What is most probable in 2016 and more obvious each day is that with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. There is too much on the line for us to let that happen. The Supreme Court decisions in the past two weeks prove it. But to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming President, Republicans must stop Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. Trump as the nominee makes it vastly more likely that Hillary Clinton will become president.

No amount of calls for rallying to Trump’s banner will help him. The Republican Party is already the smaller of the two major political parties. Even if all the Republicans who oppose him — myself included — should suddenly support him, it would not be enough. His negatives are over 70 percent. He hovers around 30 percent in the polls. His fundraising is anemic. He is prone to gaffes of extraordinary size. He has no campaign apparatus to turn people out in November and his campaign surrogates have no compelling message to convert the undecided to supporters.

In the past 24 public opinion polls, Trump has lost all but one. For those who say variants of “everybody said he’d lose in the primaries and look what happened,” they should be reminded that those of us, myself included, who did say that chose to ignore the polling in the primaries. The polling was right in the primaries. The polling is right headed into the general election as well.

The only reason Donald Trump is not doing worse right now is because the Democrats have nominated Hillary Clinton. Fifty percent of the country finds her unfavorable. But Donald Trump is still losing to her. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that “so strong is many Americans’ opposition to Clinton and desire for a change in Washington that even some registering their disapproval of Trump say that as of now they feel compelled to vote for him.” But Trump still loses to Clinton in that poll by 12 percent, even with that level of disapproval for Clinton. The disapproval for Trump is even more.

Trump has less than $2 million in the bank.  Trump claims he will be competitive in California, New York, and Maryland. In the first and second, Trump got less votes winning than Bernie Sanders did losing in the Democratic primaries. In the third, the state’s Republican governor refuses to endorse Trump. Every time Trump announces a path forward in newly competitive states, polling shows that not only is he delusional, but Republican states are the ones that are becoming competitive for Clinton. Major Republicans, including the governors of Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, and others, refuse to endorse Trump.

To believe Donald Trump is going to beat Hillary Clinton requires one to believe so much that is not so and ignore reality. The reality is that this emperor has no clothes. The campaign, laid naked and bare, is a disaster built on top of a steaming divot. The last ground on which Trump’s voters stand is that Ronald Reagan was in the thirties behind Jimmy Carter in 1980 at this point. But even that is not so. Only the Gallup poll showed that. The other polls and the polling average itself in 1980 had Ronald Reagan ahead of Jimmy Carter by the end of May in 1980 and Reagan never again fell behind Carter.

Conservatives must stop Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump is too flawed a vessel for the Republican Party to sail to victory against her. The delegates must unite and must reject any requirements to vote for Trump. To stop Hillary Clinton, they must stop Donald Trump. To stop Donald Trump, the delegates must free themselves for the good of the party, the country, and our shared future.

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