come. The question is when.

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4. In the arena

A regular roundup of the big names making news before the conventions

Utah Rep. Mia Love, a rising star in the Republican Party, says she’s planning to skip next month’s GOP Convention, giving up her spot as a delegate. “I don’t see any upsides to it,” Love, 40, told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I don’t see how this benefits the state.” Love, a Haitian-American, faces a competitive reelection battle in Utah and has declined to say whether she will support Trump in the fall. She made her announcement hours after a former Trump advisor floated her as a possible VP pick.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine — rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s likeliest running mate — auditioned for the role of attack-dog-in-chief Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ripping Donald Trump for his reaction to Brexit. “It’s always got to be about him,” Kaine said. “He said, ‘Hey, the British pound is taking a beating now. That could help my hotel out. Your loss, Britain, is my gain.’ This is a guy who will always put himself first.”

Not to be outdone, Kaine’s fellow veep contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is set to make her first public campaign appearance on behalf of the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday in Cleveland. She has some experience battling Trump.

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5. The best of the rest

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Countdown

For the latest data, make sure to check the Yahoo News delegate scorecard and primary calendar.