I mentioned before that Republican primary voters nationwide seem clearly against awarding the party’s presidential nomination to someone who didn’t get the most votes or delegates in the primaries and caucuses, regardless of who they support themselves. A new poll shows that 62% of Republicans say it would be “unacceptable” for the candidate who won the most votes not to get the nomination, if no candidate was able to clinch outright by getting to 1237 delegates.
There are two additional points worth noting about this new poll.
First, the article reporting the results quotes RNC chief Reince Priebus on Meet the Press saying the following: “If he was winning the majority of votes, he’d likely have the majority of delegates. But that’s not actually what’s happening. He’s winning a plurality of votes, and he has a plurality of delegates. And under the rules and under the concept of this country, a majority rules on everything.”
But of course this isn’t true. Very, very few elections in the United States have run-off voting. The “rule and … concept of this country” is that the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they get an absolute majority. This isn’t just a gotcha aimed at Priebus since obviously the rules of both parties are clear that you need to get a majority of delegates to support you to become the nominee. But the audience for this decision isn’t the RNC or the delegates at the convention. It’s the national electorate the nominee has to target with his campaign. Here the “rule and concept of this country” – whoever gets the most votes wins – is clearly what the great majority of the national GOP electorate is thinking in terms of.
That comes out in other parts of the poll as well. Indeed, there are responses in the poll that show the not-wholly-formed nature of public thinking on this issue and ways that could play to the RNC’s benefit in terms of dumping Trump.
The 62% number is the candidate with the most “votes”, not delegates – a number that has no official relevance in the convention process at all. The number drops down a bit to 54% saying it’s “unacceptable” if the candidate with the most “delegates” is not the nominee – seemingly a recognition of the imperfect connection between delegate allocation and popular sentiment.
Finally there’s this: “According to the NBC/WSJ poll, 55 percent of Republican primary voters say it’s acceptable to them if Cruz wins the nomination by convincing the delegates from other candidates to support him.”
On its face this seems to contradict the rest of the poll. If Cruz wins the nomination in Cleveland, presumably it will have been by doing precisely that – getting the delegates of other candidates to vote for him. He might need various unpledged delegates too. But you get the idea. We could speculate that Republican primary voters would be okay with Cruz convincing other candidates’ delegates to support him but not by grabbing Trump’s own delegates – something that clearly is part of Cruz’s plan, both at the state convention level and after the first ballot in Cleveland. But I see little reason to interpret the numbers that way. This is just the pollsters asking the same question in different ways and getting different answers, or at least asking closely intertwined questions and getting contradictory answers.
Regardless, what seems clear is that Trump claim to the nomination on the basis of getting the most votes in the primary/caucus will be a powerful one with Republican voters nationwide.
