Jophiel wrote:
Trump will certainly have more delegates than anyone else going into the convention.
Pledged delegates. My point is that due to the top heavy method of distributing pledged delegates, he has won a percentage of pledged delegates that is well out of proportion to his actual popular support in the party. His shot at winning is based on the rules that allow for this. He really can't complain if he fails to get a majority going into the convention and those pledged delegates are freed up to vote as they actually wish rather than as the rules force them to, and the result is more in keeping with his actual popular support in the GOP.
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His supporters absolutely won't be satisfied with "rules are rules" if the nomination goes to someone with a fraction of his pledged delegates and votes. There, the GOP finds itself stuck in the position of nuance being harder to explain than bumper sticker slogans. They have my empathy, if not my sympathy.
Sure. But supporters of a candidate are rarely satisfied when their candidate doesn't win, regardless of how it happens. And, yeah, I get the bumper sticker aspect of this, but the fact is that pledged delegate count is actually the "rigged" part of the nomination process (ie: He's the one taking advantage of the "rules"). If there were some magical way to allow every single GOP primary voter in the country to vote directly in each round in the convention, does anyone think that Trump would have a chance to win? Well, more than a snowball's chance anyway? No. He wouldn't. So it's not "unfair" that he can't win if it comes down to open voting of the delegates (which are presumed to represent the voters, right?), since he wouldn't win if the voters were there directly.
It is, in fact, completely fair. Doesn't mean that they wont complain about it anyway, but those complaints are (or should be) pretty weak. You can't whine about the rules that don't benefit you when you've been taking advantage of other rules that do all along. Well, you can, but you look pretty foolish doing it.
Heck. Even I thought to ask about how the actual delegates are chosen (not pledged, but who physically occupies the seat in the delegation). And I'm not professionally involved in any political campaigns. You'd think someone in the Trump campaign would have thought about this, and maybe thought about looking into that process and what it means. That they didn't either means complete incompetence on the part of his staff, or a conscious decision go to "all in" on just winning the pledged delegate count. And to be honest, I suspect the latter to be the case (despite claims after the fact of it all being "unfair"). His staff likely realized that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find enough pro-Trump GOP party members in enough states (how does one qualify to even be in the running to be a delegate?), much less place them in the delegation to make any difference if it came down to later voting rounds in the convention, and chose to focus on winning the pledged count instead. And it was probably the right choice.
Again, doesn't stop people from complaining about it, but it's empty whining IMO.
Edited, Apr 14th 2016 6:44pm by gbaji