"Ronna Romney" said on the Sunday shows today that the GOP that she chairs will support Benedict Donald as their 2024 nominee, even if a jury convicts him of a crime. There have been suggestions that a conviction (or two, or whatever) would send Trump's poll numbers into the toilet — and the Republicans to sure defeat next year.
But do you think the party will be able to dethrone their convicted criminal in favor of someone else, like Nikki Haley or Rhonda Santis or even, resurrected from the dead by a desperate party establishment, Mike Pence? Guess again: The delegate selection process has been — you've heard this term before — rigged in favor of Trump.
Over the past several years, many state GOPs have changed their primary rules to add more winner-take-all contests and to require candidates to earn higher percentages of the vote to get any delegates at all. It's another crucial aspect of the Trumpification of the Republican Party — but because it involves the eye-glazing, Inside Baseball minutiae of delegate selection and not sexy poll results and fundraising hauls, lazy journalists tend to pass it by.
Trump himself has called state party chairs to harangue them about these rule changes, because they tend to favor front-runners (like him). Recent examples include California, which this summer trashed its more-equitable, delegate-selection-by-Congressional-district system, and Massachusetts, which just switched to winner-take-all.
As the Associated Press reports, "Election experts say it appears few other [Republican] campaigns have been able to match Trump's years-long work. 'They've been asleep at the switch,' election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg said." So the die is cast. It's difficult to imagine any of those ultra-MAGA delegates being willing to budge on Donald, even (or perhaps especially) if he's being hauled off to the hoosegow.
What might that conviction be? Well, Judge Cannon seems to be dragging her feet on the classified documents case, but think J6 in Washington, DC (March 4), and the RICO trial in Georgia (TBD, but moving forward). Here's a master calendar for handy reference.
With all this, and the reality that many primary states have sore-loser laws — meaning candidates who come up short can't turn around and access the ballot as, say, independents — the GOP is stuck. We live for the day that they self-immolate, in the hope that MAGA splinters off into irrelevancy and that maybe, somehow, a more reasonable party can eventually rise from the ashes. Because our democracy requires a healthy two-party system, that would make us cats PURR.
(IMAGE: Mike Peters)
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