Tell me about GOP convention delegates you have met, ones that are neither members of Congress, governors or mayors of one of our 10 largest cities. What’s it like waiving a banner for a given Presidential candidate, when only 17% of them were chosen by those candidates themselves? What sort of party hack are they?
And -this is key- what are their incentives? Could Cruz or Trump offer them a sweetener? I’m guessing they have little political experience, so it’s not like they’re going to become a cabinet member, a deputy to a cabinet member or an assistant to the deputy.
What share of the delegates are local politicians in small cities and therefore have supporters they don’t want to alienate? What share are hobbyists? What share enjoy having their hotel rooms broadcast?
Recognize that the GOP convention is -wait for it- a convention. It’s like a plumbers convention. There will be a lot of networking, especially in-state networking. Most of the delegates will care very little about what the national congressional delegations want, or so I imagine.
AFAIK, nobody has a good handle on how these delegates will behave after the 2nd ballot, rules notwithstanding. Which can be changed. Which is why I’m inquiring about the ground level environment, as it were. I’ve read that they would prefer Cruz to Trump, but frankly the reporting has been based more on suppositions than anything else.
People do have a good handle on them actually. Right now there are huge fights going on in most states to get those delegates. So far Cruz is wiping the floor with Trump, who is basically getting shut out from most of them. If it goes to a second ballot at this point Cruz is going to have an easy victory.
But what does it mean when it’s said that Cruz has delegates lined up? Is Kasich playing this game? If Cruz is going to win, he probably needs some Trump delegates to flip to the Cruz side. I doubt whether they would announce that at this juncture.
In terms of fundamentals, if this is a three-way race, the convention could deadlock for a while. Which means that supporters of a fresh face should be helping Kasich along.
I encourage others to provide links to discussion of this issue, as well as relevant questions.
It means that those delegates are picked from among Cruz supporters. They still have to support Trump on the first ballot, but after that they are free to switch to Cruz. And he is basically running the table almost everywhere so far, Kasich and Trump are getting crumbs. If Trump doesn’t win on the first ballot the second one is going to be an easy Cruz win.
My understanding is that the Trump campaign screwed up by not realizing the importance of the delegate selection process. They focused on winning primaries and amassing a number of delegates but they let the process of choosing the individual delegates. The more experienced politicians realized the importance of creating a pool of loyal delegates so that if you win a primary, you can stock that state’s convention roster with a list of delegates who are specifically loyal to your campaign and unlikely to defect.
The Trump campaign missed this point. So when they won a state, they had to scramble to create a list of people who were eligible to be delegates - and in many cases they had to name people who had originally been chosen by one of the other candidates. The result is there is a significant number of Republican delegates who are pledged to Trump but were originally chosen because of their loyalty to somebody like Bush or Christie or even Cruz. These delegates will probably cast their votes on the first ballot for Trump but they’re significantly more prone to change their subsequent votes than typical delegates are.
If I were a GOP delegate, I would be organizing a bloc of delegates willing to swing to a candidate on the second ballot based on a set of policy promises.
Is there any evidence of organization of delegates by the delegates themselves? If not, who wants to code a message board for them? I’ll moderate.
Over at 538, we can see that Trump has 92% of his target delegates, while Cruz has 57%. Extrapoloting forwards, that gives Trump 1138/1237 and Cruz 706/1237. On the 2nd ballot, Trump would need to boost his totals by about 100 delegates while staving off defections.
As a thought experiment, assume none of Cruz’s delegates defect. Cruz still needs to pick up 531 delegates somehow. That’s a lot. Could be do-able though if it’s a 2 man race. Kasich currently has 144 delegates of unknown loyalty. I would think that he could argue that he would be more helpful downballot than Cruz in certain states. If he does, we could see an extended deadlock. Who’s On Track For The Nomination? | FiveThirtyEight
This is just the sort of break Rubio needs! And Ryan! And Romney!
And Jeb! And Fiorina!
And Walker! And Pawlenty! And Giuliani! And Pataki! And Santorum!
I believe (but I may be wrong) that any candidate who already has pledged delegates can withdraw from the race and ask their pledged delegates to support somebody else, on the FIRST ballot. I dunno what all these dribbles add up to, but suppose the also-rans all ask their people to support Cruz. Suppose Kasich dropped out and threw his into the mix. Would all this be enough to make any difference?
There are ~130 unaffiliated delegates that would be available on the first ballot, which could conceivably put Trump over the top before he lost any delegates. He is unlikely to gain many of them though.
They can ask, but once the delegates are released they can vote for anyone they like and are not beholden to the wishes of their former pledge.
I understand Rubio’s candidates aren’t bound to vote the way he wants them to after he’s bowed out, but my question was more along the lines of whether enough of these delegates exist to swing the nomination away from Trump in the first ballot. If the first part of your answer is accurate, then the answer is apparently “no”.
While this has proved to be a significant oversight, who knew, really? It doesn’t matter if they’re loyal or not if they’re bound to vote for you on the first ballot, and there’s only one ballot. And the last time the voting at a major party convention went to a second ballot was in 1952.
Also, keep in mind that just two and a half months ago, we were still debating whether Trump’s supporters would actually show up and vote. Who the delegates are doesn’t matter until you win some primaries.
Nevertheless, a campaign needs to be prepared for the eventuality, otherwise why is the candidate running in the first place? This is stuff that a seasoned campaign manager would have known and started preparations for. And it’s the problem with hiring a guy for campaign manager whose entire experience was one House campaign.
A candidate must win a majority of votes, not just a plurality. If Rubio does not release his delegates, they’re already not voting for Trump, and hence doing their part to prevent his first-ballot win. If Rubio releases them, then they’re still free to block Trump, but some of them might decide to vote for him. The only way Rubio releasing delegates can hurt Trump is if enough of them go to some other candidate (read: Cruz) to give that other candidate a first-ballot majority, and even that probably wouldn’t matter: That would only be possible if Trump didn’t have a first-ballot majority, and if he doesn’t have it on the first ballot, he’s not going to get it on any later one anyway.
Ok, so nobody here has spoken in depth with a former GOP delegate. Or has read reporting on the same.
Some journalist needs to ask a former delegate what they would do under today’s circumstances, pushing hard on points of pressure that one of these hypothetical candidates could apply. What share of these delegates could be harmed in some way if they voted against the will of the people? National politicians, state-wide reps and even mayors might be wary of that. It’s not clear to me whether a GOP activist would care though.
OTOH, I have to assume that most of Trump’s delegates have at least a little sympathy for the short fingered magnate. It would be a bit of a drag to end up as a delegate for someone you despise.
