Carly Could Turn Around the RNC

Fiorina would be perfect for this job. As the former CEO of HP, she knows how organizations are supposed to perform, and as a former GOP presidential candidate, she surely knows that the RNC is not performing well at all.

Indeed, the RNC’s problems are so bad that, barring a massive shift, they have all but cost the GOP the presidential election.

The RNC is the umbrella organization for the state parties, which since the party’s founding have selected the presidential and vice presidential nominees, and written the party platform. These core tasks remain, but the role of the RNC has shifted notably over the last half century or so.

The body now has two main responsibilities. First, the RNC functions as a (perfectly legal) money-laundering organization. Since the 1970s, campaign-finance regulations have restricted the amount of money that can be donated directly to candidates—even as the cost of campaigns has skyrocketed. Enter the party organizations. Campaign-finance laws allow them certain exemptions that individuals do not possess. Thus, wealthy donors can use the party organizations as a way around campaign contribution limits. Because the RNC works hand-in-glove with the GOP presidential nominee, it is the most important party organization there is.

Second, the RNC has essentially been tasked with designing a voting system, thanks to the proliferation of primaries and caucuses. It wasn’t always this way. State parties used to select their convention delegates directly (in processes that resembled what Colorado and North Dakota used this year), and they were (usually) free to vote their consciences at the quadrennial conventions. But since the 1970s, the power to choose the presidential nominee has shifted to the voters, and the RNC’s job has evolved. It now designs the system that translates those votes into delegates, and thus into the nomination itself.

The RNC is very good at raising money, but it is very bad at designing a voting system.

The purpose of a voting system is to aggregate the diverse preferences of each participant into a single choice that reflects the will of the whole. It is literally impossible to design a perfect voting system, but some are obviously better than others—or at least, obvious to everybody except the honchos of the RNC, which cycle after cycle has sanctioned a system with the potential to leave a broad swath of the party dissatisfied.

There are a lot of problems with the RNC process, but the biggest one is its tendency to reward delegate bonuses to the candidate who finishes in first place, regardless of their total vote share. These are the “winner take all” and “winner take most” primaries did so much to aid Donald Trump this time around. This rule has the effect of creating a process that resembles a “first past the post” voting system—where the candidate who wins the most votes acquires the nomination, even if a large majority of voters prefer somebody else.

This is an enormous problem for a presidential nomination—for two reasons. First, nomination battles tend to have several major candidates, usually three or more. If the vote is reasonably spread out among the main contenders, then you cannot say that anybody fairly represents the preferences of a majority. This makes presidential nominations different from the general election, where 95 percent or more of voters select a major-party candidate. In a general election battle, a 49-46 victory is close enough to claim an effective majority. But what if the vote is 40-25-15-15-5, which is close to what it was when Ted Cruz lost the Indiana primary? Can the person with 40 percent claim to speak for the majority? Hardly. Winner-take-all is usually a fair reflection of a group’s preference in a two-way race, but it can distort the true views of the collective in races with three or more major candidates.

Second, a party is supposed to be a group of people united by a commitment to shared principles. Implicit within that is amandate for consensus—ideally, something above and beyond a bare majority. It is dangerous for a party to have sharp divisions within it—because after the nomination, all the members of the party have to pull together for the sake of victory. That requires a genuine sense that everybody can live with the party nominee; maybe the ultimate winner is nobody’s first choice, but he should not be anybody’s last choice. On the other hand, a nominee who is beloved by 45 percent of the party but loathed by 35 percent is going to struggle to hold the coalition together in the general election. This is precisely the problem that Trump has. Can he fairly be said to represent a vast majority the GOP? Of course not. Instead, the minority of voters who supported Trump was slightly larger and more durable than the minorities who supported the other candidates. That is a terrible way to pick a candidate.

Unfortunately, the RNC has been blithely unaware of this problem, even as its ill effects have become increasingly obvious. The party was genuinely united around George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, but over the last three cycles, an outright majority (2008 and 2016) or a very large minority (2012) has supported somebody other than the eventual nominee. Is it any wonder that so many Republican voters are dissatisfied with their own party? They think that the person at the top of the ticket does not represent them. And they’re not entirely wrong.

Since consensus is a priority, and internal divisions have been a problem, the GOP should take a closer look at the Democrats’ process, which is more suited to the task. The RNC needs to stop awarding massive delegate bounties to the candidate who finishes first, and instead utilize a more proportional system. The body also needs to liberalize the rules for names to be entered into nomination on the floor of the convention, and give delegates some limited freedom of conscience. If two or three candidates finish the primary season, and all three are polarizing, then a dark-horse alternative should be allowed to have his name placed in nomination, and in those situations delegates should be free to use their good judgment.

Unfortunately, the RNC has ignored these issues—and all conservatives (pro-Trump or otherwise) will pay the price. The GOP is in the midst of an unprecedented calamity: Parties have nominated bad candidates in the past, but never has one nominated a candidate as awful as Trump—so terrible that he looks set to lose an election that a generic Republican would quite probably win, and easily at that. There are a host of reasons this has happened, but the party’s faulty rules are surely near the top of the list.

The next RNC chairman must focus on reforming the rules of the party, which is why Fiorina would be perfect for this job. If anybody in the GOP understands how organizations actually work, it’s Carly.