Summary of research for the Republican Autopsy, 2012
Let’s review. Back in 2012, the GOP decided to do an autopsy of what went wrong with Mitt Romney and the 2012 election. (For those of us keeping score, the highlight was watching the Karl Rove meltdown. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Reince Priebus selected people with gravitas to undertake the study, including Ari Fleischer and Haley Barbour, and the team interviewed over 52,000 Republicans. They reached conclusions related to being more inclusive, changing their messaging, and doing serious outreach. I’m not making this up, you can read it here. Had they done any of those things, this would be a different March of 2016.
But they did the exact opposite, and then when the poster child for the absolute worst parts of the Republican Party started a campaign, they made fun of him, and wrote him off. And so today, their presumptive candidate is Donald Trump and they’re floundering for a way to cheat him out of the nomination.
The rhetoric yesterday was amazing. Utilizing, or potentially changing Rule 40, Currently, this rule says that unless a candidate has won eight states outright, his name cannot be entered in nomination. As of this writing, Trump has won 19 states, Cruz 7, Rubio 3 and Kasich 1. Cruz may well get his eighth (think Utah) but Rubio is out, and Kasich has a heavy lift. Notwithstanding the delegate count, which is a mixture of proportional, semi-proportional and winner-take-all, it’s basically down to two on the floor. This also precludes the floated Republican plan of Paul Ryan or someone else who wasn’t part of the primary elections. This rule was enacted to stop Ron Paul in 2012, after the shenanigans they used in 2008 to invalidate his delegates in Saint Paul. The GOP is infamous in its ability to move the goalposts so they’ll likely screw with the rule, but Trump is different. Really: take the quiz.
The delegate race is on now, and that’s not what you’re seeing on TV, because delegates are actual humans sent to the convention to vote a certain way for at least the first ballot. The same ground game that gets people to caucuses selects the delegates. And states set up how that happens. For example, here in Pennsylvania you can vote for your delegates in addition to voting for your presidential preference. On the Democratic side, the delegates are bound to the candidate whose name appears to the right of the delegate’s name. On the Republican side, however, the delegates are bound to the state party. Which means the candidate organizations need to be reaching out now to the men and women who are already on the ballot. Note that those petitions were out in late January and early February. Trump doesn’t have the ground game to win the hearts and minds of the delegates in living rooms. HOWEVER, he’s got something else: groundswell.
Yesterday I spoke with a couple of Republicans who are from the “old” wing of the party. One asked me to find a way to convince him to vote for Hillary. Another had trouble finding words to express her dismay over what was going on. “How?” she kept asking, “How did we not see this coming?” They really never believed this could happen: completely blind to the amount of their party they had pushed to the sidelines since the time of Reagan.
They’re talking about a new GOP — an actual new party. They’re talking about how if Trump comes in at 2136 delegates (of 1237) they’ll deny him in Cleveland. They harken back to how Lincoln got the nomination in 1860. They missed the points made in the autopsy, they missed the rise of Trump, and as of yesterday they are still infuriating their party members by refusing to even speak to Merrick Garland.
Trump is talking riots if he doesn’t get the nomination, and whether or not he gets the nomination, he’ll certainly get riots in the streets. This is not going to be Watts in ’65, nor the riots in Chicago, New York, DC,, Baltimore, Ferguson, etc…these are going to be riots in “nice” neighborhoods. Public spaces. White rioters. Skinheads. Klansman. It will be a sight.
As I’ve said before, I don’t believe the GOP can stop Trump. I think he can get the delegates. I’ve been contacted by Democrats asking if it pays to switch temporarily to the Republican party to help Trump in upcoming primaries. Answer: maybe yes, maybe no, depends where one lives. But it’s up to us: we, the Democrats, are the last line of defense.
Rule 40(b) requires a majority of the delegation in 8 states which is not quite the same thing as winning a state. Cruz “won” Iowa, but did not get a majority of the delegation. Trump won North Carolina, but did not get a majority of the delegation. Right now, Trump is at 10 states in which he has an absolute majority of the delegates(chronologically, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Hawaii, Mississippi, Florida, Illinois, and Northern Marianas), Cruz is at 3 (Texas, Kansas, Maine, and Idaho), and Kasich is at 1 (Ohio). At this point, Missouri depends upon if Cruz requests a recount. On the current numbers, Trump is up 37 to 15. If Cruz somehow gains enough votes in a recount to get the at-large delegates, he would add Missouri to his list. Similarly, Cruz is currently leading in Wyoming (9 out of 12 delegates), but will not be assured of winning Wyoming until after the state convention. On the other hand, if they went back to the old rule (only a plurality and only five delegations), Cruz would have enough states and Kasich would probably have enough states if Rubio and Bush released their delegates to support Kasich.
There is also the question of the relation between Rule 16 and Rule 40. Rule 16 seems to imply that delegates are bound to candidates on the first ballot even if a candidate’s name is not formally placed into nomination. As such, there seems to be an argument that delegates are free to vote for candidates who have not been formally nominated (even on subsequent ballots). So even if Trump and Cruz are the only candidates that get nomination speeches on the floor of the convention, the rules do not necessarily limit the party to those two candidates.