2016 March 3^rd

 1:35 PM: Things are moving fast enough so that this entry should be timed as well as dated! Mitt Romney has just spent 20 minutes excoriating Donald Trump, the very same Donald Trump whose business ability he so effusively praised four years ago. Then he wanted Trump’s endorsement for President. Romney has changed his mind now and so has Trump. Trump is on the stump even now excoriating Mitt Romney right back. If it weren’t for the fact that this rhetorical exchange is destructive for the country it would be hilarious!

I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now let’s look at delegates, something that matters. Trump’s hopeful detractors claim that he is not on a path to the nomination because if he continues accumulating delegates at his current pace he will not have the majority needed by convention time. Unfortunately, these folks are not considering that many state primaries coming up are all or none; whoever gets the majority of the votes gets all the delegates. Suppose this rule had been used to assign delegates in the previous state delegate primaries, what would have happened? According to the rules in play now Trump has 319 delegates, Cruz 226 and Rubio 110. Other candidates have dabs and dribbles. If the election had awarded all of the delegates to each state’s winner it would have been Trump 454 delegates, Cruz 256 and Rubio 38. That scenario gives Trump just over 60 percent of the delegates to date instead of less than 50 percent under the rules used to this point. As the all or none contests now come up Trump will increase his delegate percentage if his popularity continues. He might not beat Kasich in Ohio but Rubio’s chances of winning his home state are dim to say the least. Florida is an all or none state with 99 delegates up for grabs and Trump well ahead of Rubio there.

On the Democratic side things are not entirely democratic. The party has about 15 percent of its delegates picked on the basis of their position and allowed to vote for whichever candidate they please. For example all Democratic members of Congress are super delegates, as are various party poohbahs, Democratic state governors, past Presidential candidates and others. These delegates can say that they are pledged to Clinton now, but then in a month or so say “no, now I’m going to vote for Bernie Sanders.”  In general the super delegates vote for the candidate who gets most of the popular vote. In the case of Hubert Humphrey’s nomination, Mr. Humphrey was chosen by the Democratic party elders and had never run in any primary; now that has changed. One of the problems for the super delegate system is that Bernie Sanders’ very significant Colorado victory left him tied with Hillary Clinton in the delegate count because she had most of the super delegates, including Colorado’s governor.  So much for democracy in the Democratic Party.

Of course the super delegates would help reduce the Trump problems for the Republicans. Enough super delegates could block Trump’s path to the nomination and that might be more effective than trying to bring Mitt Romney in from the cold and using him as an attack dog.