Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, said: “Most people when they vote in a primary, they expect it to have some meaning. Most average Republican voters aren’t aware of the fact that their vote has no direct impact on who the Republican presidential candidate will be coming out of the Republican convention. … I would favor a change for the next presidential cycle, the 2016 presidential cycle. Hopefully the state committee and the leadership of the Republican Party will respond to what I think will be the desire of people to have their vote count for something.”
OFF THE FLOOR
A Capitolwire Column
By Peter L. DeCoursey
Bureau Chief
Capitolwire
HARRISBURG (March 19) – As a primary approaches where the votes of a million Pennsylvania Republicans won’t matter, several Republican leaders are pushing to change that before the 2016 primary.
But the party that insisted voters should have to show photo ID to vote to ensure every vote counts, wants its own voters to have their primary results count for nothing when it comes to apportioning the 72 Republican National Convention delegates.
Instead, voters should just elect folks they don’t know to pick their presidential nominee for them, because the GOP establishment knows best, party spokesmen insist.
Since 1980, the Pennsylvania GOP primary hasn’t mattered because it was held well after the contest was over. Now it would matter again, if it wasn’t a beauty contest that has no effect on which candidates get the delegates need to win the GOP presidential nomination.
State Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Jake Corman backs former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who is mounting a surprisingly strong challenge to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. He wants to change this before the next presidential election in 2016.
“To have someone win the majority of the votes and win the minority of delegates, which could happen, is not a fair election,” he said. “The popular vote should determine who gets the delegates, which doesn’t happen now. We just elect delegates separately. And the delegates should be committed to a candidate. We don’t do that now, either. The person with the most votes should win the most delegates. Pennsylvania doesn’t do that.”
“I think this election could change that, when people realize that even when our primary matters in terms of timing, it doesn’t matter because you don’t win more delegates if you win. I think this election, if that happens to Rick, will make people want to fix it.”
Republican State Committee and its officials disagree that this is a problem.
Barley e-mailed: “I reject the premise of your question that voters are disenfranchised in our process.
“On April 24, Pennsylvania Republicans will have a chance to vote for the presidential candidate of their choosing and could potentially shift the momentum in this race yet again.”
“Furthermore, Republican voters have the opportunity to elect their friends and neighbors to the national convention. Each delegate or alternate delegate candidate has circulated petitions and have gotten their names on the ballot and deserve the opportunity to represent their fellow Republicans in the presidential nomination process.
“With a tight race and time ticking so fast, there is a chance this race could be decided at a brokered convention. With our delegation unbound and free to vote for a candidate on the floor of the convention, Pennsylvania’s delegation could be the deciding factor in the nomination process.”
“Lastly, I believe that voters casting their ballots for candidates who may not make it to Tampa are the most disenfranchised. They will not have a voice at all if a brokered convention were to occur.”
Taking the decision power from voters before the primary occurs seems like a high price to pay for giving 72 of Mike Barley’s pals a really fun convention.
I asked talented and hard-working Barley and House GOP spokesman Steve Miskin, who also backed the Barley party line on this issue: OK, if this is the process for the most important election GOP voters have every four years, should we use it for every election?
Should we stop directly electing nominees for state and national office and instead elect 72 middle-aged GOP establishment figures to pick the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate, instead of voters? For Congress? For the state House and Senate?
Miskin snorted and said no, House GOP leaders didn’t support that.
Barley didn’t reply.
Barley is right that a non-binding primary may have some kind of psychological effect. Iowa certainly does and it apportions no delegates based on its results.
Former Republican National Committeewoman Elsie Hillman and President George H.W. Bush have said winning the state in 1980 but losing the delegates showed the rules were unfair. But both said his beauty contest win that year helped make him vice president, which led to his election as president.
Hillman also isn’t sure she would change it, since she’s not sure she likes what other states do any better.
But now that we have ended the seven-cycle, 28-year-streak of the Pennsylvania GOP presidential primary not mattering, a new look at this issue is underway.
Former GOP state chairman Alan Novak said that until recently: “Nobody ever said we should change it” because Pennsylvania always voted so late, the issue never came up. “My thought would be this should go on the table. If I were in a position and had an opinion that mattered, this would be something that should be discussed.
“When other states, the other major states are doing it, the RNC is pushing it, we probably should be doing it.”
Miskin also wrote: “Ultimately, the Pennsylvania Republican Party would need to change their rules to allow for committed delegates. This is not a state law issue, but rather an issue with state party rules. Generally, the state does not involve itself much in a political party’s rules as this would be a freedom of association issue.”
Really? For the 15 years I have been watching, the state committee has been heavily influenced, if not led around by its nose, by either a sitting GOP governor or GOP legislative leaders.
We just saw that in action when the Senate picked the initial frontrunner for attorney general, only to be trumped by Gov. Tom Corbett when he picked his guy and forced theirs out of the race.
So this will happen if Corbett or the state Senate or both make it happen. Apparently, according to Miskin, the state House GOP leaders, who are also influential at state committee, plan to sit it out.
How can this be changed? State committee counsel Lawrence Tabas said it could be done either by the committee or Legislature, but there are limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court on how much the Legislature can intervene in party nomination rules.
Corbett spokesman Kevin Harley e-mailed: “We are not going to weigh in on this topic at this time.”
But Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, did weigh in. Pileggi, like Corbett has not yet endorsed a candidate.
He said: “I think it is a matter for the party” to decide, like Miskin did. But he made it clear what he hoped the party would do: “Most people when they vote in a primary, they expect it to have some meaning. Most average Republican voters aren’t aware of the fact that there vote has no direct impact on who the Republican presidential candidate will be coming out of the Republican convention.
“… I would favor a change for the next presidential cycle, the 2016 presidential cycle.
“Hopefully the state committee and the leadership of the Republican Party will respond to what I think will be the desire of people to have their vote count for something.”
HOW WE GOT HERE
Quick history lesson: In 1976, the GOP presidential primaries went on long enough that every state’s delegate selection process mattered as President Gerald Ford narrowly bested then-ex-California Gov. Ronald Reagan just before their convention.
Again in 1980, the primaries went on long enough that even late-voting states like Pennsylvania mattered as Reagan won the nomination against his eventual running mate, then-Ambassador George H.W. Bush.
Before all that, most states had a process where party leaders or party conventions dominated by party leaders and interest groups picked the delegates. Most primaries were “beauty contests.” The results of voters casting ballots in a state primary or caucus did not determine how many delegates each candidate received.
Some states had already made the primary result determine the apportionment of delegates to candidates even before the Reagan Primary Doubleheader.
After 1976 and 1980, most other states made that change as well, according to former Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan of Kentucky, also a former general counsel of the committee.
Binding delegates by the vote of a state’s primary or caucus “came out of the tumult of the ‘70s,” Duncan said. “Most states after that, based on what they needed to do internally and to build the party, made changes.
“…The whole party moved away from the convention backroom/favorite son system. … It was driven by state legislators with this idea of fairness that it not be totally driven by a favorite son in a state, that it be driven by the voters.”
HOW WE PICK THE DELEGATES WHO NOMINATE PRESIDENTS
Forty-one states send almost 1,600 delegates to the presidential nominating convention based mostly or entirely on the results of the caucuses and primaries.
Only 9 states with about 350 delegates still hold a caucus or elections but have those as “beauty contests” with no delegates assigned to a candidate based on the results. Again, that is us, Illinois, Washington, and the Mountain West Conference.
Pennsylvania awards 72 of the 1140 delegates a candidate needs to win the Republican nomination. And none of them are awarded automatically to the winner of our primary.
Instead, the individual delegates run separately on the same ballot. But unlike the Democrats, there is no listing under their name of which candidate they support. Nor are the delegates bound to vote for whomever they might tell voters they will favor if elected.
Some, of course, are obvious. Former U.S. Rep. Bob Walker, R-Lancaster, was Newt Gingrich’s most loyal ally in the U.S. House when Gingrich was Speaker, and everyone knows he will vote for Gingrich.
In a district that stretches from State College to Erie County, Corman is running for delegate and he will vote for his close friend and ally, Santorum.
But the fact is that if Santorum wins big in that congressional district, he might get only one delegate: Corman. And he is guaranteed Corman’s only because they are close friends.
In Walker’s Lancaster County, Santorum is the prohibitive favorite to win that congressional district and in 41 other states, would likely get two of the three delegates up for grabs there.
Here, because his campaign did a worse job of recruiting delegates than Gingrich or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did, Santorum could win the vote and get no delegates.
State Sen. Mike Brubaker, R-Lancaster, told the newspapers there if he is elected as the delegate, he will vote at the convention for the winner. But there is no law requiring him to do so. And with the state’s GOP political establishment lined up firmly for Romney, it is not clear where he and Dave Dumeyer, another party establishment stalwart, will end up.
Here is the best part: Ron Paul, who will finish third or fourth in that congressional district, and third at best in the state, has a better chance of getting a convention delegate than Santorum in Lancaster. Three Paul fans are running in that district, represented by U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts, for delegate.
And that is a very conservative Republican district.
Another example is U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster’s district, from Altoona to Chambersburg, the second-most conservative GOP district in the state. It is another one Santorum will win. But Shuster is running for delegate and will also win. And he has endorsed Mitt Romney and will stick to that at the convention.
1980, THE LAST TIME THIS HAPPENED
Former Republican National Committeewoman Elsie Hillman, for decades the Duchess of the Pennsylvania Republicans, now a disappointed moderate in a conservative party, knows how Santorum’s campaign feels.
Thirty-two years ago, she and former Gov. Tom Ridge were two of the key operatives for then-Ambassador George H.W. Bush.
They ran Bush’s campaign here in the primary, with a lot of help – they both excel at getting good allies to help a lot – and won the primary. But former GOP chairman Drew Lewis out-recruited them for delegates, so Reagan dominated the delegates, and gained a key boost towards re-election.
“It’s ridiculous, it really is ridiculous to hold a primary and not let the voters decide,” Hillman said. She and Ridge both hoped back in 1980 that winning the popular vote would matter, that it would influence the delegates to back the candidate voters supported.
That hope was in vain. The party establishment back then ran the delegate candidates who won them for Reagan and kept them for Reagan.
Because the party was very tightly controlled back then, attempts by reformers to add Pennsylvania to the rolls of state GOP committees who tied their delegates to the primary or caucus results failed.
Then, the issue went to sleep. The GOP primaries of 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 were all over before they got to Pennsylvania. So few people thought about the issue.
NO ONE SAW PENNSYLVANIA RETURNING TO PRIMARY RELEVANCE
Those who did raise it occasionally, like Corman four years ago, did so in a prospective way. Corman convened the Senate GOP Policy Committee in 2008 to look at moving the Pennsylvania primary forward to make the state more relevant in the presidential nominee selection process.
“I said back then that if we moved the primary up, we needed to change it so the delegates were awarded by the primary vote,” Corman said.
Novak said of those attempts: “When we tried to move up the primary, the RNC always pushed back so we didn’t do that.”
To be frank, party officials never expected the primary to again be relevant.
This time around we’re relevant, but unprepared.
Santorum is winning enough primaries that it is possible, but unlikely, that he will deny Romney the chance to clinch the GOP presidential nomination by the end of the primaries and caucuses.
Romney, Santorum and probably Gingrich and Paul will still be fighting when the April 24 “Big East” primaries arrive featuring New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
But Romney is not planning to come here much or spend much, since the voters here don’t matter. Only the delegates matter.
And the primary voters on April 24 won’t apportion even one of our 72. Which the Republican State Committee thinks is just fine.
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