Posted on 04/21/2016 6:47:54 PM PDT by Kaslin
Trump people kill me.
They've been whining for weeks about how the Republican Party primary system works.
They say it's rigged because their hero is pulling in the most votes and the most delegates but still might not win the nomination.
They say it's all very simple: Trump's getting the most votes and therefore it's only fair that the person with the most votes from the people should win the nomination.
As I tweeted earlier this week, if that's the way Trump's followers think, then they should all be supporters of Al Gore.
In the 2000 election Gore got 540,000 more votes than George W. Bush, but Bush ended up in the White House because he accumulated the most Electoral College votes.
The Founding Founders & Framers knew what they were doing when they set up the Electoral College to indirectly choose the president.
They didn't want a popular vote and they didn't want Congress to pick the chief executive.
And they sure didn't want a candidate for president to be able to just campaign in three or four big states and rack up huge vote totals and win that way.
The Founders deliberately set it up so each state got its electoral votes in proportion to its representatives and senators.
They wanted every part of the country to be part of the process of choosing a president, not just one heavily populated region or one strong faction of nut balls or extremists. (Not that Trump people are nutballs or extremists.)
It's the same representative principle at work in the Republican Party's primary system.
The GOP doesn't want some guy to be able to win the nomination by flying a 757 into a handful of big states like California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Ohio and Florida, holding campaign events for 20,000 people at the airport and then flying home to Upper Upper Manhattan.
They want a nominee who gets on the ground, walks the neighborhoods, shakes hands and does the hard retail work at the grass roots.
That's what Ted Cruz has been doing to win his delegates while Trump has been doing TV interviews and zooming back and forth over Flyover Country.
Trump people might not like the primary process because their hero is not winning, or think there is cheating and rigging going on.
But they have to understand there is a process and it's not about vote counts, it's about the delegate count. It's not that tough to get.
Meanwhile, what really concerns me lately is how Trump is wrecking his ability to unify the GOP around his candidacy in the fall if he does win the nomination.
He spends parts of every speech and press conference announcing that he hopes that his supporters don't make trouble if he doesn't win. He hopes they don't riot in the streets.
I'm getting tired of his veiled threats, because that is what they really are.
It's time for Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to stand up at a press conference and tell Trump to cut it out.
Maybe threats and intimidation are part of the Donald's winning strategy in business. But it's not how it's supposed to work when you're trying to win the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.
Their is no comparison.
The electoral college is similar to delegates being awarded for each congressional district. Yes it’s possible to win more votes but not win the delegates.
But what we object to is when one candidate clearly wins the state, but the delegates aren’t awarded to the state winner or to the congressional district winners. But rather to the GOPe wishes. In that case the vote is a sham.
You walk the neighborhoods because you want the popular vote. To get delegates, you work on the delegates - buying them off or selling your soul which is what Cruz in fact has been doing.
And as we saw in Colorado, they decided they could dispense with the fiction of a popular vote altogether.
The framers and founding fathers also claimed to have a dislike of parties. Well we got parties, and the parties certainly don't represent the will and the interests of the people.
Once CO happened we saw through the system - we saw that there is no legitimate defense of the system - not as a political system designed to represent the will of the people. And yet, they keep trying to defend this private club paid for out of public monies.
A contested convention is a losing proposition. It fractures the party and almost always (in the modern era) results in a losing party. Prez. Hillary? No thanks.
This is a repeat of a reply I gave on another thread, but since the straw man argument is ongoing...
To the usual Cruz guys who repeat their straw man arguments:
1. There is a difference between
- a) Awarding delegates according to formulae according to the vote of the people and
- b) Subverting the process so that a delegate for one candidate actually favors another, and will work at the convention in opposition to the people who elected them.
Yes, the latter is according to party rules. Apparently there is no mental connection among the Cruz camp that “I’m running against the establishment” and “I’m subverting the voters’ wishes in favor of the establishment” have any conflict with each other. True doublethink in Orwellian fashion; X and not-X believed simultaneously without mental distress. Congratulations?
2. It also fails to occur to Cruz fans that nobody else shares the opinion that this rules-gaming is oh-so-clever, and that in fact for each instance where the establishment gins up delegates this way, more voters are disgusted by both the GOP and by Cruz.
Suppose all these insider games work, and Cruz walks out of the convention as the nominee. Will that nomination speech in front of a half-empty hall look good? Do you suppose that people in states Trump won, who voted against the Uniparty, will turn around and vote Cruz? Keep in mind here, on FR, you’re writing to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy; imagine how the union guy who voted against unfair trade, the college student tired of PC madness, the IT worker hoping to avoid displacement by H1Bs will react.
The Cruz posters seem so gleeful when they post about how a Trump delegate position is subverted, but for everyone else it’s like watching a 3-year old breaking a toy and clutching the broken parts yelling “mine! Mine! MINE!”
If you want this country to go completely to hell in one big hurry, all you have to do is keep trying to let Cruz and the GOPe blow up the party. Then Hillary waltz’s in to the whitehouse and gets to appoint a whole bunch of liberal judges. We’ll also lose the senate and have no way to block her. Presto we are in hell.
A verbatim quote from Jim Robinson a few minutes ago. Congrats Cruzers, I couldn't agree with him more. Unless you reign in that turd in the punch bowl you all think is so "principled", we'll thank you if this comes to pass.
That's the general idea. :)
Trump has over 50% more delegates than Cruz and has received millions more votes. The GOP leadership just gave their last best shot in Colorado and Wyoming. Millions of voters were disenfranchised. They went to far; they pledged to Trump that the contest was going to be run in a fair way, but there has been ample evidence produced that show this was not the case.
Now the leadership is promising to not to do it again. But the leadership is more than happy to let Cruz take the blame for this. And he has been more than happy to take the “credit”. This ultimately makes Cruz look sneaky and untrustworthy. But I guess that should make you happy anyway since there is nothing wrong with disenfranchising voters.
Any article that drops the lie about Gore getting more votes in 2000 is utter junk.
By the time this is over, by the time the convention ends, there's something I would like to know that is the biggest puzzle here on Free Republic:
WHY do FR Cruzers support increased immigration, open Southern border, North American Union, TPA, TPP, resettlement of Syrians and other muslims into America, why would they support our jobs being sent offshore and our jobs still on our soil being done by massive new numbers of Indians, and finally why they would support trade agreements that KILL U.S. exports and provide hundreds of billions of dollar booms, money transferred out of the US, to China, etc.?
Is it worth a vanity? I was hoping I'd get some input from those like you and me who have shared on other threads.
It's a puzzle. It's similar to what we wondered at the beginning of Obama's presidency: is it STUPIDITY, or is it MALICIOUSNESS?
Great simile. Thanks.
+1,000
Ronald Reagan was such an insiders’ choice unsupported by the People. [surely I don’t need a sarcasm tag here]
we are deranged. We are beyond reason. We are legion. Deal with it.
It’s called Mass Hysteria and Trump is calling cadence.
Apparently because Trump supporters are deranged. That is how they deal with reality - to deny the sanity of those who challenge their reality. Since it comforts them to know that Trump supporters are deranged, it is simply easier to admit that we are deranged. I hope it brings them some of the comfort they seek since what they seek is not a world comprehensible through a lens of objectivity.
sCruzets are feeling the ice cracking under their feet and nothing to hold on to.
Cry me a river, burn the GOPe to the ground, then tske on the National Socialist Democrst Fasicst Party.
See. I was right. They feel better believing that we are deranged. It saves the mental effort of trying to make sense of what is going on.
Too bad that Michael Reagan feels this way, but he should do his homework before engaging in such pathetic attacks.
Is that a request?
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