Is the GOP making ground breaking history? Super Tuesday is supposed to be the time when the party embraces their front runner. Everybody may be pissed their losing candidate came up short. But the voters made their feelings known.
Romney for example. Many GOP leaders didn’t like him. But he won the primaries and they had to endorse him. Thats Democracy. The votes are what matters. You run for office, win your primaries, and your the party’s candidate. Period. Time to make nice and the party comes together to support the winning candidate…
I don’t like Trump but dammit, he’s won these primaries. The voters have expressed themselves.
In 1986, two members of Lyndon LaRouche’s “movement” won the Democratic nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state in Illinois. (In Illinois, the secretary of state’s office runs what would be the DMV in other states, and the office is generally considered to be second in power only to the governor.)
Once the Democratic party realized what had happened, it actively attempted to distance itself from the two candidates (Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart), and make it clear to voters that the two LaRouche disciples did not have the party’s approval. The Democratic nominee for governor, Adlai Stevenson III, withdrew rather than run on the same slate as the two of them. Ultimately, the Republicans easily won the governorship, as well as the two other positions.
In 1972, a large group of candidates and mastery of complicated delegate allocation rules enabled George McGovern to win the Democratic nomination with only 25% of the primary vote. Establishment Democrats felt, with some justification, that their party had been hijacked by an ideological extremist who had failed to win a mandate, and many major Democratic elected officials openly endorsed and campaigned for Nixon.
If you’re looking at lower offices, there was a case a few years ago where the Republican party didn’t sufficiently vet a candidate for the Montana House, and ended up with a neo-Nazi running under their banner. As soon as it came out, party officials endorsed the Democrat.
Wasn’t there pretty much of a party-wide disavowal when David Duke became Republican candidate for State Representative in Louisiana (and won)? And in his subsequent (unsuccessful) runs for other Louisiana offices?
The 1912 GOP primary created internal division and when Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t nominated he went 3rd party. I see some parallels between Teddy and Teh Donald.
They had no justification to believe so. They were peeved that their influence in the selection process was reduced by the change from smoke-filled rooms to primaries.
Neither McGovern, nor Humphrey, nor Wallace won a mandate. McGovern won the delegate vote on the first ballot clearly and cleanly. Even had he lost the California and Illinois seating challenges, he still would have won.
The ones who supported Nixon were Wallace supporters, who had also supported him during his independent run in 1968.
And the election before that, Gene McCarthy won the most primaries in 1968, although Bobby Kennedy was gaining fast before he was assassinated. But the party bigwigs got together and engineered the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, who had won zero primaries, by controlling the caucuses.
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
That is, of course, exactly what Trump has said about immigrants.
It is, perhaps, worth noting that Roosevelt’s concern was with German immigrants. The correctness of his view is shown by the lack of assimilation of Germans in this country. We should have barred them. Why only yesterday, I drove past a restaurant with a German name!
To be clear, I am sure that if I had been around then, I would have supported McGovern, at least once Shirley Chisholm dropped out.
McGovern vs Humphrey vs Wallace. We think the Republicans are divided today.
As Tony points out, in 1968 the opposite scenario happened, with the party bigwigs rejecting the voters’ choice. In response, the rules were changed to prevent that from happen again. The new, extremely complicated, rules were written by a committee chaired by George McGovern. So the bosses had their power taken away, the immediate result of which was the nomination of a candidate they couldn’t stand who also had no mandate from their party’s voters and no chance of winning. And this had been done to them by the same guy who wrote the new rules!
Politically, I oppose (would have opposed) the Humphrey/Wallace crowd, but I can’t really blame them for being pissed.
I don’t know about the good old days, but they ( both sides ) have as much as said that Trump and Sanders supporters do not know what is right for them.
This is a golden opportunity to vote independent. It doesn’t matter who you like, but it will show these "professional politicians " that we are in charge of ourselves.
Fundamentally flawed premise. The time when the party is supposed to unify is once someone has been nominated, not on Super Tuesday. Trump is in the lead in delegates, but he hasn’t yet won anywhere near as many as he needs to declare victory. And he has only been getting 34% of the vote, so he certainly can’t claim to be the party’s clear choice.
NOBODY had a mandate from the party that year. Nobody.
With lesser certainty, nobody could have beat Nixon that year. It might not have been a landslide, but it still would have been a loss.
And you are completely wrong in attempting to group together Humphrey and Wallace supporters. You remember Wallace standing in front of the schoolhouse door, don’t you? That’s what Wallace supporters supported. Those are the ones who became Republicans.
Yes, I agree! Nobody had or could have a mandate because the party was completely dysfunctional, and it’s certainly not McGovern’s fault that he was smarter than the other candidates. I didn’t mean to equate Humphrey and Wallace supporters, except to the extent that they both felt screwed by McGovern. Do you have a cite that all of the Democrats for Nixon crowd had previously supported Wallace rather than Humphrey?
In retrospect, the loss of the 1972 election was a worthwhile price to pay to get rid of the Wallace faction and allow the Democrats to become a consistently anti-racist party.
There was also the thing where Bob Kelleher, the perennial candidate who wanted to turn Montana into a parliamentary system, actually won the Republican senate primary in (IIRC) 2008 because the mainstream candidates split the vote. (He ran as a Green the previous election, because the Green Party of Montana couldn’t afford the filing fee but he could.) While the Republican Party didn’t go so far as endorsing Max Baccus, they definitely disavowed Kelleher.