EXACTLY.
Keeping Mitt 100 delegates or more below the 1144 threshold allows us to demand someone else besides Romney, even if it means an entirely new, compromise ticket.
I agree, like Gingrich/Palin. Romney will likely team up with Santorum, to get the holy roller vote. (Offset his Mormon problem)
Man, if that does happen, can you imagine how pissed Mitt will be? (In an LDS-acceptable way, of course!) Talk about “We was robbed!” - - he and Hillary could go out and get drunk together if he was a drinkin’ man...
A person does have to admit Romney’s ground game was flawless, none of these qualification mistakes. But that’s a lot easier when you’ve been campaigning for the past 4 years and have millions of $ to spend.
That won’t be enough and you know it. When the convention rolls around and Romney is 100 or so short, pressure will mount on the uncommitted Superdelegates to support him because of his lead in the popular vote and number of contests won, just like what happened with Obama/Hillary in 2008.
Here’s the current Watch List. Romney already has 24, Newt 3, Santorum 2, Paul 1. If Romney is still leading in the delegate count by convention time, you can bet the bulk will turn to him especially if he carried that state’s contest.
http://www.democraticconventionwatch.com/diary/4726/republican-superdelegate-endorsement-list
As for Santorum’s “Delegate” woes, these are blown out of proportion. First, it was probably best to save the $10,000 to stay off the DC ballot, as they’re probably aren’t anywhere near enough conservative Republicans who live in NW DC to qualify and even if he did, it’s WTA. This is a fact. If Huntsman were still in this thing, he’d probably finish 2nd to Romney as these are the most liberal GOP’ers in the country. Nothing was lost here.
As for IL, 3 of the CD’s are tied to Chicago, 1 of which I think is Mark Kirk’s old seat, which tells you all you need to know about the kind of Republicans there. Also, the other 2 CD’s are radical leftist districts, so could luck finding conservative Republicans there.
The 13th isn’t a great situation, but it isn’t the only district in mid/downstate that Santorum will play in. Plus, IL rewards CD’s in that the more Republican they vote, they get an extra delegate. So those 3 CD’s in Chicago, Santorum is losing out on 6 total delegates. The 13th, he’s losing out on 3. But he’s on the ballot in the other CD’s that have as many as 4 delegates allocates.
Even with this, IL has some strange rules on how 15-20 delegates are selected, which seems to be entirely exclusive of the popular vote and seems rather shady. On Green Papers web site, I still haven’t fully understood this remaining allocation, like they send a bunch of uncommitteds to the convention without any regard to the vote.