How Giuliani’s rigging the system for himself allowed McCain to win the nomination

In an e-mail exchange about the primary system, Jon S. wrote:

The main reason the GOP ended up with McCain is that several states, including New Jersey and Florida, changed their primary system to “winner takes all” in summer 2007 in an effort to help Giuliani. If the usual rules had been in effect Romney would have picked up many more delegates than he did and the outcome might have been different. So, inadvertently, Rudy played a huge role in the Republican primary, much more so than his single delegate would suggest.

LA replies:

I did not know about large states adopting winner take all deliberately in order to help Giuliani. Do you happen to have more info on that?

Jon S. replies:

This is from the Atlantic:

Yesterday afternoon, in a hotel conference room just off exit nine on the New Jersey Turnpike, the state Republican Party did presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani a huge favor: they agreed to consider an unprecedented rule revision that could, in effect, rig the New Jersey Republican primary, award Rudy Giuliani 52 delegates, save his campaign millions of dollars, and establish the state’s most conservative county chairman as an ingenious power broker.

This is from Politico:

Aug. 11, 2007, was a pivotal day in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but not for the reason most political junkies would suspect. While the national media were focused on Mitt Romney’s victory in the Iowa Straw Poll, down in Florida, that state’s Republican Party was taking steps that could help Rudy Giuliani’s unusual path toward the Republican nomination.

That was the day the Florida Republican Party decided to change its primary to a winner-take-all contest. After being stripped of half of its 114 delegates by the Republican National Committee for moving its primary up to Jan. 29, the state Republican leadership opted to give the statewide primary winner all 57 remaining delegates, instead of parsing them out by congressional district. Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer said at the time that the move was made in an effort to keep Florida relevant in the nomination process.

Others say that the change was made to help Giuliani, who had already decided to make Florida a focal point in his unorthodox, big-state strategy.

The procedural change in the state’s primary rules, and similar changes in other GOP primaries, comprises the unspoken, backroom component of Giuliani’s “Feb. 5 strategy,” which has been criticized by many political pros as risky or untenable. The Giuliani camp has focused on tweaking party rules to its favor, hoping for winner-take-all primaries in states where he has been running strong.

LA replies:

Of course, there’s nothing inherently “rigged” about winner-take-all versus proportional, except that for these states to change the rules specifically to help the candidate who was at that point leading in those states to win the nomination seems highly improper.

And it’s part and parcel of the whole delusion of the Giuliani campaign. Just as his campaign was based on the idea that only he could win, because that’s what the polls said, these primaries were changed to winner-take-all based on the idea that he was ahead in those states and would be the winner. But he did not win in those states or come remotely close. The rules that were changed for Giuliani helped McCain become the nominee.

Also, it’s ironic that the Dems have been roundly criticized for their proportional system, which prevents a clear winner from emerging, and now we’re criticizing the Republicans for using the winner take all system which quickly leads to a clear winner.

- end of initial entry -

A reader writes:

Gosh, and even with all that extra help, he still fizzled! I could have told them from the outset, he was a NON-STARTER. Not only was I traumatized by the moral coarsening conservatives had to permit themselves to want to put this man with his personal history into the WH, but I was traumatized to realize that they were so out of touch politically to think he could win!!

Jason writes (May 15):

I do not know much about Florida, but I can tell you exactly what happened here in New Jersey.

The state party (mostly liberals) got together for their quarterly meeting, and they brought a motion to the floor to change the rules in NJ to a winner take all situation. Our state chair (who was a McCain person, and is a lousy leader) to his credit tried to stop this through every parliamentary he could think of, but the Giuliani people managed to get the votes they needed to change the rules.

This caused every other campaign in the state to pull up stakes and leave, because there was no point. Not only did this do damage to the reputation of NJ, that being that we threw our weight as a state party behind a loser AGAIN! But I pointed out the fact, forgetting that I was a Tancredo person, that it hurt the NJGOP because now we were going to lose the opportunity to make our state a battleground of sorts. Other candidates might have campaigned here, and raised us much needed cash. Plus other candidates might have opened offices and hired staff if the state was more up for grabs. The best part was that not even Giuliani bothered to show up, since now that he had the state wrapped up why should he.

I remember election night in February, all of the supposedly really important party people walking around wondering what happened. I basically told them that they messed up, as usual.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 13, 2008 09:56 AM | Send