Sean Trende has an important piece on delegate pluralities this morning. Here’s a flavor of it:
No matter what happens tonight, tomorrow you’re going to hear people insisting that the race is over because Trump will be on track to a plurality of delegates and that will mean he has to be given the nomination. So remember: This simply isn’t true. 1,237 is not an arbitrary number. It’s a number defined by a rule that was crafted with a specific purpose. And the purpose was to prevent people with narrow-but-deep plurality support from taking the nomination. The 1,237 majority rule was written explicitly to stymie a candidate with Trump-levels of support and he would not be the first plurality-winner to be denied the nomination.
And when you hear talk about Trump and “the will of the people” think back to 2008. Hillary Clinton won 300,000 more votes than Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. How much did this matter? Exactly zero. Because the rules for nominating were about delegates, not votes. And the world didn’t exactly end for Clinton supporters, even though their candidate won an outright majority of the popular vote.
The race will continue and if Trump falls further behind the delegate pace then the chances for a brokered convention will have actually increased. And at a brokered convention the party will be under no obligation–no legal, moral, or practical obligation, whatsoever–to hand the nomination to Trump.
