Delegates matter

On April 16, Donald Trump was on Fox and Friends Saturday, apparently being given equal time for all the news about himself that morning. After running an advertising tease for over 3 hours, about him being live by telephone later on in the program to explain all the talk about him in the news, Donald Trump was given about 13 minutes to set everyone straight on his side of things, particularly his assertion that losing the delegate battle in Colorado was due to Cruz cheating and Republican dirty tricks. “After they saw that I was going to win Colorado, in August they changed the system," he said. So let’s go back to August and see what happened.

The RCP average of the polls taken before the first debate on August 6 had Donald Trump at 24.3%, Jeb Bush at 12.5%, Scott Walker at 9.5%, Ben Carson at 8.5%, Ted Cruz at 5.5%, Marco Rubio at 5.3%, and Carley Fiorina at 1.3%. After the first debate, a Rasmussen poll taken August 9-10 had Trump with 17% (down from 25% before the first debate), Rubio and Bush at 10%, Carly Fiorina and Scott Walker 9%, Carson 8%, Cruz 7%. The article was titled “Has ‘The Donald’ Peaked,” an example of some of the talk leading up to the Republican meeting in Colorado on August 21 showing was that Trump was not the inevitable threat to the Republican establishment as The Donald would like us to believe. Donald Trump gives no actual proof for his statement “they saw that I was going to win in Colorado,” and neither does the news or the polling of that time indicate that it was settled that Trump was going to be the nominee, causing Republicans across the country to modify their delegating process according to the dictates of the Republican establishment. In a reprint of a news story first run on August 25, 2015, the Denver Post summarized the vote of the Colorado Republicans executive committee on August 21:

“The RNC tightened the rules in 2012 to eliminate nonbinding straw polls and help prevent similar stunts in the future, forcing Colorado Republicans to re-evaluate their process. An effort earlier this year to switch to a presidential primary system failed amid party infighting.” “With the change, the only way Colorado Republican delegates would remain relevant is the remote chance that no candidate emerges as a clear winner in the primary contest. In this case, the state's unbound delegates would receive significant attention and may hold the key to victory in a floor fight. " ‘If there's the potential for a brokered convention in any way, the unaffiliated delegates become extremely important,’ said Joy Hoffman, the Arapahoe County GOP chairwoman who attended the party meeting.”

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The following account of a delegate shows that the problem wasn’t dirty tricks, it was just that Trump supporters didn’t show up, and possibly didn’t exist TO show up:

““After long being an unaffiliated voter, I registered as a Republican voter late last year, in part so that I could participate in Colorado’s Republican caucus system this year....I looked up how to participate in my precinct caucus on March 1, showed up, participated in the meeting, and successfully ran as an alternate delegate to the county convention on March 19 and to the state convention on April 9. “Interestingly, in my precinct, I’m pretty sure that not a single person had participated in the caucus system before. We were all ‘outsiders.’ We even had to ask one of the party organizers to step in for a while to help us figure out the process. But we worked it out and got along fine. We even had a very civil discussion about the presidential candidates; one fellow was strongly for Trump, while several of us were strongly against him.” “The Founders were very careful to create levels of representation; indeed, it is part of the checks and balances of constitutionalism. All we do in Colorado is keep an extra layer of representation in the process; we choose state delegates who then chose national delegates. One can argue that the caucus system is not ideal for whatever reason, but the fact that it is based on the representative model of government isn’t by itself a very good reason to oppose it.”

Over the years, I have been involved in the convention process for both parties, having been involved in it from precinct caucus chairman up to county and state convention delegate. It's all set up to be a very open and democratic process for party members, yet the party needs to maintain a structure that insures that the candidate that becomes the nominee actually represents their party. After Ted Cruz dominated the delegation selection process in Colorado last week, instead of Donald Trump saying something to the effect of, "You beat me in this one, but we'll win the next one," we hear charges of cheating and dirty tricks, apparently, according to Trump, all originating from Reince Priebus and the Republican National Committee and their supposed surrogate Ted Cruz. But the culprit, as it turns out, is the political process itself! How a system that has been used by American political parties for nearly 200 years could be rigged against a specific individual in 2016 is beyond me. But the answer is simple, really: the issue was made up to direct the focus away from a campaign's failure at working the process to get their candidate more delegates. To make up an issue because it suits the momentary needs of one's campaign is an unprincipled way to approach politics. Besides being an attempt to make people believe something that is simply not true, it takes the focus off of the real issues that need to be discussed in order to determine the best candidate. Supporters trying to add logic to the propaganda of the moment make the matter worse. For example Ben Carson, former candidate now Trump supporter, went off the deep end defending the sudden all-encompassing issue of making every decision a one-man-one-vote election. Carson goes so far as to compare the delegate process in a convention like Jim Crow laws from 50-plus years ago that prevented black people from voting. Then he goes from there to say who needs the Electoral College. What??? In one fell swoop, political propaganda has taken us back to grade school social studies! It has been a proven fact since ancient Greece that direct democracy doesn't work. Principled people with a knowledge of the issues would be needed to debate and vote on legislation. The democratic process would need representatives or delegates to represent the wishes of the people and make decisions for them at all levels of government. Our Founding Fathers recognized that and came up with an ingenious idea for a government that Lincoln would describe as of, by, and for the people. Representative government was needed so that government wouldn't be an impossible process of making every decision by having a public plebiscite where everybody voted on everything. And having people from each state coming together to discuss issues of national importance required people delegated to represent them.

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As political parties developed, a similar representative process was found to be necessary in determining presidential nominees for the party. Delegates would be selected to represent party members' choices for President. But delegates would also represent the policies of the party as articulated in the party platform at the state and national level. Delegates would be chosen to work on the rules committee as well. And having a majority required for the eventual nominee to be chosen meant delegates would possibly have to change the nominee they voted for during the process. So in many respects, having a primary election where all you do is vote for the candidate of your choice, is a very undemocratic process, because voters have no say in the other matters of party politics. The party would go into the general election with little consensus for their nominee because with strictly a one-time election during the primary, the nominee would usually be determined by only a plurality. There has to be a process for choosing party officials, delegates, and determining all the inner workings of the party. So choosing delegates through caucuses is really not an unfair process compared to voting at the polls, it actually involves party members in party activities from the grassroots level all the way up to the national convention. Delegates to the next level are chosen from the people in attendance each step of the way. It's shameful that as a candidate who is being considered for the Republican presidential nominee, who is the ultimate representative of the party, would choose a state where he lost in the delegate process due to lack of involvement, as an example of dirty politics. As much as Donald Trump wishes he could just give stump speeches and then have Republicans go into a voting booth, party politics is so much more than voting someone into being the Republican nominee.