ELDER PATRIOT - The establishment elites who own and operate the Republican Party are working overtime to convince Americans that a strong political ground game is more important than the will of the people. The appearance of legitimacy still matters to them, at least a little. Amazingly, some GOP voters are buying this line of reasoning while at the same time mocking the Democratic Party’s control of their nominating process through the assignment of super delegates.
Rules are rules after all just as they are in Russia and China. Donald Trump knew these rules just like everyone else they tell us. That Trump decided not to engage in rigged processes and instead decided to carry his message directly to the people in the states where it still makes a difference is to his credit. Spending large sums of money and time only to be denied by a small number of party apparatchiks is not the way smart businessmen allocate their resources.
In the twenty-two states that still recognize the vote of ordinary citizens as supreme by holding primary elections, Donald Trump has won 18 of them. In these states Trump was able to carry his message straight to the voters and wound up with 83% more delegates than Cruz. It’s not as though Cruz didn’t enjoy a superior ground game in these states as well, just that without a corrupt party apparatus behind him he finds it difficult to win.
Contrast that to the states that hold caucuses where party insiders hold significant influence over the outcome. In some cases that influence went beyond what is legally and morally allowed. Cruz’s “superior organization” has delivered 8 of those states to the Texas senator. In these states Cruz has been “assigned” 232% more delegates than Trump. This is a model for electoral success that would make Vladimir Putin proud.
In the open primaries a single delegate was awarded to Trump or Cruz for every 14,000 votes cast by the voters. In the caucuses the candidates were awarded a single delegate for every 2,000 votes that were cast. However you analyze the data the votes of insiders count seven times as much as your vote does and illustrates the almost insurmountable control the party has established over the people.
This is precisely the same as the closed political systems in communist states that transfer power from one oligarch to another that our leaders love to rail against when it suits their purposes.
It is difficult to believe Ted Cruz is truly a Constitutional Conservative when he brags dismissively about diminishing the single most important underpinning of our republic – the fundamental premise of one man, one vote.