Trump’s entire argument for being President is competence as a manager & negotiator.
I ask you: What’s the first thing you would do if you decided to run for President? Hm? Answer: Hire a competent campaign manager. Someone who knows the rules. How’s it done. What you need. The candidate himself doesn’t have to be an old hand at politics, just have the wit to know you need to hire one. There are no mysteries to this. We have 50 individual elections (56 if you count the territories). We’re not a democracy. We’re a Constitutional Republic. We have a *representative* form of government. We have a whole series of emergency brakes built in in case there’s some kind of unforeseen disaster. Consider: what if the day before the convention Trump had a heart attack? Became incapacitated? You would want a failsafe in place to manage this. You can’t re-do the entire year of primaries, obviously. So there are rules & processes in place to manage these things.
The recipe to become the nominee has been unchanged since the days of Lincoln. 50% + 1 delegate = GOP nominee. If you don’t win 1237, you haven’t won. That’s why we have conventions. So if someone hasn’t won, or has a heart-attack, or there’s some other unforeseen situation, these people, these delegates, who our representative process has freely and fairly put there can finish the job. Every candidate has equal access to exactly the same process to get there. Despite what Trump would have you believe, nobody was handcuffed naked to his plane unable to read the rules.
With that in mind, consider the following April 12 article from AP* describing Mr. Art-of-the-Deal’s weapons-grade failure to manage his own campaign. To do the most basic friggin’ things.
How can anyone vote for this jerk?
*Bolds are mine, with a few snips […] taken out here & there for brevity.
Trump Amassing Delegates Who Might Not Be Loyal to Him
Already behind the curve in organizing for the Republican convention, Donald Trump has missed crucial deadlines in a number of states to lock up delegates who would stay loyal beyond the first ballot.
Trump’s shortcomings in this behind-the-scenes campaign, which hasn’t played much of a role in selecting the GOP nominee in decades, could doom his presidential candidacy if he is unable to win the nomination in the initial voting at this summer’s national convention in Cleveland.
After that first ballot, most delegates are no longer bound to support the winner of their state’s party primary or caucuses — they’re free agents who can support the candidate of their choosing.
Most of the actual delegates are elected at state and congressional district conventions run by party insiders, members of the Republican establishment that Trump has run against from the outset of his campaign.
And while Trump’s team has had little contact with these loyal party activists, his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has been actively courting them for months.
Trump has spent the past three days hammering at his party’s delegate selection process as “unfair.”
At a rally in Rome, New York, Tuesday evening, Trump angrily denounced Saturday’s final allocation of all of Colorado’s delegates to Cruz, blasting the party’s system as “rigged” and “corrupt.”
Trump’s team is only now starting to engage in the delegate selection process, the choosing of the actual people who will attend and vote at the convention. Republicans have already selected delegates in at least nine states. And in others, such as Virginia and Arizona, the deadline to apply to be a delegate has passed.
Indiana‘s primary, for example, won’t take place until next month. But the deadline to become a national convention delegate was in mid-March. “Are we concerned? Yes, definitely,” said Tony Samuel, vice chairman of Trump’s Indiana campaign. The Cruz team feels the opposite. “Even if (Trump) jumped into high gear, he can’t do it,” said Shak Hill, a Cruz campaign leader in Virginia. “That’s where he’s been shut out of the game.”
Trump’s delegates must vote for him on the first ballot at the convention. But if no one gets a majority, most of the delegates can then bolt if they choose. … Cruz has built an organization of volunteers who are working in state after state to get his supporters selected as delegates, even those who must vote for Trump at first.
Trump is just ramping up his operation, but in some states he’s too late.
In Virginia — a state where Trump won the primary — he has missed the deadlines to assemble lists of potential delegates. Cruz, however, has delegate candidates in 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts.
The application deadline was last month.
Indiana‘s primary is May 3, but 27 of the state’s 57 delegates — the actual people — have already been selected at congressional district caucuses. The deadline to register as a candidate for delegate was March 15.
In all, at least nine states have picked some or all of their delegates: Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
Trump has won a total of 100 delegates in primaries and caucuses in these states. In most, however, the candidates had no formal role in selecting the people who will fill those slots.
To help manage the process, Trump’s campaign hired a convention manager, Paul Manafort, last week. … He said Trump was successful in selecting delegates in Michigan, and predicted the same in Nevada. “In fact, we wiped him out,” Manafort said in an NBC interview Sunday. “And we’re going to see Ted Cruz get skunked in Nevada.”
Former South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson, who has been publicly neutral in the race, said he’s seen no difference in Trump’s delegate strategy since Manafort’s hire. Said Dawson, a veteran national GOP strategist, “He’s not a household name or miracle worker by any stretch.” Trump won all 50 of South Carolina’s delegates. But in order to be a delegate at the national convention, you had to be a delegate at last year’s state convention. “The people that are going to fill those slots were already selected anyway,” said Republican political consultant Tony Denny, who has been a delegate to three previous GOP national conventions. Cruz has already done a lot of groundwork to get supporters selected as delegates in South Carolina. “The delegate selection process is in their DNA,” Denny said of Cruz’s ground operation.
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