350years says we are not a direct democracy but rather a representative democracy. But what is suggested, If I understand the process that could happen at the GOP convention, we won't even be a representative democracy in this process. The party bosses will disregard and dismiss any plurality expressed and will simply install the candidate of their choice as the nominee.
In Colorado they party bosses did just that. They didn't bother to have an election but just assigned the delegates to Cruz, not because they wanted Cruz, but to deny Trump a majority of delegates. It is a near certainty that Cruz will be dismissed just as Trump will be dismissed at the convention if the party bosses are in control of the process.
If they can do that, why do we bother to go to all the time and expense of having primary elections and having the people vote at all?
Red:
In a representative democracy, the elected representatives are free to vote using their judgment. Only rarely do they even have enough direct input from enough constituents to even know what most of them want, that is to
act as delegates rather than as trustees.
To be sure, on the first round of voting in GOP national convention, delegates must act as delegates. On subsequent rounds, most of them become free to act as trustees. That only makes sense seeing as were they, without exception, required to act/vote only as delegates, nobody would gain the nomination in situations where there is no individual who has a majority of support.
The GOP itself (the RNC) defined/determined that a majority rather than a plurality is what is needed for an individual to get the GOP nomination for President. Were the GOP's guidelines altered so that no candidate needed a majority and a plurality were all that's needed, there'd be no need for a GOP convention. Everyone'd know who the nominee is merely by observing who got the most votes/delegates in the primaries and caucuses.
Now here's the thing about the GOP/RNC: it can, at its discretion, change the rules and/or invent new ones, at any point that it wants to. Does it's ability and authority to do so seem democratic? Well, frankly, no, it doesn't. But then it doesn't need to actually be democratic because the GOP/RNC is not the government itself. It's a private organization, and as such it can create, revise, discard, structure and conduct its processes and rules for them whatever way it wants any time it wants to do so.
One need not like how it works in the GOP, but neither does one need to join the GOP. Most especially, Trump, with his $2B no less, didn't need to run as a Republican. He could have, and IMO should have, stuck with his initial approach of running as an Independent and focusing his vast resources on getting himself on state Presidential ballots and publicizing his platform.
Ross Perot ran as an Independent and got ~20% of the vote. Comparing Trump's popularity with Mr. Perot's and perceiving it as being even greater, Trump would, IMO, have had a good shot of winning as an Independent.
Lastly, the
direct primary has been evaluated critically. Research into its impact found that it largely had very little impact, with one exception.
Green:
For all the capriciousness the GOP may display at the national level, the "Colorado issue" is a state one. The fact is that each state (and each state's political party organizations) has complete control over how it chooses delegates to the respective party conventions. Colorado's GOP announced its approach to selecting 2016 election cycle delegates in August 2015.
In Colorado, a caucus is held to elect delegates to county assemblies and the county assemblies elect delegates to state and district assemblies where the delegates to the RNC (37 of them) are chosen. That is how it has worked over the past four presidential cycles, and it is nothing new for this year.
- Coloradans voted for those delegates on March 1, 2016.
- Coloradans knew that's what they were voting for, or at least should have seeing as they cast votes. (Individuals should have, if they had any integrity, abstained from the vote if they didn't understand what they were voting for. Note: "should" is not the same as "must.")
- Coloradans knew that the alignment of their chosen delegates would be determined at the Colorado GOP Convention.
- Coloradans knew they were choosing delegates who would be free to act as "trustees." They knew this because their March 1st vote didn't indicate how the delegates would be assigned to candidates.
- What Mr. Cruz did was lobby the chosen delegates to align with him, and he was very successful at getting them to do so.
Additionally, for all Trump's griping about the Colorado process for assigning delegates to the candidates,
the fact is his campaign goofed in multiple ways.
- On Saturday, Trump backers passed out flyers at the convention site with official campaign slate of 13 delegates and 13 alternates accompanied by their three-digit number position on the 600-plus person ballot. Seven of the names, however, directed people to the wrong number and one delegate's name was misspelled. Other candidates did not have errors on their slates.
In one case, an erroneous number corresponded with a Cruz supporter. A second flyer handed out by the Trump campaign contained four mismatched names and numbers.
- One Trump alternate, Jerome Parks, was not on the numbers-only ballot at #379 — instead the ballot listed #378 twice.
- On Thursday, a Trump slate of three names in the 7th Congressional District convention contained two that weren't listed on the ballot. The campaign's state director, Patrick Davis, said they failed to pay the necessary fees to qualify.
- The Donald Trump campaign inadvertently guided its supporters to vote for a delegate pledged to support Ted Cruz.
- The Trump campaign hired its Colorado state director on Tuesday before the convention, leaving them "play catch up" in the 11th hour in an effort to organize in Colorado.
- At a congressional district convention, the Trump campaign handed out slate cards that featured two candidates who were not listed on the ballot.
- Trump didn't show up for the Colorado Convention, even though he knew his organization was in utter disarray there. What exec, principal or manager does that? Not one that I know of, at least none that hope to "right the ship."
One of Trump's own supporters attested to the poor quality of the Trump campaign's preparation for the event saying, "We could have had some things going, but the campaign decided to not put resources here." Their having done so, along with the other observed mistakes Trump's campaign has made, provides evidence of what I've said several times: Trump is not running his campaign with the same degree of professionalism it seems he uses to run Trump Organization, his company. The dichotomy in management approaches is one of the noteworthy reasons I grew to oppose Trump. I was "all for" Trump when his candidacy was in the prospective stage. This is just a speculation on my part, but I think Trump is trying to run his Presidential campaign "on the cheap," starkly contrasting with the way he appoints his properties.
As goes Trump and his "Colorado was rigged" cries...well, I'd be willing to be somewhat more sympathetic than I am (which is not much at all right now) were he routinely to have offered something other than unsubstantiated bombast. I honestly cannot say that I've seen him once so much as attempt to present cogent and credible arguments or evidence in support any of his claims.
All I've yet to hear from Trump is one claim after another, all of which are predicated on my agreeing with it before he utters it. Thus his statements are of little value for, assuming I agree with them "from the get go," I sure didn't need him to tell me I'm right and that's it. And what he needs to do is present a good case that "we/he" are right in order to convert open minded and objective opponents. That approach just doesn't work for me because someday, he'll say something I don't agree with, and then I'll among the folks needing to be convinced, and the way Trump attempts to do so -- largely on the strength of his own word or worse, as an
ad hominem plea based on himself -- just isn't going to do it.
Sidebar:
That approach doesn't work for me no matter who uses it. I'm not requiring more rigor just from Trump; I require it of everyone, no matter how important or irrelevant they seem to be.
Objecting to another's support for a position and objecting to their poor argument for it are two totally different things. Personally, I welcome the former and am unwilling to applaud the latter, even when it's presented in concurrence with my own stance. Acting any other way would compromise my objectivity, and that in turn compromises my integrity. I can't have that, even if costs me another's aid or encouragement.
End of sidebar.
Blue:
Do you have any firsthand experience of a time when so-called party bosses didn't control the process (
bossism)? I cannot recall any time in my life when that wasn't how "things" were done.
I'm not entirely sure that their rule and the accompanying apparent corruption (political, not economic) is even a bad thing overall. I know what that statement sounds like, but read the article to which it's linked and you'll understand my ambivalence.
Bossism is most closely associated with big cities, but bosses have also controlled political party organizations at the state level as well as in suburban and rural counties. Harry Flood Byrd, for example, dominated the Democratic Party in Virginia from the 1920s to the 1940s. Boss power has occasionally been exercised in presidential politics, too. A group of big city bosses helped secure the nomination of Harry Truman for vice president at the 1944 Democratic convention, and Richard Daley's support was considered critical to John F. Kennedy's election in the close 1960 presidential race.
The conditions for bossism were most widely present from the 1860s until World War II, with the waves of immigration that marked that period. Political machines and their bosses provided immigrants with jobs, small favors, and a sense of ethnic solidarity, forging personal relationships with new voters. In exchange, voters loyally supported machine candidates. At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressive reformers and many newspapers successfully attacked the inefficiency and immorality of the big city bosses. Civil service legislation forced bosses either to reform or have their candidates turned out of office.
The decline in machine strength after World War II has been attributed to changes in immigration policy and big city demography, the spread of federal social welfare programs, and the decline in voter loyalty to party organizations. In addition, the rise of media such as television and radio allowed individual candidates to reach voters directly, thereby undercutting the need for political clubs and other boss-controlled institutions to "deliver the vote" in a primary election.
Academic evaluation of the phenomenon of bossism is riddled with ambivalence. In the early twentieth century, academics heaped scorn on bosses and big city political machines for perpetuating corruption and inefficiency, and called for civil service and electoral reform that would drive bosses out of power. As the power of the more prominent city bosses began to wane in the 1950s, revisionist historians pointed to the class bias and nativism of the reformers as a counterbalance to the admitted faults of the bosses. In the late twentieth century, scholarship focused on such matters as the widespread machine practice of electoral exclusion of minorities, the collusion between machines and the economic elite, and the stalled economic mobility of ethnic groups closely associated with political machines.
I'm not suggesting party bosses don't act to maintain the status quo re: their power. I'm just saying that their doing so isn't unsurprising and that thinking himself an outsider, Trump should have been well prepared strategically for it. He certainly, unlike the average citizen, has access to the resources needed to both be prepared and counteract the bossism.
