Pity that no one seems to be interested in dealing with such Inconvenient Truths. Post a Comment. But let me try to flesh out the explanation of the model a bit as a means of addressing the above issues and then have a look at what the terrain is like now that Super Tuesday is out of the way. It is a fantasy. It is a complete fantasy that one candidate will receive exactly one half of the vote across all the remaining states and by virtue of having that same level of support applied to each and every congressional district where states allocate based on that subunit vote , win all the delegates from those districts.
Again, that is not going to happen. But what I tried to do with the second model was to account for the number of candidates who got over the various thresholds in the states to get any delegates at all. The model built in the reallocation of delegates not allocated to candidates because they did not meet the threshold. Those are reallocated to the candidates above the threshold. Let me illustrate this with an example. We'll call it Kansas. The way the model treats this, Santorum would get a majority in each of the four Kansas congressional districts and wins all 12 delegates 3 delegates in each of the four congressional districts.
By winning the statewide vote Santorum would also win the three automatic delegates. But where the fun comes in is with the 25 at-large delegates. If it was, Santorum would receive 12 delegates, Romney 5, Gingrich 4 and Paul 4. So what? Well, ultimately the primary season is a contest for who can secure the 1, delegates required to win the nomination. If Gingrich and Romney continue the way they're going, the race could be a drawn-out fight for every last delegate.
That in turn could lead to an unlikely but entirely plausible nightmare for the Republican National Committee — with Florida once again being at the center of a bitter vote counting dispute. The question boils down to this: Did the RNC properly allow the Republican Party of Florida to decree its primary a winner-take-all contest for Florida delegates?
Or should Florida's 50 delegates in fact be divvied up proportionally by each candidate's share of the primary vote? Yes, it sounds like an arcane debate about the minutiae of party rules.
But if you're the candidate who spends million of dollars and finishes a close second in Florida, it matters a lot whether the winner leaves Florida with 50 more delegates than you or five.
Ron Paul has already decided against spending much money in Florida's primary, saying it's not worth the expense of competing in a winner-take-all state.
And if the primary turns out to be a long slog where only 50 delegates separate the two front-runners, the Florida delegates could determine the nominee.
We are winner-take-all. That's not guaranteed, however. All it takes is a registered Florida Republican to file a protest with the RNC, and the party's contest committee would have to consider the issue when it meets in August just before the convention. We could be the group that everybody loves or everybody hates," said Fredi Simpson, an RNC member from Washington state who sits on that committee and also helped write the rules.
At an RNC meeting in August, members of the Presidential Nominating and Selection Committee passed a resolution calling for the RNC to enforce its rules for proportional delegates on states like Florida that set primaries earlier than April.
That was absolutely the intention when we wrote that rule," said Pete Ricketts, an RNC member from Nebraska who served on the RNC committee appointed in to draw up delegate selection rules for Have we come close to a brokered convention since? Republicans flirted with one in , when incumbent Gerald Ford eked out a first-ballot win over Ronald Reagan, and the Democrats had a near-miss in , when Walter Mondale barely won. And "a few more missteps for Mr. Mondale or Mr. Ford, and the outcome might have been different.
Could this really happen? Yes, if the cards fall just right. Yes, "the path to this outcome is still a very narrow, precarious one. But for the first time, I can see it. After a few deadlocked votes, the delegates who are initially bound to vote for a specific candidate would be released to vote for anyone. And at that point, anything could happen — including the conservative fantasy of a "dark horse" candidate like Palin, Jeb Bush, Gov.
Chris Christie N. Mitch Daniels Ind. Under party rules, anyone can be nominated if a plurality of five state delegations approve. Who would win a brokered GOP convention? Romney, probably.
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