I think Trump is a loose cannon, but Cruz is nothing more than a guy you really don’t like. He is a smart guy and a seasoned and skilled politician, who happens to be on the far right wing of the current political spectrum. Any analysis premised on the notion that he is “batshit insane” is worthless - at least in the context of rational analysis.
That was mostly aimed at Trump and his supporters (plus folks like Carson, perhaps), and the more-wacky-than-normal positions and statements that his success has pushed some of his competitors into (like Cruz’s “patrol Muslim neighborhoods” quote). I phrased it hyperbolically, and I should have stated it better to avoid confusion.
Do you disagree with the larger point that, considering the relative unpredictability of the race so far, it may be impossible to predict the behavior of the delegates in a contested convention?
National Review article written by Cruz.
I thought the SCOTUS interpreted the Constitution.
Oh, goody. Tyranny of the masses.
I wonder what he would do if it goes against his wishes anyway.
Under the current rules, those wild and crazy delegates can vote ONLY for Trump (for sure) and Cruz (probably), no matter how many ballots there are. Them’s the rules. Actually, they can vote for whoever they want, but their votes will not be counted unless they are for Trump or (possibly) Cruz.
In the last week, it seems that more and more media outlets and Republican insiders have actually read the rules and focus is starting to shift to the Rules Committee. That is where the course of the convention will be decided. Cruz has begun making public statements opposing a change to the rules. Trump has nothing to gain by changing the rules.
Here is an article put up yesterday by New York Magazine that explains it as clear as anything: How an Obscure Rule Could Limit the GOP Convention to a Choice of Trump or Cruz.
And here is factcheck.org’s take on the situation.
The real action is going to be in the Rules Committee before the convention. If you want to speculate about unpredictable outcomes, speculate about them.
I don’t know. There’s been exactly one unpredictable aspect of the race so far, that being the incredible amount of people willing to support a guy like Trump. This has in turn impacted the other candidates, but that’s about it.
The senior leadership of the Republican Party has been almost unanimous in opposition to Trump, with the exception of a few people here and there, mostly opportunists (e.g. Christie, and allegedly Carson).
The truth is that we’ve not had any sort of contested convention for so long that it’s very difficult to predict the outcome in any event. As to whether this one would be more unpredictable than it otherwise might be due to the Trump Factor, I would say it depends on one key factual question. (Probably an easy question to answer but in my ignorance I don’t know what the facts are.)
In the electoral college voting for president, there are actually two slates of people vying to be elected as electors. One or another group of these people will cast their votes. Question is whether delegates to political conventions work the same way. Are there different sets of people running to be selected as delegates, some of whom are supporters of Trump and some supporters of Cruz and so on? Or is it the same people who will attend the convention and vote no matter who wins that primary, and the effect of the voting is to bind these delegates to vote in accordance with the allocation of delegates determined by the votes in that primary? I’ve not seen this question directly addressed anywhere.
Because I agree that anyone who is running for “delegate” as a supporter of Trump is more unpredictable than someone running in support of another candidate. But if it’s the same mainstream local political guys running, only that some of them will be bound to vote for Trump on the first ballot, then once they are released from this requirement the Trump Effect would be over.
Either way, the point of the Politico article was that Cruz is ahead of the curve in recruiting these delegates. If they’re not really Trump people altogether you could see where that might give him a huge leg up. If they are Trump people it would give him a smaller leg up.
While all of the Republican nominees are pretty terrible, I don’t think the behavior of the voters is insane. A lot of them are tired of politicians, and especially politicians who keep promising things that they can’t or won’t do, like repealing Obamacare and preventing gay marriage as just two examples. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Trump got more support than expected as a non-establishment candidate, as well as Fiorina and Carson to a certain extent. Definitely not something I predicted, but makes some sense in hindsight.
Also, there were so many candidates starting off. I think if there had been fewer at the beginning, the election would have been less chaotic, and also Trump might not have gotten so far.
I don’t know what will happen at the convention though, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
Really that’s why Cruz scares me more, because Trump is a loose cannon and just seems to say things off the cuff, but Cruz is a believe in what he says. And while Cruz is not clinically insane, a lot of his beliefs are extreme enough or divorced from reality that calling his beliefs crazy doesn’t seem too far to me. But while his views are more extreme than the average Republican voter, they’re not wildly so, so I don’t know how that would affect him getting the nomination.
It depends on the state.
In some states, each candidate’s campaign committee gets to select the delegates and they compete against each other to be sent to the convention. Presumably, the candidates’ state campaign committees will choose delegates who are loyal to their respective candidates.
In other states, delegates are chosen by conventions or party caucuses, these delegates are bound to vote for the winner of the state’s primary in at least the first round of voting, but the delegates themselves may have no loyalty to the candidate for whom they are bound to vote.
How did we get to the point where Ted Cruz is part of the Forces of Sanity?!
These voters are not insane but they are extremely politically ignorant.
If, as you say, what irks these voters is “politicians who keep promising things that they can’t or won’t do”, then Trump is the absolute last guy they should be supporting. His positions (e.g. “build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it” et al) are less likely to be actually enacted than those of any other candidate.
[Which is even besides for the fact that he can’t get elected, so all his promises will be moot in any event.]
Right, very true, Trump is saying a lot of things he can’t or won’t do. And I think there are some true believers who think that he can do what he says, and those people are politically ignorant. But I think a significant number are voting for him as a “Fuck you” to the establishment. They’re angry about a lot of things, including but not limited to politicians, and Trump is angry, so they’re voting for him. Here’s one article with a few Trump voters say why they’re voting for him. Some say things about him being a businessman and the government should be run like a business, which is ignorant, but some say they like how he’s not politically correct. I’ve read and heard similar things elsewhere, where people are unhappy with politicians, but Trump isn’t a politician and appears to be not beholden to political interests since he has so much money on his own, so people like him and vote for him, regardless of the promises he makes.
So it makes some sort of warped sense to me why Trump has gotten so many voters. It doesn’t make actual, logical sense, but if you are starting with certain assumptions about how the world does and should work, it makes some sense that you would follow that line of thinking and like Trump. If (god forbid) he won, I don’t know if those same voters would vote for him again, since he’s not actually going to have a wall built or prevent Muslims from entering the US, so I don’t know if they’ll vote for someone else or if they’ll just be happy that he keeps yelling about Mexicans and Muslims and doesn’t coddle them.
It’s my understanding that delegate selection is very much a state by state process. Who gets to be a delegate and how many voting rounds they are bound varies wildly. So even though Cruz is apparently working hard on this angle there’s only so much he can really do. How a contested convention would shake out is not just unpredictable because of the personalities involved but because of the interaction of state and national rules.
Eta: guess I shoukd have refreshed the page. Alley Dweller says it more precisely.
OK, but as a practical matter, there’s not much difference between that latter group and “insane”. I mean, I’m sure these people are otherwise perfectly sane in how they conduct their lives, but their support for Trump, while understandable on a psychological level, is not based on rational thinking, as you seem to acknowledge.
In the context of the discussion here, that would imply that these people are probably a lot more unpredictable than the average voter.
Which means, I suppose, that they could conceivably flip over to Cruz at any moment. Or even to Sanders, in some cases.
Yeah, that’s a good point. You can probably predict what a lot of voters will do, but Trump voters would be harder to predict.
The Pubbies are simply setting up the procedures. As noted above, they have a Rules Committee that establishes the rules for each convention. The rules for previous incarnations mean squat.
They are stalling for time, more or less. They are hoping that by the time push comes to shove, Trump will be so unpopular that they can screw him good and hard, and nobody will much object. Basically, that Trump will alienate his own followers to an extent that they won’t be a problem. Not a great plan, not even really a good plan. But what else have they got?
Cruz.
Yay.
Key issue here is who controls the rules. It appears that the elected delegates have some control here, which is not good news for Kasich. But again, to the extent that the delegates are just pledged to vote for Trump (or Cruz) and are not genuine supporters, this might not bind them in terms of setting rules.
Doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea to me. Certainly Trump himself is doing everything he can to help out …
Doesn’t much matter if its a good idea or not, its all they got. Except, of course, for the momentum building in the DraftRomney movement.
I myself am also still available.
It doesn’t matter how much the other guys hate him, he is still one of them.