The Future President, Donald Trump

On Saturday Ted Cruz supporters took all 13 of the delegates up for grabs at the Colorado GOP Convention to complete a clean sweep of the state.

But it was not without controversy.
There never was a vote – Party elites decided on who got the delegates.

The anti-Trump politicians were passing around a “Resolution to Forbid Colorado Delegates from Voting for Trump” for weeks before the convention.

After Cruz swept the Colorado delegates the Colorado Republican Party tweeted this out:



Robert Zubrin from Colorado Republicans for Liberty wrote about the anti-Trump resolution at American Thinker back on March 22, 2016:

“
In the caucuses March 1, I was elected an alternate delegate to the Colorado State GOP convention, which on April 9 will select and instruct our delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer.

Accordingly, I have drawn up a resolution that is now being circulated that will forbid Colorado delegates to the national convention from voting for Donald Trump for president or vice president on any ballot. Such a resolution is necessary, because Trump has publicly stated that his methods of operation include buying or renting the services of politicians for cash.

As the text of the resolution provides a succinct and forceful summary of the reasons why Donald Trump is unacceptable as a Republican candidate for president, I thought I would share it with the readers of American Thinker. Here it is:

“
Resolution to Forbid Colorado Delegates from Voting for Donald Trump

Whereas Donald Trump is not a Republican; and

Whereas Donald Trump is a demagogue who is using fear, hate, and lies to assemble a mob in support of an agenda of socialist policy, unlimited government, and strongman rule; and

Whereas Donald Trump would destroy the Western alliance which is the basis of American security; and

Whereas Donald Trump would destroy the system of international trade which is the basis of American prosperity; and

Whereas Donald Trump would destroy the freedom of the press that is the basis of American liberty; and

Whereas Donald Trump would destroy the rule of law which is the basis of American civil society; and

Whereas Donald Trump has mocked those who risked their lives to fight for America when he avoided doing so; and

Whereas Donald Trump has acted as an apologist for America’s enemy Vladimir Putin and other brutal anti-American foreign tyrants; and

Whereas Donald Trump has set himself forth as an open exponent of lust, greed, and other vices antithetical to Judeo-Christian ethics and the moral fiber necessary to sustain a republic; and

Whereas Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has no respect for the truth, and

Whereas Donald Trump has defrauded thousands of ordinary Americans of their life savings; and

Whereas Donald Trump has, in the course of the present campaign, committed acts potential prosecutable as incitement to riot, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison; and

Whereas Donald Trump has knowingly acted to degrade the Republican presidential nominating process to a vile level that can only serve to drive people of talent and integrity out of the party and assist in the election of the party’s opponents; and

Whereas the nomination of Donald Trump for president would insure a landslide defeat for the Republican Party nationwide in the fall, and deeply damage the Republican Party and the conservative movement for years, and possibly decades to come; and

Whereas a vote for Donald Trump by any member of the Colorado delegation to the Republican National Convention would dishonor and disgrace the Colorado Republican Party;

Therefore, be it resolved that:

The Colorado Republican Party forbids any of its delegates to the Republican National Convention to vote for Donald Trump for president or vice president on the first ballot or any other ballot, and
The Colorado Republican Party asks its delegates to national convention to pledge on their honor to do everything in their power to help secure the presidential nomination for someone other than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has threatened the Republican Party with mob violence. Let’s tell him where to go!

Colorado Republicans for Liberty

The anti-Trump officials handed out this same resolution at the state convention on Saturday.
Here’s the resolution passed around at the convention that instructed Colorado Republicans to not vote for Trump.



The resolution was created by Colorado Republicans for Liberty – a Cruz offshoot group.

The 2016 presidential election is different beyond the number of allocated representatives available. The election year began with a large number of Republican candidates, thinning out the number each candidate could garner, even further. This could make the Republican road to the White House more difficult, as a candidate must receive over 1,200 delegates to be nominated at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Candidates are using their votes to garner delegates in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the five U.S. territories between February 1 and June 7.

Each state has its own rules, which determine if the representatives are required to vote for the candidate the people chose, or if the votes only represent a suggestion for them to take into consideration. These differences are referred to as binding and non-binding primaries or caucuses.

Donald Trump has a point. (Yes, you read that correctly.) After getting shut out at the Colorado conventions, Trump has been complaining that the Republican primary process is undemocratic and rigged. I don’t agree with the “rigged” part, as the rules have been known for some time, but it’s true that some Republican votes are worth a lot more than others. “One person, one vote” — or the idea that every voter should have equal say in an election — is not the rule in the GOP primary system.1 The irony, however, is that Trump has benefited from this imbalance.

But before we get to Trump, let’s talk about delegates overall. I’ve collected all the votes cast and delegates allotted in every contest so far.2 In some cases, such as Massachusetts, where delegates are awarded only at the statewide level, this means just looking at the state as a whole. In others, such as Georgia, delegates are given out at both the congressional district and statewide level, so I’m treating those as individual contests. (I’m not including states that award delegates through conventions, which involve a multi-tiered process that doesn’t really include “votes.”)

The number of delegates that one vote will buy you varies a ton:3
(graph at the source)

Not surprisingly, votes have the most purchasing power in caucuses, where turnout is typically lower than in primaries. The power of one voter in the Northern Marianas, for example, is ludicrously high, at 52 votes per delegate. Indeed, two of the three jurisdictions with the lowest ratios of votes per delegate are commonwealths or territories. In Washington, D.C., just 2,839 voters determined how 19 delegates would be awarded (that’s 149 votes per delegate).

Indeed, Washington, D.C., is emblematic of a larger pattern: Blue areas have a lot more power per voter in Republican primaries because the GOP gives a lot of weight to the overall population — rather than the number of Republicans present — to determine how many delegates each state gets. When delegates are assigned by congressional district within a state, Democratic- and Republican-leaning districts get an equal number of delegates assigned. We’ll see that at work in New York next week, but we’ve also already seen this at play in places such as Vermont, where just 61,022 votes were cast and 16 delegates were awarded, for a ratio of 3,814 votes per delegate. The overall ratio for the 169 contests I studied is 21,337 voters per delegate.

On the other hand, voters in the most Republican-rich places have the least influence. For example, in Wisconsin’s 5th District (home to the famously Republican Waukesha County) three delegates were awarded to the winner among 191,735 voters — that’s 63,912 voters per delegate. Even within certain states, Republicans living in blue areas have a lot more influence than Republicans living in red areas. For example, Illinois’ 4th District (which President Obama won with 81 percent of the vote in 2012) had a votes-to-delegate ratio of 4,989 to 1, while the state’s 18th district (which Obama lost with just 44 percent of the vote) had a ratio of 43,679 to 1.

So, yes, the playing field is tilted, but it’s tilted in Trump’s favor; he’s been running downhill. You can see this in the table below, which shows Trump’s percentage of the vote in each state compared with the percentage of the delegates he won there. In a perfectly “fair” system, the two numbers would match perfectly.

Trump usually earns a higher percentage of delegates than votes
(graph at the source)

Trump has won a higher share of delegates than votes in 24 of the 35 contests studied (67 percent), most notably in winner-take-all contests. Winner-take-all statewide contests are less democratic than winner-take-all by congressional district (in the sense that the delegate allocation mirrors the vote). And winner-take-all by district is less democratic than simple proportional allocation. Trump benefited most in South Carolina, which awarded all 50 of its delegates to Trump even as he won a little less than a third of the vote. He also took all the delegates in the winner-take-all states of Arizona and Florida, while earning less than 50 percent of the vote in each. In 40 percent of the contests, Trump did at least 10 percentage points better in the delegate race than in the actual voting.

Sounds like their your 1%.

But if one did that the republican party would disappear completely.

The establishment Democrats would be swallowed by independents and the disenfranchised Ds returning to the process. Decent honest progressives, voting their conscience.