This really is odd. If Fred Thompson won the straw poll, it should have gotten at least a little ink.
My only question is about the delegates who were cut. I guess I just don’t understand how that works and could it favor one candidate over another.
“It’s not who gets the most votes that matters, it’s who counts the votes.”
-J. Stalin
Romney seemed to question the results himself in his concession speech last night. I don’t exactly recall his remarks, except he alluded to winning two silvers and a gold, but then made it appear he wasn’t sure about Wyoming.
After reading the article, you are left with the impression that the votes don’t really matter, that the Party just selected delegates, perhaps based on hair style.
They did report the results of the straw poll. Romney took 51%, and Fred and Hunter had I think 30% and 19%, but I can’t remember which got which.
I don’t know if they listed it out by individual caucus.
We knew the results of the straw poll before we knew the results of the delegate selection.
It sounds from this story that Romney didn’t have a lot of people at this one caucus that wasn’t picking a delegate, but instead was doing an alternate.
BTW, I’ve also seen the alternates listed somewhere,but I don’t remember where.
Good question. As I understand it, the process was flawed, because the straw polls didn’t really count. In that case, I don’t know why they had them. It sounds as if they wanted to give the illusion of popular input, whereas the results were basically predetermined by the party pros and insiders.
Regretably, by doing it this way, the state party gave the media the chance to pretend that Romney won the straw polls. I think that was dishonest on the part of the state officials, and that it was probably deliberate, because they did nothing to correct the false impression when they spoke with the press.
This is one more regretable example of how the pros can screw up if they try to tell the base what to do, instead of at least listening to them. It’s like what happened in California, when Parsky imposed first Riordan and then Arnold on the base—which has probably succeeded in sinking the party there permanently.
This is akin to what happened back in the early years of the Iowa caucuses. In 1976, Reagan supporters such as myself went to the caucuses believing we were making our choice for the GOP candidate. We got to the end of the caucus and I asked if we were going to vote. The precinct chair said that really wasn’t on the agenda so we took an informal vote and Reagan won. It turned out that the delegate process was under the control of party hacks supporting Ford. In 1980, Reagan got screwed by the party hacks again. Finally, after that the party got a whole lot more serious about getting a quality vote count since the media was questioning their credibility.