Hypothetically, lets assume that this election plays out in two ways:
- Trump gets nominated, loses the election, and kills the downticket candidates
- Someone else wins in a brokered convention, the people are upset that the RNC went against their will, nominee loses, kills the downticket candidates.
Either way, it’s bad for the Republicans.
So, what will the GOP do to avoid this situation again? How can they ensure that “their” candidate gets chosen, while not looking like they’re going against the public. Create their own super-delegates? Re-do the primaries so they’re not a giant mess of proportional and winner take all?
Thanks to the fairly easy availability of anyone to get vote totals online, this isn’t possible, as it will always be known “whom the people voted for.”
If the party wants to choose a candidate, then it has to scrap the entire primary and caucus system and go back to the days of the smoke-filled backrooms having the final say in who is on the ticket.
I have a feeling that, one of these days, enough states will support the “all of our electoral votes go to whoever wins that nationwide popular vote” rule that, for all intents and purposes, the national popular vote chooses the president. When that happens, would the Republican (and Democratic, for that matter) parties be far behind in changing their rules to do the same thing? Note that they don’t have to have all of the primaries on the same day, and if you want to keep the current delegate system, just change it so (a) the number of delegates each state gets is proportional to, say, the number of people who voted for that party’s candidate for president four years earlier, and (b) all delegates are awarded on a strictly statewide proportional basis.