Donald Trump has an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal in which the Republican presidential candidate rails against the “system” and his top rival, Ted Cruz. The diction of the op-ed is much more cerebral than Trump’s typical style, but the thrust of the piece is pure Donald. Particularly in its sloppiness with the facts.
Here’s Trump on the results of the Colorado caucuses, which awarded Cruz all 34 elected delegates:
Trump continues to argue that Colorado voters were “disenfranchised”—he uses the term three times—implying that the result was somehow ill-gotten and illegitimate. He also repeats the idea that a vote was “canceled” by “political insiders.”
To say that Colorado Republicans were disenfranchised is incorrect. Karl Dierenbach, a Colorado Republican, wrote his account of his state’s March 1 caucuses, at which he and his fellow Republicans voted for delegates. Those delegates, many of whom expressed their support for one presidential candidate or another, attended conventions at either the congressional-district-level or the state-level. At those conventions, the elected delegates, representing the Republicans who voted on March 1, voted for delegates to the national convention in Cleveland. Because the Cruz campaign was better organized, had allied with supporters of other organized ex-candidates (like Marco Rubio), and made sure Cruz himself attended the state convention, the elected national delegates are all Cruz supporters.
To say that Republican voters were disenfranchised is akin to saying voters are disenfranchised when they don’t get a vote on every bill before Congress, or on congressional leadership, or on every resolution naming a post office. The representative tradition of our democratic republic is as familiar as it is longstanding. In Colorado in particular, the Republican party has used the caucus system to select its delegates to the national convention in every presidential election since 1912, except for three. Colorado’s own rules were public knowledge before the caucuses occurred. And Trump and his campaign have not shown any evidence that Republican voters in Colorado were unfairly or illegally turned away from their precinct caucus on March 1.
Still, an appeal to tradition alone is not an argument for Colorado’s system. Indeed, the complex way in which Colorado Republicans select their delegates is arcane, complicated, and not very inclusive for those not already in the know. There’s a case to be made, one Trump’s supporters would no doubt agree with, that a more direct and democratic delegate-selection process would be fairer.
Many in Colorado did make that case, in fact. There were two debates in 2015, one in the legislature and another within the state party, about changing the rules to make the process more straightforward. The Colorado legislature debated a bill to require a presidential primary for both major parties, where voters would vote for their candidate of choice and the parties would allocate delegates based on the popular vote. The debate was open and available for the public to see. But in May 2015, the legislature voted that proposal down, keeping the caucus system alive.
Last fall, the state party was forced to make another decision about how to allocate its delegates. The state party had always held an unofficial straw poll of caucusgoers, but the national party had changed its rules and required any such vote tally at caucuses to bind delegates. So would the party tally the votes for presidential preference at the March 1 caucuses and use that result to allocate delegates to the national convention? Or would it maintain the complicated process of selecting delegates at the precinct level who would in turn select national delegates at the state and congressional-district levels?
Again, an open debate occurred about which path to use, and the state GOP decided to maintain the system that was used this spring. This is presumably the source of Trump’s claim that a vote was “canceled.” But it was a straw poll, not the caucuses themselves, that were canceled.
According to Colorado Republicans who spoke with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, neither Trump nor his political operation were involved in trying to influence either of those debates—even as other presidential campaigns were doing exactly that. Never, from the moment the Colorado bill to institute a primary was introduced in early 2015 to the day of the Colorado GOP’s state convention on April 9, did Trump publicly raise the issue of how Colorado selects its delegates.
In his Journal op-ed, Trump makes a fair case for reforming the party’s delegate-selection process. But he does so in the middle of the primary season, only after his prospects of winning the nomination have become endangered, and without ever having engaged in an effort to change the rules before. It’s an attempt to poison the well, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the rules should he end up losing his bid for the GOP nomination.
Trump is wrong. He’s wrong on the facts, he’s wrong to mislead his supporters and the American people about what happened in Colorado, and he’s wrong to demagogue the issue of voting rights for his own political benefit.
