That’s not a closed primary, then.
It’s not exactly open either; you can only vote in one, and I think they register you as a member of that party when you do. As far as I know, no loyalty oath is required.
I know Ron Paul supporters who think Mitt Romney is a snake and I know Romney supporters who think Ron Paul is nucking futz. If Ron Paul actually won the primary and Romney mounted a third party bid, they would vote for him over Ron Paul.
If the primary is still competitive come the Virginia primary then Romney has noone to blame but himself.
If the guy that might steal Romney’s thunder looks like it might be Ron Paul then armageddon is coming anyways so who cares what I sign.
I see two fundamental differences between what this is targeted at and Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos, such that it is non-hypocritically possible to oppose both. First is the wording of the oath: If the oath merely said “I support the general principles of the Republican party” or “I self-identify as a Republican”, I wouldn’t have any real problem with it: If Republicans want to say that only Republicans can vote in their primary, that’s fine. But a pledge to support the party’s nominee, whomever that turns out to be, is just absurd.
The other distinction is the motivation for the line-crossing. My current state of Montana allows cross-party primary voting with basically no restriction (beyond only voting in one of them), and if the Republican nomination is still undecided when that day rolls around, I probably will vote in it. But I’ll vote for whichever of the Republican candidates I find least repugnant, because I recognize the chance that Obama might lose, and if that happens, I want the President to be someone I can live with. My vote, in other words, would be an honest expression of preference among the candidates on the ballot. What Limbaugh was encouraging, however, was dishonest: He encouraged his listeners not to vote for the candidate they thought better, but to vote for the one they thought worse. And while I can’t see any practical way to legislate against such behavior, I can say that I find it distasteful at best.
My point exactly. I know plenty of Republicans who have no intention of supporting at least one of the candidates.
I don’t know about “loyalty oath,” but there is a rule saying that a primary doesn’t count unless only votes from registered Republicans are counted. IIRC, there was a problem in 2000 when California had an open primary, until the state decided that ballots from Republicans had to be identifiable somehow so that only those votes would be used to determine California’s delegates to the RNC. (Since then, the law has changed to that, even in an “open” primary, votes for party committee members and national convention delegates are limited to registered members of that party.)
(Technically, even those votes should not have counted, as the party rules said that a primary did not count if any non-Republicans could vote in the Republican primary for any partisan office, and, in fact, Democrats could vote in their Congressional districts’ Republican primaries.)