The floor fight at the GOP convention was an attempt to stymie Cruz's 2020 bid

Jon Ward:
...
The RNC’s argument to the D.C. delegates boiled down to this: A vote for the rules reset would open the door to Ted Cruz becoming the GOP’s nominee four years from now.

Cruz is already laying the groundwork for another run for president in 2020, but a top RNC official told Yahoo News that they expect him to run even if Donald Trump becomes president this fall. That would represent the first major challenge of an incumbent president from inside his own party since Teddy Kennedy ran against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

“If Trump wins, you better bet your ass Cruz is going to primary him,” the RNC official told Yahoo News.

And so the RNC officials told D.C. delegates that a rules reset would open the door to an effort by a key Cruz ally, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, to close primary contests in several states to independent and Democratic voters. Cuccinelli and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed for the closed primary in the convention rules committee meeting last week.

Closed primaries would exclude independents and limit the nomination process to registered Republicans, a more conservative voting group overall, which would favor Cruz.

The RNC official told D.C. delegates that they had signed on to “a movement by Mike Lee and Ken Cuccinelli and Ted Cruz to further close the primary system, as it relates to 2020.”
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John Kasich has also indicated that he is unlikely to support Trump and is also not going to vote for Hillary Clinton.   Trump and many of his backers have so alienated many Republicans that his only route to victory is to drive Hillary Clinton's negatives lower than his own subarctic numbers.

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