The Arizona Putsch by the Cruz-Kasich Clones
The Cruz-Kasich conspiracy won most of Arizona’s delegates at the state convention, by running candidate clones who were the same for Cruz and Kasich. After their spats over Indiana, they clearly got together to pull this off. Not only should Trump be angry, but the Arizona voters as well.
Let’s review the numbers. Arizona had a winner-take-all primary on March 22, where real estate mogul Donald Trump won with 46.0% of the vote (almost half). Sen. Ted Cruz was second with 27.6%, Sen. Marco Rubio was third with 11.6%, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio was fourth with 10.6% of the vote. If you add Cruz and Kasich together (who would have imagined that was important) they get 38.2%, a good 6% less than Trump.
At the Arizona state convention of April 30, Cruz’s and Kasich’s slate of delegates was largely identical, and they managed to thus win almost all of the 28 at-large delegates, and split the 27 delegates elected by congressional district. Apparently these delegates will back Cruz if there is a second ballot vote. They are still committed to vote for Trump on the first ballot.
Since this blog coverage is partly about the math of the election, they seem to have stayed within the rules. Once again, human ingenuity has surpassed the rules, but instead of instituting democracy as in Pennsylvania, here it led to a coup for the candidate that I will now call Tricky Ted. We expect more from him.
The other subject of these blog articles about the election is about disenfranchisement. Where do we start with Arizona? Starting here, Trump and Arizona voters should feel disenfranchised since Cruz, who only got a bit over a quarter of the votes in the primary, now has about ¾ of the convention delegates. Former Governor Jan Brewer was apparently backing Trump, and is very upset. From the view of the 54% of the voters who did not vote for Trump, the winner-take-all primary disenfranchised them from any proportional representation. Even Kasich voters with 10.6% could feel sold out on.
But wait, there’s more. Maricopa County, containing Phoenix, supposedly for budgetary reasons, had reduced the number of polling places from 200 to only 60. This caused lines of three or four hours long, causing many to pass on voting. There is now a complaint filed with the justice department that this had the result of disenfranchising minorities and poorer voters, some of which didn’t even have polling places, in addition to the long lines. Arizona had previously been under the Voting Rights Act, where such changes could not have been made without Justice department consent.
So even the Republican voters who won all the state’s 58 delegates for Trump, find that a system basically based on disenfranchisement can come back to bite them. Why not try a proportional system, which all of the Democrats’ primaries are (except of course for the 15% Superdelegates)?
