This is rather disappointing.
Whoops. Turns out that running a campaign based on personality and free media, without much actual campaign organization, can turn around and bite you, something Donald Trump is starting to find out. Trump is winning primaries, but that’s not the whole ballgame. In many states, convention delegates are chosen after the primaries … and Ted Cruz’s campaign is swooping in and organizing, working to pick up every possible delegate while Trump’s campaign has been sitting back and assuming the delegates were in the bag. The big question is what happens if Trump doesn’t get to 1,237 delegates and the nomination goes to a second vote at the Republican National Convention:
via Daily Kos
As I understand it, the party apparatchiks get to pick the delegates, who will be duty bound to vote for Trump on the first ballot, but will then be free to vote for whomsoever they please. Or, whoever their party leaders tell them pleases them. So, looks like Paul Ryan may be nominated yet. For a guy who is a master of the Art of the Deal, a guy who will give those foreigners “what fer”, (as Georgie Russell advised Davy Crockett to do at the Alamo), and will even talk our friends to the South into building our wall for us, Trump has proven to be surprisingly inept. Well, not surprisingly. As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, he’s really been somewhat of a failure as a business person, and has succeeded only by virtue of braggadocio. Not for him the serious work of learning the rules and figuring out the angles. He doesn’t even have people for that. He alone, he tells us, can put the rest of the world in its place, but he can’t even make sure he has loyal delegates.
But, back to my main point. This is disappointing for those of us rooting for a brokered convention, one that slowly descends into chaos as the ballots mount. Had Trump gone to the trouble to make sure he had loyal delegates in all the states in which he has pledged delegates, we could have expected a massive floor fight with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Presumably he will still have some loyalists, but it would be so much juicier if there was a full complement. And, while we’re on the subject, am I the only person out here who’s slightly disappointed that the Secret Service ran interference for the RNC and put the kibosh on allowing open carry at the convention? The Republicans could have given a whole new meaning to the phrase “floor fight”.
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