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Trump and Drudge Are Lying to You About Colorado Delegates
As some have noticed, Ted Cruz swept to victory in Colorado over the weekend, earning 34 (in reality, probably all 37) of the state’s Republican delegates to the national convention. And as one might anticipate, the usual suspects reacted in the fashion to which we’ve become accustomed:
and:
How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger – totally unfair!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2016
Where to even begin with this parade of preposterousness? I understand that Drudge is under no obligation to present a fair and balanced picture and that he tends to highlight conservative victories and downplay our losses. However, this crosses over into sheer untruth with a heaping helping of rabble rousing.
How do I know that it’s untrue? I was a delegate to the Colorado State Republican Convention in 2008 and voted on delegates to the national convention, that’s how.
This website gives you a rough breakdown of the progression of events that led up to the State Party Convention in 2008:
Presidential Nominating Process
Precinct Caucuses: Tuesday 5 February 2008 County Assemblies: Friday 25 April – Saturday 17 May 2008 (tentative date) District Conventions: Saturday 24 May – Saturday 7 June 2008 (tentative date) State Convention: Saturday 31 May 2008
So, there I was on a cold night in February 2008 at a Caucus in Franktown, CO. I showed up that night with local political old-timer Jon Bond in my pocket who spoke in favor of my being a delegate to the county assembly. After delivering brief remarks placing my name into nomination, the votes and presidential preference poll were tabulated and I was selected.
Thus began the process where I voluntarily sacrificed multiple Saturdays that spring in the pursuit (ultimately) of being a delegate to the Republican State Convention. I remember seeing Mitt Romney speak to the crowd while Ron Paul’s contingent of 12 bearded malcontents marched in a circle on the convention floor holding signs.
The point is this: The reason both Trump and Drudge are lying is that the slate of Delegates to the national convention is voted on, and voted on by real people — not “party insiders” — unless you consider a guy who was at the time a 29-year-old novice a “party insider.” Here is a breakdown of this year’s results.
All it takes is time. The process is totally open and explicable — unless you’re a 69-year-old knothead who thinks that showing up and holding a rally equals “winning.”
Here’s Trump’s other tweet on the situation:
The people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2016
One can only assume that this tweet is in response to the fact that back in August the State Republican Party decided that holding a Presidential preference poll at the caucus was superfluous because the state’s delegates were going to be bound by the results of the State Convention.
One can also assume on the basis of this Tweet that Donald Trump is ignorant of the realities of electoral politics. How many doors did Trump’s campaign knock on? How many phone calls did his phone bank make? How many Precinct Captains did his organization get elected? How many delegates to the State Convention did his campaign send? As a delegate, I did all of these things. It’s hard work. It’s thankless work. But if you want to win, it’s work that you must do.
Apparently, the amount of that hard work that Trump did is darn close to “zero” based on the 34-0 wipeout he suffered at the State Convention and it serves him right.
One of the critical differences between the left and the right in this nation is our conception of how Constitutional governance is supposed to work. Our nation was set up with a series of anti-democratic measures designed specifically to prevent the hot temper of the electorate from overwhelming the various protections written into the framework of the government. Not once in the founding documents does the word “democracy” appear — we are a Republic with some democratic institutions. That there are processes in place to insulate the levers of power from those who would ignorantly snatch at them doesn’t sit well with some people who apparently seem to think they are entitled to winning merely for having shown up.
To quote the great Thomas Sowell:
Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right — creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
Who could possibly feel more entitled and disconnected from the actual process than Donald J. Trump?
Published in General
There’s more at the link, by the way.
I say again that it is a travesty that that the people of Colorado are not allowed- by the Republican party at least- to have a vote upon who should get to be the Republican nominee.
Either you believe in elections, or you don’t.
The people controlling the Colorado state GOP apparently don’t.
Sad.
The election is in November. As far as I’m concerned, the Republican party can pick its nominee however it wants to, and each state party can pick their respective delegates however they want.
They are though. You have someone from Colorado who told you that they voted. In a caucus system. This is just mendacious twaddle.
Why do you think this helps your argument?
The problem is that the vote got cancelled once it mattered.
I should have refrained from mentioning Trump at all, because his issues aren’t what motivated me to comment.
Majestyk is correct- he danged well should have been able to hire people to tell him how to navigate the process successfully, and he danged well should have done more to win. That’s on him.
I say again: It is a travesty that we spent so such in blood and treasure to bring democracy to Iraq- at one point yesterday Drudge had a picture of some woman holding up a purple finger, plainly alluding to all that– while the right-leaning people of Colorado are not allowed even a voting Iowa-style caucus to express their opinion.
No good will come of this.
I suppose most years, when the opinions of the party insiders align reasonably well with the opinions of the electorate, this wouldn’t matter so much.
This is not one of those years.
I disagree with you, as does the former chairman of the state GOP.
Because your chosen candidate lost.
I disagree. It was always a non-binding straw poll, it never mattered. Literally nothing has changed. No one’s right to vote has been taken away. The purple finger event is in November, not now.
You are angry because your guy, Trump, didn’t understand the rules and now you want them changed after the fact because they hurt Trump. And, obviously, so is Drudge.
The Republican Party is a private organization. They are allowed to select their nominee for President however they want, and the people can decide in November if they want to vote for that person or not. That is where the democracy happens.
I complain that the people of Colorado aren’t getting a say in who should represent them in the contest for the presidency- and you respond that they never had a say. Noted. Gasp.
I’ve already addressed this. Repeatedly. In this comment thread, which you’re reading right now.
And of late the answer from the people has been to pick someone from the other team.
I see a problem here. Apparently the party does not, or else they’d change something. Apparently what they want to change is that the people who have voted for the party in the past still do. Gasp.
It won’t last. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The disease won’t get better when the party- a private organization, dontcha know- is even cancelling the meaningless election it used to hold.
The people of Colorado always had a voice in who represents them for the presidency and they did his year too. You have apparently bought Trumps lie and are now repeating it all while ignoring the actual on the ground reporting from one of our fellow R> members.
Colorado had a caucus on Super Tuesday. Here’s an article by someone who voted in it.
No. The caucus still happened (even though earlier you incorrectly stated the caucus was cancelled). Now you just don’t like the caucus system in Colorado. It is now an outrage that the caucus is not and has never been an “Iowas style” caucus.
They removed a meaningless step from the process that you feel should be so meaningful that it should be the only process, and now you are angry about the rules because you don’t like them.
Just because it was a non-binding straw poll doesn’t mean it never mattered.
It never mattered the way Xen wanted it to, i.e., it never determined how the delegates were allocated. The process for allocating delegates is unchanged from 2012. Xen thinks the party should only be allowed to use primaries or “Iowa style” caucuses because he likes those.
A caucus different from one Xen prefers is not the end of Democracy in our country, regardless of what picture Drudge puts above his headline.
Bt the way, can you or Xen tell me how the parties chose their candidates in Iraq?
Sure. Drudge was misleading people as he has been doing so much of the time lately. And I’m glad Cruz worked the system as well as he did and came out of it so well. But these things do matter.
No, but I’ll bet you can tell us.
I actually don’t know, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t an “Iowa Style” caucus or a primary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Iraq
I am just guessing but with 256 political parties I suspect there is some variation in the manner and method of selecting nominees.
According to the link, Iraq now uses the Sainte-Laguë method for allocating representation to the parties. In practice, this means that the party draws up the list of its candidates however it wants and once it knows how many seats it will have, it simply pulls the first x names off the lists. There is zero voter input into how the list is created or prioritized. This also means there is no way to kick the leader of the party out of parliament as long as the party gets one seat in parliament, it will go the leader of the party.
To all Trump supporters: Trump has to run as an independent. His campaign has been all about tossing the game table. From the beginning its all been about how the party isn’t fair. He has threatened repeatedly to walk if he doesn’t like the outcome regardless of the rules of candidate selection.
Trump support, in my opinion, is complex: there are people who sincerely want change in the country and who see Trump as the best champion of that change, there are people who are happy if all Trump does is to bust up furniture, there are people who see a Trump win as a (much needed) victory over political correctness, there are people who are nativist and nationalist with varying degrees of purity in their hearts, and some combination of all of the above.
The biggest contrast with Cruz (IMO) is that Cruz studies and plans within the party structure to win while Trump simply wants a wave of negative emotion to place Trump in the winner’s circle. That’s like having a jury system where the jury invents new crimes with which to convict the accused rather than weighing the evidence against the current law in deciding whether a crime was committed.
Ex post facto.
There are things I wish Rush would have done then and things I wish he would do now.
In the past, I wish he had raised red flags earlier about Trump’s divergence from conservatism. I’ve mentioned the comments about health care in Scotland and Canada from the August debate. The idea that socialized medicine can work anywhere at the national level is not a conservative idea, even if he doesn’t want to do that here. To my mind, it’s not that different from Obama’s recent remarks that the debate between capitalism and socialism is academic and we should take the best of each. Or Trump complaining that Governor Walker spent to much time fighting the public sector unions and not enough time on public schools. If Jeb! had made similar remarks, Rush would have raked him over the coals without mercy. Rush likes that Trump never apologizes, but I wish he were more critical of the substance of Trump.
As to the present, I was unhappy that Rush blamed the Establishment instead of Trump for Colorado. Even tough love would require Rush to tell Trump that he has to do the work to get the reward and he couldn’t even bring himself to do that. Personal responsibility should apply to Trump too, that’s all.
Why start now?
Better late than never.
A caucus that previously had a non-binding straw poll is bad enough.
A caucus that has does not even have a non-binding straw poll is even worse.
So, yes I very much prefer elections that have results that can be quantified in ways other a tweet that says “we did it #neverTrump.”
I disagree. I think Trump, simply assuming that the United States has elections in which the person who gets the most votes usually wins, figured all he had to do was get the most votes.
Oops. He is now discovering that this isn’t quite the case.
As are quite a few Americans.
Again, no good will come of this for the GOP.
He assumed. Every successful business person, and especially “dealmakers” know assuming something can break a deal.
So why would the author of Art of the Deal, hire’er of the best people, master of negotiation, assume? Cruz didn’t.
Good point. I agree.
I think I’ve already said this, but the success of Trump is a symptom of something much worse.
In this case Trump should have done the terrible hard work- ha ha- of paying people who understood the Colorado delegate selection process to give his supporters a decent chance of winding their way through the process and winning him some delegates.
He didn’t, either from ignorance, laziness, or stupidity. That’s on him, and he has no excuse for his failure.
My problem is that Trump made the exact same assumption many millions of other Americans would have made. That is, you get the most votes, and you win.
That Trump made an ignorant and false assumption- well, that’s Trump- but to find out that Colorado has a process such that the electorate at large doesn’t even get to vote on who should be the nominee- gasp.
I was quite surprised- not that my opinion mattered.
Hence, when I saw that Trump said it was a problem- yeah, I agree with him, not the folks who knew more about the process.
Trump is running for president, not the head of the Colorado GOP- so we’ll see how all this pans out soon.
Can someone here tell me if a political party’s preference poll within each state to inform, and sometimes bind, delegates to a candidate at the national convention is properly called an ‘election’?
So Trump is like the God of low information voters?
With this I can agree. But then again no good will come to the American experiment as it becomes populated with people who no longer have been educated on what a federal republic is.