Tom Coburn and Rick Perry discussed as potential third party Trump opponents

[Mr. Morden]

So Coburn's the only Republican who has been explicitly asked about it and didn't rule it out?  Yes, they mention Perry, but that was other people talking up Perry.  Perry himself hasn't said anything about it AFAIK.

[Mr. Morden]

Can't we find more credible candidates than Rick Perry?

Rick Perry getting 15%-20% in Texas (with enough funding, this might not be impossible), would put the state in play. That is all we really need! Clinton winning Texas with 41% of the vote would be precious!

But isn't Texas one of the harder states on which to get on the ballot, because of the deadline coming up soon?  I don't expect that such a candidate will be able to get on the ballot everywhere.  Though in states where he's not on the ballot, I guess there would be a write-in effort.

[Mr. Morden]

Again, big difference in terms of what we have from Coburn and Perry.  Coburn says he doesn't really want to run, but wouldn't rule it out.  Perry hasn't publicly addressed the topic at all, AFAIK (though there's an asterisk to that--see below).  But Perry has endorsed Cruz.  So he wouldn't start making any moves towards this while Cruz is still running anyway.

The closest Perry has come to indicating that he still might be interested in running was this comment from a few weeks ago:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/25/politics/rick-perry-brokered-convention/

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So someone brought up the third party option to Perry and he changed the subject to a brokered convention.  Make of that what you will.

[Mr. Morden]

Coburn now says no:

http://newsok.com/article/5486256

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Also, Rick Perry joined Cruz on the campaign trail in Arizona this week, and it resulted in this picture:

[Mr. Morden]

Some Republicans really want Hillary being elected. Ok, she's better than any establishment Republican. If the GOP want to win, they have to nominate TRUMP.

But some of them don't want to win with Trump.  They don't want Trumpism to take over the party, so if Trump is the nominee, they'd be perfectly happy to see him lose.