lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
As amusing as that may be, the reality is that if no candidate gets a majority of pledged delegates by convention day, and if the delegates at the convention decide they don't like either Trump or Cruz, and can't get a majority to support either candidate in later voting rounds, that means they've got to start looking at other people.
The point is that none of them are electable in a year that was most beneficial to them. Considering the demographic, it's simply irresponsible to believe that Trump supporters are going to support, in significant numbers anyway, anyone picked by a brokered convention.
Including Trump? You do get that if it's an open primary (or contested, the term "brokered" would be better applied to a Dem convention if the margin of pledged delegates is <= to the number of super delegates), then Trump also would depend on pledged delegates changing their vote to him in order to win, right? Everyone is in the same boat there, and no one's supporters are going to be super happy. Here's the thing though, Trumps negatives are the highest of any Republican in the race. So it stands to reason that the GOP will lose more actual general election voters if he's granted the nomination via open delegate voting at the convention then if someone else is.
You also have to remember that Trump's strategy is to take advantage of the top heavy delegate awarding system the GOP uses to garner sub 40% voter support into a nomination by having enough pledged delegates to avoid any sort of open vote for a candidate. Because in an open vote, he'll lose. He knows this. Everyone knows this. It's also why he's spending zero effort trying to help place specific people in delegate seats. He can't win that way. He knows that there's no way he can get enough actual Trump supporters to take those delegate seats to get even remotely close to a majority (or even a strong minority). He must have them forced to vote for him in the convention via the pledge system. Once released from that pledge, they'll move to any other candidate but him.
So one can argue (I am arguing this in fact) that Trump's actual support among voters is smaller than his relative delegate count, while other candidate's voter support is higher (much higher in some cases). Which is why you can't just assume that the best choice is to give it to the guy who got the most pledged delegates. That number is intentionally off balance in order to maximize the odds of a single clear winner. But in the case where a clear winner does not appear, you can't use it as a means of determining who is actually most supported among party voters, and thus would be the best choice. Ultimately, once you reach that point, it's not about delegate count at all, but who the delegates think would have the best chance of unifying the party (or at least retaining the most voter support).
And that's not going to be Trump. It might not be Cruz. Hence my point about looking elsewhere. You can also make the point that if Cruz is chosen over Trump, it'll look like it's just plain anti-Trump. Same deal if in reverse Trump is chosen over Cruz. Oddly, if you pick neither of them, neither of them will be as upset about it. When you fight a hard and dirty battle against someone, it's not uncommon to adopt the idea that "even if I lose, I don't want him to win" to come to the forefront, and picking someone other than either of them might actually result in the best outcome. They can both save face, and choose to support whomever the delegates chose, because neither one "lost" to the other. Seems strange, but it's really not.
Quote:
Being able to say you're more delegate rich than Mittens...
There's no "more" here though. That would suggest a comparison to someone who had a number of delegates greater than zero, and had actually participated in the process. What you'd say is that you ran in the campaign, and won delegates. Something that Mitt nor Ryan did. That's a pretty huge distinction.
Obviously, we're all just speculating here, but I find the narrative about "what happens if Trump loses the nomination despite having the most delegates" to be pretty one sided. If Trump fails to win enough pledged delegates, then losing the nomination is exactly what *should* happen, because his pledged count isn't the result of broad popular appeal among the party voters. Similarly, Cruz isn't terribly popular and is only there because he's the guy voters had to support in order to prevent Trump from getting a majority of pledged delegates and effectively stealing the nomination. It's not remotely out of the realm of possibility (even probability) that if it comes to open delegate voting that neither of them will win. But I don't know if the delegates would go so far as to support a candidate who never ran at all. Hence my suggestion that they could settle on either Rubio or Kasich. I'd certainly assume they'd at least try to go that route before going to someone totally outside the field.