Who?
Yet, John McCain was the nominee. This was due in large part to opening states like Florida to non-GOP voters, and by making sure that more moderate states disproportionately allocate their votes to the winner of that state's primary.
The “trick” was most evident in the Buchanan/Dole slug-fest of 1996, where the GOP began a process of opening-up more and more states’ primaries to ensure an edge for the more Moderate candidate after Buchanan scared the hell out of George H.W. Bush a few years earlier (they had also begun a process of publicly talking-down the Iowa caucus after it became apparent that it was a SoCon stronghold - more Moderate candidates even began to skip it entirely). They then changed the rules of the debates to prevent candidates from asking each other direct questions (this would later be “tweaked” in one or two debates to allow for a single question to be posed candidate-to-candidate), so as to prevent firebrand populists from de-pantsing the Party Guy or tripping the Party Guy into a deadly soundbite goof.
Finally, they opened up three very large primaries that would have voted Buchanan over Dole had just GOP voters been the ones casting ballots.
There are several tricks the party uses to make sure their candidate has a nearly insurmountable edge. We will see more “tweaking” in the coming days to ensure Romney has an unfair advantage.