Posted on 04/11/2016 4:05:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The funniest part of this is when he says the rules in Colorado were changed to help “a guy like Cruz.” In reality the rules were changed to block guys like Cruz. Colorado used to award its delegates via a caucus, but that backfired in 2012 when Rick Santorum upset Mitt Romney there. That’s how it tends to go with caucuses — unlike a statewide primary, they benefit well-organized candidates with a passionate grassroots following, both of which are hallmarks of Cruz’s campaign. When the rules were altered last August, decoupling the caucus from the process of awarding delegates, it was done with the intent of preventing another victory by an outsider — not just Trump but Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, and so on. The hope, I’m sure, was that an establishment champion would emerge this year and would, by dint of his greater campaign resources and “insider” support,” be able to out-organize all of the insurgent candidates in electing delegates directly. Trump’s not wrong, in other words, to believe that the system was “rigged,” but it was rigged to try to hurt Cruz as much as to hurt him. So what happened? Cruz adapted and Trump didn’t. As the establishment candidates crumbled, Cruz got organized to target delegates at the state and district level while Trump glided on with his media-saturation campaign strategy. If Trump had been paying attention, he’d have brought Paul Manafort into the campaign the day after Colorado changed its rules, knowing that delegate-wrangling could end up playing a key role in claiming the nomination. He didn’t.
Which, says Ben Domenech, raises the question: If Trump can’t anticipate his opponents’ moves in a straightforward game like this, where the rules are written down and publicly available, how’s he going to do with foreign policy?
There have been plenty of examples of Ted Cruz being a savvy tactician during the 2016 cycle, but this Colorado disaster for Trump was not one of them, any more than Trump irritating everyone on the abortion issue was Cruz’s fault, or Trump driving up his negatives with women to “you will never get this rose” territory was Cruz’s fault. This is another own-goal where America’s king of the deal seems uninterested in doing the actual work to make the deal happen. Even a modicum of preparation could’ve landed Trump several delegates from Colorado – instead, he and his team appear uninterested in doing the work everyone has been reporting for weeks that they need to do in order to win.
For their part, the Trump team is vowing to win a delegate majority before the convention. But they have now experienced serious setbacks in South Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Georgia. In each of these cases, Trump’s setbacks would not have been as significant if he had simply paid attention to how the delegate process works.
“[T]wo key Trump claims have fallen apart thanks to his inability to fight for delegates properly, writes Ben Shapiro: “[H]e’s not a great dealmaker, and he doesn’t hire all the very best people.” Pay attention to the clip below, in fact, and you’ll find Trump complaining at one point about the process of wooing delegates, “They offer him trips, they offer him all sorts of things, and you’re allowed to do that.” That’s the second-funniest moment here. The billionaire who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” who’s bragged for months about how shrewd he was in buying influence with pols like Hillary Clinton by cutting them big checks for donations, is now whining that it’s unfair to dangle goodies in front of political actors to get them to do your bidding.
If anything, in fact, the delegate-wrangling process should be a godsend for Trump. It moves the race out of the ballot box, where he’s vulnerable to a surge of #NeverTrump votes as the primaries near their conclusion, to the backroom, where he can work his fatcat dealmaking magic. In practice, Cruz is beating the pants off of him, something that should never happen per the mystique that surrounds Trump of being a master negotiator. Noah Rothman claimed this morning that the fact that two of Trump’s kids failed to register in New York as Republicans in time to vote in this year’s primary is a microcosm of Trump’s disorganization generally, which is fair enough. But I’d add to that that him getting consistently beaten by Cruz at the delegate level is a microcosm of how Trump’s image as wheeler-dealer extraordinaire is oversold. An ingenious salesman should not be at this sort of chronic disadvantage against a guy who’s not very personally likable, whose methods are loathed by the establishmentarians who “rigged” the system, and who’s operating at a financial handicap compared to Trump. But he is. How come?
And one more thing. Why doesn’t Trump ever talk about the ways in which the system has been “rigged” to benefit him?
Trump now leads the Republican field with 756 delegates — or 45 percent of all delegates awarded to date. Yet he has won about 37 percent of all votes in the primaries, according to the NBC analysis, meaning Trump’s delegate support is greater than his actual support from voters.
For each percentage point of total primary votes that Trump has won, he has been awarded 1.22 percent of the total delegates…
By contrast, Cruz has been awarded about 1.14 percent of the delegates for each percentage point of votes he has won — a delegate bonus of 14 percent above his raw support…
Taken together, the data show Trump has been awarded 8 percent more delegates than Cruz for the same rate of voter support.
Trump’s delegate lead over Cruz, in other words, is bigger proportionally than his actual vote lead over Cruz thanks to the “bonus” delegates he’s won by winning more states than Cruz has. If you’re an advocate of strict, straightforward democracy, where every vote counts the same, then Trump’s lead is bigger than it “should be” and the size of his delegate lead is “unfair” to Cruz. But it’s ridiculous to object to that, of course, for the simple reason that those rules were clear from the beginning. Delegate bonuses for statewide winners were always part of the process. If Cruz has failed to claim them, well, that’s his problem for failing to execute. Same goes for Trump at the delegate level. He could have built the best, biggest, classiest delegate-wrangling outfit in the field but he neglected to do so, thinking that he’d stomp Cruz at the ballot box and render all of that irrelevant. He failed to execute, most notably in Wisconsin. That, I think, is the ultimate objection to Trump on democratic grounds: Why are we even talking about delegates now? Why, if he has this unstoppable movement, is he still struggling to break 40 percent in many states when the only alternatives are unlikable Ted Cruz and, um, John Kasich? A brokered convention can’t happen unless every candidate — every candidate — fails to notch a critical level of support. Trump hasn’t failed yet. But he probably will.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Inconvenient fact ignored by Trump supporters.
Let me tell you this. I will actively protest at any cruz rally I can ever get to. He is the enemy. REMEMBER COLORADO!!
Are you from Colorado?
I don't think Cruz has become that which he hates. On the contrary, I think he's been pure establishment all along. He hid it for a while, but now the mask is falling off.
Background info. on the rules changes in the RNC & CO GOP national convention nominating process starting over 2 years ago:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28700919/colorado-republicans-cancel-2016-presidential-caucus-vote
In the general, it’s winner take all. Hmm.....
Hey! Back off! Don’t confuse us with FACTS!!
His ground team isn’t good enough. He has very few people left and just started up California.
Hillary can’t beat him head to head but the demo ground team can beat him handily. A very basic and yuge error that has everyone worried.
Cruz started to assemble his ground team in 2014 and he has one that can match or beat the demos team. He has all the talented people on his team.
. Up through the 1976 election, which accelerated the number of states holding Primaries, the CAUCUS/CONVENTION method was the usual method for choosing delegates to the National Convention: it was a system easily controlled - and, in many cases, manipulated - by the party hierarchy. In the Democratic Party of the early 1970’s, the McGovern-Fraser reforms - seeking to reduce the influence of “bossism” in the nominating process - encouraged many states to change over from this method of choosing National Convention delegates to the Primary and, since Primaries are elections regulated by state law and the majority of statehouses in the 1970’s came to be controlled by Democrats, the GOP was also forced - by laws in the several states - to begin turning away from the CAUCUS/CONVENTION. In 1960, there were only 16 presidential primaries: by 1980, there were 35 and, in 2000, there were 45 presidential primaries
My question is a joke because people didn’t get to vote in Colorado.
Trump knew what the rules were last year. Trump is using the bomb the Colorado GOP gave him to blow the corruption there sky high. I think Trump planned it that way. He knew the GOP elitist rules in Colorado. A good warrior chooses the battle - and when it’s not winnable you do an end run. That is what Trump is doing and it’s working perfectly. Look what’s happening on twitter, on facebook, here, on Drudge, and in the pressers.
Colorado was a bed built for Jeb, Cruz just happened to fall into it - wildly fornicating and fluffling every establishment elitist he can get close to. The exact same thing happened on Wisconsin.
Yes. The “only principled candidate in the race” has left the race never to return, “A Time For Truth” has defaulted to “A Time For Status Quo Gutter Politics”.
I’d like a refund on my copy of the book. Ted will wish he had never seen Colorado before this is over.
Rules don’t mean a damn thing if the people running the show are corrupt. There are ways to deal with the gestapo-like tactics of the Colorado GOPe, but it’s by stepping outside of their little, rigged system of intimidation and attacking from without. Trump supporters who played by the rules within the system and put themselves up for election as delegates were excluded by the party bosses, so the rules had nothing to do with Trump getting stiffed.
Why not use the same argument to silence Obama’s critics? (i.e. Conservatives, what are you complaining about with Executive Amnesty or IRS-Gate? Obama is just better at using the rules than you.)
Doubling down on dirty :(
“wildly fornicating and fluffling every establishment elitist he can get close to.”
Yup..the x-rated Ted went a step too far
The people he has laid off have said that they never had materials, signs, brochures etc. Which are effectively used to persuade people to vote for him.
Several have they never received any.
The Demos will eat his lunch.
>> No amount of spin and taunts on this site can make up for Trump’s lack of effort <<
What about shouting to the Heavens, pounding the floor, and rending of garments?
Maybe those actions would help more than would spinning and taunting?
Dummie Trump is not as smart as Cruz with foreign policy, we need “skin in the game” to prove we aren’t wimps to Putin. Putin looks so evil he needs competition.
Like Jessie Watters said tonight on The Five, this is what they do in communist countries, just cancel the vote and make the deal in a backroom.
I know the best candidate is the one who has the ability to manipulate byzantine bureaucratic rules with the help of insiders. Not the one with the overwhelming majority of votes and state victories.
It is insane to even consider that the Republican Party could deny the candidate who won every state in the South, swept the entire Northeast, and won the rust belt states of Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Even forgetting all of the other states that he won and will win.
The fact that the establishment has and is plotting this makes it clear that globalist interests overwhelming trump (no pun intended) the interests of the average American.
Huh? Pennsylvania hasn’t even voted yet.
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