Why Republican Party rules may deny Donald Trump the delegates he needs

Donald Trump may fall short of the clean majority he will need to avoid more than one round of balloting

Donald Trump (Getty)

The mood should have been effervescent as Donald Trump burst onto the stage inside a pavilion at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Wednesday, one day after sweeping the New York primary. So why all the fretfulness, from him and also from many of his supporters who had streamed in to see him?

A tricky truth has dawned on them. As well as state primaries and caucuses, each candidate must also organise on the ground in each state to maximise the numbers of delegates who will be loyal – and stay loyal - to them at the national party convention in Cleveland in July. That is certainly so for Mr Trump who may fall short of the clean majority he will need to avoid more than one round of balloting.

This is the parallel war that Mr Trump has been losing horribly, most notably to Senator Ted Cruz, whose central focus is now exploiting the quirks and curiosities of Republican Party rules when it comes to assigning delegates – and they vary dramatically from state to state – to try to deny Mr Trump that majority and then ensure that in a second round of convention balloting his support falls steeply away.

The delegate-selection arrangements in some states can be surprising. Colorado didn’t even bother with a primary election or even caucuses and let the party elite choose delegates in min-conventions around the state in March. The Cruz campaign was on the ground in force and managed to lock Mr Trump out altogether. That was the moment when Trumpworld woke up to the problem and began to go ballistic.

Generally, delegates going to the national convention are bound to whichever candidate has won their state’s primary or caucuses at least in a first round of balloting. Pennsylvania, which has its primary on Tuesday, only expects 17 of its delegates to show such loyalty, however. The other 54 who will be chosen after next week will be free to vote for whomever they like in the convention first round.

This is just one example of what Mr Trump is railing about. He is likely to win the Pennsylvania primary but it may not mean very much. “It’s a rigged, crooked system that decides things so that the bosses can pick whomever they want so that people like me can’t run and can’t defend you …it’s rigged system,” he vented at the Indiana Fairgrounds. “This is a crooked system, and we are going to get a change.”

He is angry about Indiana too, where the state Republican Party has already chosen its delegates for the national convention even though its primary is not until 3 March. If Mr Trump wins the primary, all those delegates will have vote for him in Cleveland but only on the first round. According to the campaign of Ohio Governor John Kasich after that they will almost all switch allegiance to him.

“We feel very good about the number of delegates who will support Governor Kasich on a second ballot," said Pete Seat, a consultant to Kasich's Indiana campaign. "Electability is an extremely important part of the nomination for the Indiana delegation. The whole point of this is to win the White House. Governor Kasich has the best shot of doing that.”

It quickly becomes apparently how all could be lost for Mr Trump in a trice. If he does not capture the 1,237 delegates he will need to win the nomination on the first round, his prospects on the second round suddenly look grim. In that instance there will be little guessing who the nominee will be.

Mr Trump’s assertion that some party bosses are exploiting the rules to block him is not outlandish. In some Indiana congressional districts slates of delegates were picked by one committee of party leaders and then approved by another partly made up of the same people. They also demanded $2000 from anyone wanting to be a delegate in Cleveland, too much for many outsiders excited by Mr Trump.

“It is impossible to deny that the delegate-selection process is run for and by well-established insiders,” Matthew Tully, a political columnist for the Indianapolis Star, wrote this week. “Essentially, party leaders identify and nominate delegates and then party leaders vote on those nominations.” The Republican leader of one congressional district acknowledged seeking to screen out Trump fans.

“One of my criteria for filtering out folks was whether or not they support Donald Trump,” he told Politico. “I didn’t care whether they supported Ted Cruz or John Kasich.”

“For them it’s anyone but Trump,” complained Paul Milford 56, an estate agent who was among the crowd filling the Fairgrounds pavilion on Wednesday. He argues that he and other Trump supporters are being deliberately disenfranchised. “I know 100 per cent that what has been happening in the state is an all-out effort to block Trump and I feel that that is very unfair.”

Bryan Poynter, 49, also an estate agent who had also skipped work to see Mr Trump, whom he intends to vote for, was less keen to condemn the state party’s methodology. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but it’s our system,” he said, suggesting that Mr Trump should live with it just like everyone else. “It’s part of the mess and quirkiness of democracy, but it works.”

More forthright still was Doug Huntsinger who served as a policy advisor to the popular former Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels, a Republican, for ten years. “It might be a bit unsettling, but it’s the process. The rules were set way back and so you play by those rules. If Mr Trump wanted to see them changed somehow he would have had to have started working on that a long time ago.”

By repeatedly haranguing Republican Party leaders on the issue, Mr Trump risks being labeled a whiner. But there may be wisdom in the approach, especially if the spotlight that he is shining on the issue now makes it almost impossible for the Republican Party leadership to succumb to the temptation to fiddle with the rules that will govern the voting at the convention in ways that could impede his chances.

It may also make it more difficult to deny Mr Trump the nomination even if he arrives at the convention just short of the majority he in theory will need. The day they make that rule-change will be the day Mr Trump stops complaining.