2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Berkut]

I'm looking forward to the fireworks when the delegates fuck over Trump in favor of Ted Cruz at the convention, despite a large gap in votes and 1st-round delegates.

It is such bullshit to claim that Trump would be getting fucked over.

He didn't get a majority of delegates or votes. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a majority of delegates and voters would rather *anyone* but Trump be the nominee, and the only reason Trump has a plurality is that the non-Trump votes have been divided.

By definition, if Trump doesn't have a majority of votes, then a majority of voters have voted against him. He is not getting fucked.

[DGuller]

I'm looking forward to the fireworks when the delegates fuck over Trump in favor of Ted Cruz at the convention, despite a large gap in votes and 1st-round delegates.

It is such bullshit to claim that Trump would be getting fucked over.

He didn't get a majority of delegates or votes. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a majority of delegates and voters would rather *anyone* but Trump be the nominee, and the only reason Trump has a plurality is that the non-Trump votes have been divided.

By definition, if Trump doesn't have a majority of votes, then a majority of voters have voted against him. He is not getting fucked.

That would be completely true if delegates were just abstract units that belonged to each candidate, and not people that can turn on their master the first moment they're allowed to.  If Trump winds up with far fewer delegates at subsequent votes than he even started with, because he can't get enough party cronies on his side, that would test the legitimacy of what comes out.  And we're not even talking about perception, which is a whole different kind of reality when it comes to Trump voters.

[Berkut]

I'm looking forward to the fireworks when the delegates fuck over Trump in favor of Ted Cruz at the convention, despite a large gap in votes and 1st-round delegates.

It is such bullshit to claim that Trump would be getting fucked over.

He didn't get a majority of delegates or votes. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a majority of delegates and voters would rather *anyone* but Trump be the nominee, and the only reason Trump has a plurality is that the non-Trump votes have been divided.

By definition, if Trump doesn't have a majority of votes, then a majority of voters have voted against him. He is not getting fucked.

That would be completely true if delegates were just abstract units that belonged to each candidate, and not people that can turn on their master the first moment they're allowed to.  If Trump winds up with far fewer delegates at subsequent votes than he even started with, because he can't get enough party cronies on his side, that would test the legitimacy of what comes out.  And we're not even talking about perception, which is a whole different kind of reality when it comes to Trump voters.

That would be completely true if delegates had "masters", but since they don't...well, it isn't.

[Barrister]

My take is:

I have no problem if leaders are chosen only by party loyalists at a series of conventions which select delegates.  Heck, that's not too far off how Canadian parties do it.  To me the whole idea of having party nominations open to whomever walks in off the street seems bizarre.

But, in many/most cases, that's how the US does it.  Party nominations are by open vote either to literally anyone, or anyone who checked a D or R box when they registered to vote.  If you're going to have that kind of widespread voting, then those votes need to matter.

[Valmy]

But, in many/most cases, that's how the US does it.  Party nominations are by open vote either to literally anyone, or anyone who checked a D or R box when they registered to vote.  If you're going to have that kind of widespread voting, then those votes need to matter.

Except it doesn't work that way. Each state's R or D party gets to pick its own method of deciding who to support. Some prefer a primary election, some don't. Colorado decided to do it the way they did. The Republicans of Colorado are free to let the Colorado Republicans know how they feel about this.

[dps]

I think a lot of foreign posters here (and a lot of Americans as well) don't really understand how Presidential primaries work.  It's been touched on a lot that each state has its own rules about how delegates are selected (and in some state, each party has a different system), but I think a lot of people don't realize just how much variation there is.  For example in some states (WV for one, at least when I lived there, not sure if it's been changed since), the primary voting for the actual Presidential candidates is essentially what is often called a "straw poll", which is completely separate from the delegate selection process.   People who actually want to be convention delegates are listed separately on the ballot, and you vote for them as individuals, not as a slate.  Now logically, if you voted for Trump, expressing your preference for him as the Republican nominee, you'd vote for delegates who are pledged to Trump--but that doesn't always happen.  Maybe you vote for a bunch of Trump delegates, but a couple of your buddies are running as "uncommitted" delegates, another couple of friends are running as Cruz delegates, and your own father is running as a Kasich delegates, so 5 of your votes go to your friends and your father instead of the Trump delegates, or maybe you just vote for everyone from your home county who's running without regard to who they're pledged to.  Or maybe you're lazy, and if you're allowed to vote for X number of delegates, you just vote for the first X number of people listed on the ballot.  Or maybe you just enjoy fucking with the system, and vote for delegates at random.  Or you split up your votes for some other logical or illogical reason. 

The point is, all this variation in the delegate selection process makes it very difficult to say what the will of the voters really is when it comes to Presidential nominations.

[DGuller]

That would be completely true if delegates had "masters", but since they don't...well, it isn't.

That's coming full circle.  You have to either take the stand that delegates are the "votes", and that if Trump doesn't win the majority of delegates, then he lost to "anti-Trump" side.  Or you have to take the stand that delegates are independent actors, in which case it doesn't even matter how well Trump performed in the primaries.

[dps]

If, at the end of the primaries, Trump has won a majority of the delegate selected, but then, some of them are, for lack of a better word, "subverted" and he's denied the nomination, then he and his supporters have a valid complaint about being fucked over, and the legitimacy of the nomination can reasonably be questioned, even if the means by which some of his delegates were "subverted" were legal and in accordance to party rules.  On the other hand, if he heads into the convention with a plurality but not a majority, well, then as Berkut said, he didn't win, so he's not getting fucked if the party turns to someone else after no one gets a majority on the first ballot.  And it's not unreasonable to assume that a majority of the voters did feel that the party's nominee should be "anyone but Trump".  Heck, count me in that number--I would have voted for any of the 16 or so candidates that the GOP started out with ahead of Trump.

[Jaron]

Can Bernie win NY?

A lot of his followers are claiming the polls that show Clinton ahead are inaccurate or purposely misleading results to discourage potential Bernie leaning Democrats from voting.

[CountDeMoney]

But, in many/most cases, that's how the US does it.  Party nominations are by open vote either to literally anyone, or anyone who checked a D or R box when they registered to vote.  If you're going to have that kind of widespread voting, then those votes need to matter.

Except it doesn't work that way. Each state's R or D party gets to pick its own method of deciding who to support. Some prefer a primary election, some don't. Colorado decided to do it the way they did. The Republicans of Colorado are free to let the Colorado Republicans know how they feel about this.

Interesting op-ed piece on Colorado's primary, albeit a bit dated.  But it gives a good idea at the numbers that involved--or not involved--in some of these processes.

OpEdOpinion
Colorado's rules disenfranchise most voters
Updated March 1, 2016 11:27 AM
By Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg View


THE BOTTOM LINE
This year, Colorado's primary process provides an example of a broader problem with the country's political system: Far too many Americans aren't represented.

If you need proof that the two established parties don't represent enough Americans, come to Colorado, which holds its nomination caucuses on Super-Tuesday. In this swing state, neither Republicans nor Democrats have a plurality of registered voters, but the parties have rigged the rules so that voters have as little say as possible in the selection of presidential candidates.

This year, Colorado's primary process provides an example of a broader problem with the country's political system: Far too many Americans aren't represented.

Everyone I talked to in Denver has mentioned what is variously defined as Colorado's "frontier mentality," "Wild West feel" or "libertarian streak." The state is the birthplace of the Libertarian Party, which has 24,000 active registered voters here, but the independent voters are mainly registered as unaffiliated. There are 1.3 million such independents compared with 1.1 million each for the Democrats and Republicans.

Support for maximum liberty straddles political lines. This translates into voter backing for a set of political causes championed by both traditional parties: pot legalization and the energy industry's freedom to frack; abortion rights and a small government. According to Christy Powell, who works for Project New America, a company in Denver that does polling and strategy consulting for progressive organizations:

Small government libertarianism works for a lot of Western voters, so even in issues such as reproductive choice 'government needs to get out of my business' is a more accessible framework. The Republican side has done a good job of pushing small government, and we can turn it on its head.

This peculiarity may bring voters together, but more often it divides them. According to Richard Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chairman, independent Coloradans "don't want to identify with the Democrats because they're too liberal on spending or with the Republicans because they're too conservative on social issues."

The share of unaffiliated voters is growing. In 2006, they made up 34 percent of the rolls; now it's almost 37 percent. It's young people and relatively new arrivals in the state who swell the unaffiliated ranks. "People who move here for the quality of life and then stay can't be taken for granted," says Jill Hanauer, president of Project New America. "The customary labels are meaningless to the average voter, especially a millennial. Those over 50 are easier to classify."

Indeed, the 26-40 age cohort is the biggest among the unaffiliated voters. Those 41-60 dominate the registered Republicans and Democrats.

Wadhams says that only 10 percent or 15 percent of the state's voting age population are true swing voters: The rest more or less consistently support either the Democrats or the Republicans. Yet they prefer to keep their options open.

This elemental libertarianism seems to call for a strong grass-roots democracy, the kind I saw in Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet in Colorado in 2016, it wouldn't stand a chance.

Both parties have chosen to keep the independents out of the primary process. On March 1, Colorado parties are holding closed caucuses, meaning that only voters who registered Democrat or Republican a month ahead will be allowed to attend. The Republicans have gone further: Their caucuses don't even feature a candidate preference poll. The party's state executive committee canceled it in August, ostensibly in response to national party rules that, according to one interpretation, bind a delegate to vote for a specific candidate if he declared his affiliation at the caucus stage.

Colorado's system is the polar opposite of Iowa's, where unaffiliated voters also constitute a plurality, but are allowed to register with the parties on voting day, and where both parties ask caucus-goers about their candidate preferences. In Iowa, with its 2.1 million registered voters, 357,983 people turned out for the caucuses. It was a genuinely democratic process. Turnout has been high in the other early states that held open voting in which anyone, including independents, could take part.

In Colorado, Wadhams proposed and held Republican preference polls in 2008, when 70,000 Republicans turned out, and in 2012, when 50,000 showed up. This year, he says, perhaps 15,000 die-hard activists will turn out in a state with 3.6 million registered voters (compared with the almost 187,000 Republicans who voted in Iowa, whose voting age population is 42 percent smaller).

Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver, suggests that Republicans may have canceled the vote intentionally to keep the turnout low. "It's what they want," Masket says. "They are concerned about Donald Trump and they want just the party regulars, the more mainstream voters."

Colorado's favorite Republican candidate will be determined through a four-tier process, in which only 1.3 percent of the registered Republicans will take part, and that just at the first stage. Obviously, this favors establishment candidates.

"Look, it's a bummer that there's no preference poll," says Josh Penry, the former state senate minority leader who now serves as Marco Rubio's Colorado campaign chairman. "We're doing out best to get delegates for Marco through the arcane process that there is."

I rather suspect that with five Republican candidates still in the race, Colorado's undemocratic Republican primary system gives Rubio, now the party mainstream's clear favorite, one of his few chances of winning a state.

The Democrats aren't doing such an obvious job of keeping out voters who might back Bernie Sanders, but a closed caucus favors Hillary Clinton: The demographics of registered Democrats in Colorado match those of Clinton supporters. Many of the younger Coloradans who might have backed Sanders caught on to the rules too late, and they are still registered as independents and left out of the primary process.

Because the state parties haven't thrown the doors open to independents and each other's supporters, as they'd done in Iowa, candidates haven't made too many campaign appearances here. As a result, the swing state's public will get its say only during the national election in November. In 2016, that's way too late. Some — or all — candidates who would have satisfied the independents' demand for an outsider will be gone by then, kept out by the still-powerful party hierarchies.

"All the rules are gone" in this election, Wadhams says. That, however, doesn't include the candidate selection rules. Of the states that have yet to vote, 29 have closed primaries that keep out swing voters and, more narrowly, backers of Trump and Sanders.

These rules, more than anything else, may determine who's going to compete for the presidency. Trump and Sanders have both done well in states where the primaries were open (Trump also won in Nevada, where a Republican voter needed to register 10 days ahead of the caucus). If they manage victories in states with systems as unfair as Colorado's, they will have overcome odds that were stacked against them.

If, on the other hand, they end up failing, that will only feed the trend toward the traditional parties' irrelevance. About 40 percent of Americans — and the number is growing — identify as independents in polls. Voter registration will probably follow the trend, especially as Millennials begin to dominate the agenda.

The two parties are firmly entrenched, but by clinging to their power to select candidates, they may be slowly killing themselves. Independents whose political agendas cross party lines won't always accept being limited to being able to only make the final choice, not the preliminary one.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.

[Martinus]

The "primaries are not really democratic process so it doesn't matter" argument would have some leg to stand on if not for the early ballot registration deadlines and sore loser laws.

[Admiral Yi]

Sure, because if poor Donald had actually known the rules, which have been sitting around for a year, he would have run as an independent. 

[Legbiter]

My take is:

I have no problem if leaders are chosen only by party loyalists at a series of conventions which select delegates.  Heck, that's not too far off how Canadian parties do it.  To me the whole idea of having party nominations open to whomever walks in off the street seems bizarre.

But, in many/most cases, that's how the US does it.  Party nominations are by open vote either to literally anyone, or anyone who checked a D or R box when they registered to vote.  If you're going to have that kind of widespread voting, then those votes need to matter.

Trump could nuke the Republican party if they try to educate their base on nomination rules too much.

[Eddie Teach]

Sure, because if poor Donald had actually known the rules, which have been sitting around for a year, he would have run as an independent.

If he did that, he wouldn't have gotten all the free publicity.

[jimmy olsen]

But, in many/most cases, that's how the US does it.  Party nominations are by open vote either to literally anyone, or anyone who checked a D or R box when they registered to vote.  If you're going to have that kind of widespread voting, then those votes need to matter.

Except it doesn't work that way. Each state's R or D party gets to pick its own method of deciding who to support. Some prefer a primary election, some don't. Colorado decided to do it the way they did. The Republicans of Colorado are free to let the Colorado Republicans know how they feel about this.

We know it doesn't work that way, we're talking about how it should work.

In my opinion the parties should be legally required to determine their candidates by popular vote.