Picture this. There are only two candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016. One is a true-red conservative. The other is an establishment Republican, a RINO (Republican In Name Only) to many conservatives.
During the campaign for the nomination, the conservative wins the primaries and caucuses in the Red states by landslide margins, often by 3:1 ratios. In the same campaign, the moderate Republican wins a large percentage of the primaries and caucuses in the Blue states, but the contests are often close. Altogether, the conservative wins about 60 percent of the vote in the primaries and caucuses.
Now picture this — the moderate in the above scenario is the GOP presidential nominee. This scenario can’t quite occur this year because there are so many candidates, but the reason a moderate could win in the above scenario is that the Republican Party’s rules for choosing delegates to the Republican Convention are biased against conservatives.
In fact, a more moderate candidate like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich could be the GOP nominee in 2016 even if he receives FAR fewer votes than the leading conservative vote-getter because the rules are so outrageously tilted in favor of the Blue states — although none of them would “win” 40 to 60 percent.
After this brief word from our sponsor we’ll show you why moderates are given a massive leg up in the GOP Primary.
So… How is the system rigged in favor of moderate conservatives…
The moderate could win because the GOP delegate selection rules are a blatant violation of the concept of one person, one vote. In essence, a vote in a Blue state is worth way, way……………way more than a vote in a Red state.
“A GOP primary vote cast in the bluest part of the Bronx (one of New York City’s five boroughs) could be worth 43 times more than a vote cast in the reddest part of Alabama,” explained David Wasserman, a political expert for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, in an article entitled “The GOP’s Primary Rules Might Doom Carson, Cruz And Trump.”
Wasserman’s analysis includes a graph entitled “The Bluer the (Congressional) District, The More Valuable the Primary Vote.” The graph is based on the fact that “the average blue congressional district awards one conventional delegate per 28,912 (Mitt) Romney voters (in the 2012 presidential election), while the average red district awards one delegate per 56,714 Romney voters.”
There will be 2,472 delegates at the July 18-21 Republican Convention in Cleveland. The allocation of delegates is based primarily on state-by-state population rather than the number of Republicans state-by-state. More than half of the delegates — 1,305 — are based on the fact that the Republican Party decided to give each of the nation’s 435 Congressional districts three delegates each. Thus, Alabama’s sixth Congressional district and New York’s 15th have three delegates each although the former cast 233,803 votes for Romney and the latter cast 5,315.
Altogether, there will be 1,247 delegates from states that Obama won in the 2012 election, 1,166 delegates from states that Romney won (and 59 from U.S. territories like Puerto Rico) although 43 of the 54 U.S. senators are from states that Romney won and 221 of the 247 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are from Congressional districts that Romney won.
“Winner” Rules Favor Moderates
According to the article “The Surprising Power of Blue-State Republicans,” GOP primary voters in Blue states were nine percentage points likelier to support the moderate John McCain in 2008 than GOP Red state voters and 15 percentage points likelier to support the moderate Romney in 2012. In fact, McCain and Romney won EVERY Blue-state primary in 2008 and 2012 so it was “all but impossible” for a conservative to win the nomination, the article reported.
“The electorate that nominates GOP presidential candidates is much bluer than the ones that nominate other GOP officials,” wrote Wasserman. Consequently, it’s VERY possible that Blue-state Republicans could support a more moderate candidate in 2016 by a large enough margin to give him the nomination.
There is another reason that GOP delegate selection rules favor moderates. The Republican National Committee decided that states holding their primaries and caucuses before March 15 must award their delegates via proportional representation, while states that vote March 15 and afterward are allowed to have winner-take-all contests. Take a look at the “EXCLUSIVE: TIME Guide to Official 2016 Republican Nomination Calendar” to see what that means. The “SEC Primary” on March 1 includes contests in several Southern states, including Texas and Georgia. They all award delegates proportionally so a moderate who doesn’t win a primary can rack up a substantial number of delegates.
On the other hand, most of the states that have winner-take-all contests via a statewide vote and/or Congressional district vote are Blue states. The states with such contests are Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, California, New Jersey, Montana, and South Dakota.
A moderate could win VERY Blue states such as California, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland and, thus, win about 300 more delegates than a conservative in those states. And what happens if a moderate prevails by a tiny margin in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania? The moderate under that scenario will win 278 delegates to ZERO for the conservative.
“The Republican voters who will have little to no sway in the general election could have some of the most sway in the primary,” wrote Wasserman.
Are you angry about the prospect of a moderate winning the GOP presidential nomination even if a conservative earns several million more votes? It’s a very real prospect and it should anger every true-red conservative.
Article Sources:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gops-primary-rules-might-doom-carson-and-cruz/
http://time.com/4059030/republican-primary-calendar-2016-nomination-convention/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016
https://www.gop.com/the-official-guide-to-the-2016-republican-nominating-process/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/upshot/the-surprising-power-of-blue-state-republicans.html
