Posted on 04/06/2012 2:08:05 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The Republican National Committee was supposed to play the part of umpire in the GOP presidential primary, but some Republicans are grumbling that the committee wasn’t just calling balls and strikes.
Critics, including supporters of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and even neutral Republicans, argue that the national party took steps that helped tilt the contest toward Mitt Romney — an allegation that the RNC rejects but is taking very seriously.
The list of specific grievances ranges from issues that even the party acknowledges are legitimate, to those that they dismiss as desperate fixations from Romney’s flailing rivals.
For example, the committee agrees that some states that went for Romney jumped the line in the primary schedule, a violation of party rules. But RNC defenders shrug off other complaints, like that they undercut Santorum and Gingrich by formatting a delegate tracking list to pad Romney’s tally, by forming a fundraising alliance this week with Romney and by highlighting a rule that would block an unlikely path to the nomination for Gingrich.
And it’s possible they’ll be other clashes in the coming weeks, with the RNC signaling Thursday its opposition to a push by Santorum backers in Texas to alter the rules surrounding that state’s May 29 primary to help the former Pennsylvania Senator.
Critics of the RNC’s handling of the primary are so sensitive to signs that the committee may be pulling for Romney that they’ve even detected evidence of favoritism in the staff ties between his campaign and the RNC — though some concede such speculation veers more toward conspiracy theory than legitimate concern.
Still, taken together, the perception that the primary wasn’t a fair fight could damage the Party’s standing with the big donors and grassroots activists it needs to rally this fall to defeat President Barack Obama. And if Obama wins reelection, that angst could create problems for the RNC and particularly for its chairman, Reince Priebus.
“The chatter is that the fix is in, and that’s created a great deal of consternation,” said Michael Steele, Priebus’s predecessor as RNC chairman.
Steele said he’s been approached “very quietly” by about ten of the RNC’s elected members expressed misgivings “about the influence that the Romney campaign seems to have in dictating the terms of what the RNC is going to do and how it is going to follow the rules.”
A source with a rival GOP campaign said supportive RNC members have raised concerns about a pro-Romney bias within the committee’s full-time leadership, and suggested they were dissatisfied with Priebus’s stewardship.
The RNC defended its neutrality in the race, with spokesman Sean Spicer explaining “we followed the rules exactly as laid out” and questioning Steele’s credibility to comment on RNC affairs given “the state of disaster Mr. Steele left the RNC in.”
The handful of 168 members interviewed for this story all rejected the idea that there was a concerted effort to favor Romney – and one even emailed the next day after talking with Spicer to more assertively defend the RNC.
However, some did acknowledge that individual RNC moves seemed to benefit Romney, conceding that those decisions could be fueling the perception that the national Party had its thumb on the scale.
“I would like to discourage the public from believing that there’s been monkey business going on that’s giving Mitt Romney any kind of an advantage,” said Phyllis Woods, an RNC committeewoman from New Hampshire. Woods, who didn’t endorse in her state’s first-in-the-nation primary, said she’s “concerned that there may be some perception that the RNC or maybe even some state parties anoint candidates.”
But she asserted that’s not the RNC’s fault. “It’s just part of the culture right now that there is a mistrust of the establishment.”
That mistrust is justified, said supporters of Santorum and Gingrich. They complain that the RNC’s interpretation of rules padded Romney’s delegate lead and could stymie Gingrich’s attempt to compete in a brokered convention in Tampa, Fla., this summer – the increasingly far-fetched scenario that the former House Speaker contends is his route to the nomination.
“It’s probably not coincidence” that both interpretations favor Romney, asserted former Pennsylvania congressman Bob Walker, a top Gingrich campaign advisor. “But the fact is that we’ve known all the way along in our campaign that we are faced with an establishment that has made their decision.”
Gingrich’s allies lashed at Priebus late last month after he suggested in an interview on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” that “an important rule” of the RNC could bar Gingrich from having his name presented as a candidate at the convention.
The rule states that candidates have to “demonstrate the support of a plurality of the delegates” from “five or more states prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.”
Priebus explained “when these candidates are adding up their delegates … they had better make sure they at least have a plurality of five states to make these things happen.”
Gingrich – both at the time and still – has won only two states’ primaries, but his supporters contend that he could cobble together pluralities of delegates even without winning additional contests by wooing uncommitted delegates from states that have already voted.
When Priebus cited the rule in the context of Gingrich’s campaign, it “was disturbing to me, and I think he’s wrong about it,” said Rick Tyler, a former close Gingrich aide now running a super PAC devoted to the former House Speaker. The super PAC, Winning Our Future, is “doing some things on the delegate front,” Tyler said, asserting Priebus failed to take into account Gingrich’s efforts to court uncommitted delegates. “We’re one delegate behind in Mississippi. You don’t think we can get one delegate to say they’ll support Newt?”
The Gingrich and Santorum campaigns found common cause in challenging the RNC’s handling of the allocation of delegates from Arizona and Florida – both of which violated party rules by holding their primaries before this month.
The rules – which were approved during Steele’s tenure in an effort to extend the primary to give voters in more states a chance to weigh in – stipulate that states that hold nominating contests prior to April 1 are required to allocate their delegates proportionally. But Arizona and Florida approved plans allocating all their delegates to the winner of their primaries and, in both cases, that ended up being Romney.
While the campaigns have indicated they intend to challenge the winner-take-all delegate allocations at the convention, the RNC’s delegate tracking list continues to count all 29 delegates from Arizona and all 50 from Florida in Romney’s column.
The tracker indicates its “numbers do not reflect any potential delegate disputes.”
But it nonetheless “gives a bloated view of how many [Romney] has,” said Tim LeFever, an influential conservative activist and top fundraiser for Santorum.
The RNC’s response to such complaints – that they can be addressed through a formal challenge before the convention’s rules committee – doesn’t satisfy Santorum supporters, said LeFever, asserting that the RNC has flouted the spirit of the Steele rule changes to extend the primary. “They’re saying you can still vote but it’s not going to make much of a difference because they’ve been pushing everybody to have this race over before it even gets to your doorstep,” said LeFever, who lives in California, which holds its primary June 5. “In my mind, it’s disenfranchisement.”
Even John Ryder, a national committeeman from Tennessee who helped write the new rules, said “if I were issuing delegate counts either as a member of the media or as a member of the RNC press office, I might put an asterisks next to” the delegates from Florida and Arizona. After talking to RNC spokesman Spicer, though, Ryder emailed back to explain that he was satisfied by the RNC’s disclaimer about how disputes could impact delegate tallies.
But Kim Lehman, an RNC committee member from Iowa who supports Santorum, noted that the RNC delegate tracker is “not even including states like Iowa that Santorum won because they’re unbound.”
Nonetheless, both Ryder and Lehman praised Priebus for trying to accommodate supporters of all the candidates even as the primary process grew contentious.
“I’m not saying that everyone is happy,” said Lehman. “I’m just saying that the way that things have been conducted have been fair.”
The committee has been diligent about both treating the campaigns equally and following its rules, said Spicer. Those rules gave it little flexibility in how it handled the Florida and Arizona violations, Spicer said, explaining the RNC “enacted every punishment available to the RNC under the rules and have made everyone aware of how further action can be taken if it was so desired.”
He cast the dustup over the five-state rule that could bar Gingrich as an effort by Priebus to clarify the rule in response to a question about Gingrich’s strategy, asserting “I’m not sure how reading the rule that is on a website advantages any one candidate.”
News this week about the Romney campaign taking up an RNC offer to form a joint fundraising committee, which was presented as a sign that the Party was “coalescing around” Romney, was much ado about nothing, Spicer said.
He explained that the presidential campaigns of Santorum, Gingrich and even Texas Rep. Ron Paul had been offered similar joint fundraising arrangements during a conference call several weeks ago, and said “three campaigns have expressed interest in doing this.”
After being contacted by Spicer about this story and asked to respond to grumbling about the joint fundraising arrangement, Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond called POLITICO to say “we did get approached a couple months ago about that. And if our campaign was at a different point, we might have taken advantage of that.” Hammond said Gingrich doesn’t intend to participate in a joint committee, but he added that generally “Reince has been very good to Newt and has been fair.”
But Tyler called the joint committee offer to Gingrich, Santorum and Paul “too cute by half because Romney is the only person who can afford to do something like that.” Tyler said the deal “has all the imprinteur of ‘the fix is in’” and predicted “if Newt Gingrich were to win the nomination, I think the RNC would get cleaned out.”
Tyler and other Gingrich and Santorum backers cited the staff ties between the RNC and Team Romney, such as RNC outside counsel Tom Josefiak, who serves as the top lawyer for a super PAC run by a pro-Romney operative, and Romney general counsel Ben Ginsberg, who worked for the RNC for years.
“Team Romney has an advantage with someone like Ginsberg, who has been around the RNC for a long time and understands the rules and can make them sound like anything they want,” said Tyler.
Then there’s Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director. He worked as the RNC political director and is a partner in a political data firm co-founded by RNC political director Jeff Larson.
An operative for one of Romney’s GOP rivals said “I know this sounds like Watergate conspiracy theory stuff, but it is all connected. It’s the same sort of establishment crowd who all have concluded that we need Mitt Romney to be the nominee to beat Barack Obama.”
The operative, who was not authorized to discuss the race, has worked at high levels of GOP politics, but said “It has been eye opening to see up close the degree to which the establishment does put its thumb on the scale.”
The corrupt, crooked, decrepit GOP-E is going down the same path as the old Whigs.
The GOPe REWARDS Romney for his backstabbing
Gov Palin and her children through surrogates in 2008.
=== WILL NOT VOTE FOR A TICKET WITH RINO ROMNEY
and WILL WORK AGAINST IT. =====================
RINO$ got us RINORomney.
Just like Ford, Dole, McNutt...............
We’re screwed.
Again.
We The Few
We The Controllers
I’m with Amy. If we don’t fix this and clean our own house, we will never move forward or win from here.
Here in Pa., the GOP elite have decided that Steve Welch should be the candidate (even though he worked on the Sestak campaign....egad.) This is happeneing at all levels not just the national scale. We need to expose them, root them out and shut them down...or at least diminish their influence. I’m up to Here with this garbage.
They’ll not get one thin dime from me this year. They’ll not get one moment of my time.
In fact, I’ll probably work for a 3rd party candidate to defeat the 2 liberals running on the major party tickets.
In my case, Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum have gotten money from me, and the GOP has in the past.
This year they get my animosity instead.
I didn’t leave the Republican Party.....the Party “LEFT” me.
After returning the money requests several times with a clear statement of how disappointed I am with rinos and their ilk, the RNC has finally stopped bothering me. Who would have thougt? I will be voting only for conservatives at all levels. I will only donate directly to conservatives.
It's almost as though they shrug their shoulders and murmur, "who cares what he does to the people or the country" as long as he serves our needs.
A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. - Ronald Reagan's 1975 CPAC Speech
Mark for later.
Does anyone have the hard totals of all votes cast, and for who?
I would like to see the raw numbers if they are available.
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P12/
That is the same link as in Post #1.
Click on the state abbreviations at the top of the graph.
You can get all the information of popular vote, hard delegates, soft (uncommitted) delegates and the GOP state party rules for each.
Your conclusion may well be, contrived chaos.
I was hoping someone had totaled them up already for the states that had voted, me being lazy and all...
Now that Romney is much closer to wrapping up the nomination, they can afford the luxury of “taking it seriously”. Their work is done.
Exactly why I posted this article; they're counting on "lazy -- someone else tell me" voters.
".......For example, the committee agrees that some states that went for Romney jumped the line in the primary schedule, a violation of party rules. But RNC defenders shrug off other complaints, like that they undercut Santorum and Gingrich by formatting a delegate tracking list to pad Romney’s tally, by forming a fundraising alliance this week with Romney and by highlighting a rule that would block an unlikely path to the nomination for Gingrich."....
YOU have to look up the numbers, not take the AP numbers or the GOP numbers or the campaign numbers --- YOU need to do some math.
It won't take long (or much looking) to see this is such a total mess that it had to be setup for mischief.
“Bob Dole had more charisma! Romney comes across as a weird poser as he tries to portray “regular kinda guy” on the trail.”
You mean you don’t think the stiff-old-man walk up to the microphone wearing blue jeans, button-down collar shirt with rolled-up sleeves looks cool?
His jeans are hiked up to his armpits and they have a visible crease.. Who irons their jeans? MITTENS!
Newt Gingrich is going after unpledged delegates - "soft" delegates that haven't committed in primaries already completed, including all the PA (72) and MT (26) and (IL (69) delegates, since these delegates remain unpledged regardless of primary vote.
AND though there are going to be some “winner take all” primaries, the following contests are also on the schedule:
RI (16) proportional
NY (92) proportional
WVA (28) proportional -- elect delegates (who list their presidential pick on ballot)
NC (52) proportional
OR (25) proportional
AK (33) proportional
KY (42) proportional
TX (155) proportional
CA (169) proportional (by district)
NM (20) proportional
SD (25) proportional
The Green Papers Contested delegates: …. “delegates have to be "uncontested" in order to count. The frontrunner's rivals argue some of the states that awarded Romney all of their delegates violated Republican National Committee rules when they moved their contests ahead of April 1 and therefore should distribute delegates proportionally. This dispute, if it continues, would not be ruled on until the August convention in Tampa.
"All the media counts right now give him all of Florida, which is against the rules, all of Arizona, which is against the rules, and all of Idaho," Gingrich said Monday. "Those are all three proportional states and they should only be counting his share. So he has to win 1,144 uncontested delegates."
FL: 50 delegates
ID: 32 delegates
AZ: 29 delegates the RNC wants the primaries/caucuses calendar set, so they penalized states half of their delegates if they moved their state's date up in the queue.
Regarding "winner take all" in these same states moving their primaries before March 6th:
____________________________
Jan 30, 2012 "So the winner on Tuesday gets all of Florida’s 50 delegates to the GOP convention, right? It says so right in the Republican Party of Florida primary rules.
Eh . . . probably. You see, the Republican National Committee wanted the primary season to start later (that didn’t work out so well) and they wanted the early states to award their delegates proportionally. But those rules came about under Chairman Michael Steele; by the time Florida set its date, Reince Priebus was running the show, and the RNC approved the current winner-takes-all system. The Florida GOP says it’s a non-issue; the current RNC leadership has signed off on the winner-take-all system.
The Tampa Bay Times’s Adam Smith reports, “All it takes is a registered Florida Republican to file a protest with the RNC, and the party’s contest committee would have to consider the issue when it meets in August just before the convention.”
The party’s primary rules were intended to encourage a longer primary season, while ensuring that four smaller states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — hold the first contests. Only those states were permitted to hold primaries or caucuses before March 6, the RNC decreed, while any state that held a contest prior to April 1 would award its delegates proportionally. Under the rules, any party that violated the sanctioned calendar would lose half its delegates and potentially face further penalties.
Republican leaders in Florida, determined to give the state a big say in picking the nominee, decided having their delegation slashed from 99 to 50 was worth it and set Florida’s primary for Jan. 31. The RNC has said Florida will be a winner-take-all primary, but that decision is still subject to challenge.
If tomorrow’s results are in line with recent polls, Mitt Romney will win 50 delegates and everyone else will win none. (Thus, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul spent a limited amount of time and resources in Florida.) But if it were proportional, Romney would win about 20-25, Gingrich would win about 14-16, Santorum would win about 5-7, and Paul would win 5-6.
In other words, Newt Gingrich may have enormous incentive to file protests and perhaps even legal challenges to the RNC to make Florida allocate its delegates proportionally."
I was really looking for the popular vote count so far, how many people voted for Romney, Gingrich, etc. I understand the delegate count is a total mess, I am just interested in the percentage of registered voters that cast a vote, and how those votes have broken down in the different states.
Normally I’m not a glass half empty kind of guy, but Romney has been chosen and will be the candidate whether we agree yet or not.
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