The media and the Mac supporters have all been exaggerating John McCain's popularity in the recent primaries.
If I was to ask you how many more votes did McCain get than Romney, I bet you would say twice as many. But, that wouldn't even be close.
Here are vote totals so far...
McCain....4.7 million
Romney....4.4 million
Source, please?
Close, isn't it? Because the delegate count doesn't reflect this. Why? This happened because of the distorted proportion of votes.
Some states had winner take all. Some were proportioned by districts won and some, I have no idea how they distributed them. In fact, some states still have not given all their delegates out.
You could look it up.
It was luck of the draw that McCain had huge leads in winner take all states and it made the rest of the states rather mute as he would have had to come in last in all the rest to make it a race. If the winner take all states were proportioned, we would still have a race much like the Democrat Party. In fact, change the Dems big states to winner take all, and Hillary is the likely runner away favorite to win.
You speak like having a race much like the Democrats is something to be desired. In fact, most observers believe that wrapping up the race early is a distinct advantage for the GOP. McCain can start declaring a significant proportion of his donations as general election funds, something he would not be able to do if he were still battling Romney.
In fact, McCain had huge leads in a few winner take all states--New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, notably, and had those states' delegates been awarded by, say, congressional district there would not have been a significant difference in the number of delegates he won there. Evidence? Look at California, where they're still working out the totals, but the delegates were awarded in each district. McCain won the state by 10 percentage points over Romney. Currently, he has been awarded 152 delegates. Romney has garnered six. Given that McCain won the mid-Atlantic states by even larger margins, it is extremely unlikely that he would have suffered more than a token loss of delegates.
He won narrowly in Florida and Missouri, and had those state delegations been awarded proportionally or congressionally, he clearly would lose some delegates. But Mitt would lose some in Colorado.
I think it's rather unfair to have so many different ways to distribute delegates as to not reflect the will of the people.
And you call yourself a conservative? One of the bedrock principles of conservatism is that we believe in fairness when it comes to opportunity, but not fairness when it comes to outcomes. This principle underlies much conservative thought. For an example, consider affirmative action. Suppose a (reasonably prestigious) school requires 700 SATs on all three portions of the exam and a 3.5 GPA to enter. If their student body turns out to be 10% Oriental, 80% white, 5% black and 5% Hispanic, well that is or should be fine with conservatives--everybody had the opportunity to meet the criteria which were well-known in advance. Somebody interested in fairness of outcomes would say that the student body should be (roughly) 3% Oriental, 71% white, 13% black and 13% Hispanic. Hence affirmative action.
The same applies to the elections. Conservatives believe in laying out the rules and enforcing them, but beyond that they do not obsess with fair outcomes.
McCain was actually severely hampered by the fact that Iowa comes first in the events people pay attention to, because his longstanding antipathy to ethanol subsidies means that he is unable to garner a lot of support in a state where corn-growing is a major industry (even though the largest newspaper endorsed him).
New Hampshire? Mitt Romney's face was beamed into the homes of most of the people in the state from Boston TV stations on a regular basis. He owned a vacation home there, and spent a great deal of money on TV advertising.
South Carolina? The veteran population helped McCain there, but Fred Thomson was from a neighboring state and Mike Huckabee had the Southern thing going as well.
Anyone know why they do it this way? Why some states distribute them in so many confusing ways.
The primary system has developed over the years. Originally there were only a few primaries and no chance that anybody could win enough delegates in them to run to the nomination. That was determined in the genuine smoke-filled rooms of the day, where deals would be hammered out. The purpose of primaries was for candidates to prove to the party bosses in those hazy rooms that they could actually get people to pull the lever for them (quite literally, back then). In fact, the hope of the best candidates was that they wouldn't have to run in a lot of them, that they could put together a good enough showing in a few selected states.
For an excellent description of this era, I recommend The Making of the President, 1960 by Ted White. One of the classics of the genre.
In 1968 things changed. The antiwar movement made strong inroads into the Democrats and as a result, LBJ declined to seek reelection. The antiwar candidates won many or most of the primaries, and yet when the nomination was given it was to the sitting VP, Hubert Humphrey, who planned to continue the Johnson strategy on the war.
As a result, the antiwar groups decided to take over the Democrats. They challenged pro-war Democrats where they could, and took over the lower echelons of the party apparatus (precinct and county committees). They demanded that more states have primaries and that more of the delegates be awarded based on the primaries, so that the party bosses could not ignore the will of the people. The result was the McGovern fiasco.
At the time, most of the primaries were still awarded on a winner-take-all basis. But in their quest for fairness, the liberals found yet another cause to embrace. Was it really fair that one candidate might receive 51% of the vote while the other 49% and yet the delegates all went to the former. Nay! So they began to go to various proportional schemes.
For example suppose a district has a 60%-40% split between two real candidates, and four delegates to award. What is the "fairest" way to split that up? It's to give 2 delegates to each candidate, because if you gave 3-1, that's a 75-25% split, or 15 percentage points off the actual outcome, versus 50%-50% which is only 10 percentage points off.
On the other hand, suppose another district has 3 delegates, and the vote comes in 51% to 49%? Not hard to figure that one out, the first guy gets twice as many delegates. See how hard it is when you try to ensure a fair outcome?
Caucuses have been around for a long time, and they make a lot of sense. The idea is to reward those who have actually borne the burden of doing the party's business, generally on a volunteer basis. These people are presumably much more involved and knowledgeable about politics than the voters at large.
I rather like the current system. If anything, I would like to see more winner-take-all states in the primaries for the Republicans because there is no prize for finishing second in a state in the general election.
