If the Republican primary process were designed to produce an exactly proportional result based on voters’ choice rather than a winner, the party would have been doomed to a contested convention almost from the start.
Donald Trump, who has failed more than any other GOP presidential front-runner in recent history to unite the party behind him, would have no chance of securing the nomination, for he has won only 37 percent of primary votes so far.
Keep this in mind as Trump gripes about how his opponent Ted Cruz secured all 37 delegates at the Colorado convention last weekend. The process is certainly imperfect, but it made clear which candidate knows how to run and organize things and which one doesn’t.
Wherever strange or arcane Republican state party rules have benefited Trump, such as when he secured all the pledged delegates in one state while winning only 33 percent of the vote, he’s just fine with that. But when the rules hurt him, or he fails to learn or execute a strategy to exploit them, he whines about unfairness. Pretty unimpressive.
On March 1, Colorado Republicans gathered at 2,917 locations to choose participants who would go on to county GOP assemblies. Cruz’s people had already been there for months, finding supporters willing to run for county delegate slots and getting out the vote for them. During March, those assemblies chose the delegates to the district and state conventions who, no surprise, voted overwhelmingly for Cruz.
Trump, who didn’t do the necessary legwork, didn’t get the delegates. It’s that simple. He has no excuses for this failure. Every campaign knew the process when it was adopted last August — not in order to stop Trump, who at that point was expected to fade, but to circumvent party rules about “bound” delegates. It should be noted that Jeb Bush, hardly a Trump fan, wanted an actual primary.
Trump’s team botched the caucuses, and was helpless to compete at the conventions. At some, his delegate candidates didn’t pay the $5 fee to get their names on the ballot. At the state convention on Saturday, his campaign handed out flyers with incorrect advice on them; if his supporters had followed that advice they’d have ended up voting for other candidates’ delegates.
It’s worth wondering whether the man in charge of such a campaign could successfully run the executive branch of the federal government. Trump supporters brush aside concerns that their man doesn’t know what he is talking about by saying he’d hire good people to work for him. So why didn’t hire good people to work in his campaign? When President Trump is outsmarted by Vladimir Putin or a newly nuclear Iran, will his response be a stream of petulant tweets?
But there is a deeper point. A typical complaint against grandstanding Republican politicians is that they let the grassroots do the heavy lifting at election time, then go to Washington and enjoy the high life without securing the gains their voters fought for. So what is one to think of Trump, who rouses crowds with interminable speeches but does not follow through with effective executive action to secure the nomination? While Trump grandstands, Cruz outworks him in state after state.
Trump’s indifference to details, first of policy and now of executive administration, may yet be his undoing. Attention to detail is as important in the mechanics of politics as it is in every other endeavor. A central element of his campaign message is that he knows how to get things done. But actually, his campaign’s recent failures show he doesn’t know how to get things done at all.
