House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that Republicans would give Democrats a massive victory in November if they chose a presidential nominee who hasn’t won the most votes during the primary.
“On the Republican side, if they reject the public will, they will really hand us a bigger victory than I’m even anticipating now, because that will be an implosion of the Republican Party,” she told reporters Thursday morning.
Establishment Republicans have been considering for months how they might find a nominee other than Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, even though those two candidates have picked up most of the available delegates so far.
Speculation about how this might be done has risen in the last few weeks, as it became clear that Trump may not be able to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to win a majority.
A Republican National Committee member predicted Wednesday that if Trump wins more than 1,100, that might be enough for him to clinch it. But the RNC quickly noted that nothing in the rules have changed, and that the RNC member was discussing a hypothetical scenario.
On the Democratic side, the race is not nearly as close, thanks to the hundreds of “superdelegates” that are siding with Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Pelosi reiterated again on Thursday that she doesn’t favor the superdelegate system.
“I have for 30 years been against super-delegates. I just don’t think that that’s the way you’re supposed to choose,” she said.
Still, she said the Democratic Party isn’t in nearly the fix Republicans are in, and predicted that whoever wins in the primaries would also end up being the Democratic nominee.
