With actual voters getting ready to make real choices for the GOP presidential nominee in a few weeks, it's important to remember that the winners and losers of party primaries are often determined long before a single vote casts a ballot.
It will be no different this time around. In the key battles over the rules for selecting delegates, and other arcane matters, the clear winner has been…former President Donald Trump. As the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib reports, Trump's team has prepared the way for him to scoop up the lion's share of delegates. If everything goes according to plan:
Trump's allies have also pushed for the early Republican primaries and caucuses to adopt new rules friendly to the front-runner, including on Super Tuesday, March 5. Though the party still doesn't technically allow a pure winner-take-all primary until after March 15, in 2024 there will be a proliferation of early states that use some variation, typically giving all the delegates to a candidate who wins 50% or more of the votes.
By the Trump campaign's count, 23 states and territories voting by March 15 will employ some kind of winner-take-all trigger. In 2016, just 15 states and territories did so. The most important change is in delegate-rich California, which is instituting rules for its Super Tuesday primary that will give all of its delegates to a candidate who wins 50% of the state's vote.
For trailing candidates, this means that staying close to the front-runner might bring little or nothing in the way of actual delegates. The front-runner can rack up delegates fast and pull away to an insurmountable lead quickly, particularly when facing a field in which multiple opponents are dividing the remaining vote into small pieces.
This means that should Trump roll up early victories, it will be tough for any challenger to deny him the nomination.
But again, this only works for Trump if he posts those early wins. The polls show he's poised to do exactly that. Which only adds to the sense of inevitability surrounding his candidacy. But there's a funny thing about inevitability – and no one knows this better than Trump: leading the polls only matters until the votes are actually cast. Just ask would-be frontrunners Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, or Scott Walker what it was like to ride high in the polls until the ballots were counted.
But that ancient political history doesn't include the current rules changes that have put a premium on getting a nominee early. Those changes will be a powerful tailwind for whichever candidates comes out of the early states with victories.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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