How the GOP creates extreme candidates

Business Insider

Business Insider's Walt Hickey explains how the GOP primaries work and why their design benefits Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Transcript

00:00 The primaries are not only a way to help lots of people who don't have money to compete early on,

00:04 but also as kind of a whetstone to sharpen someone into a good candidate.

00:08 And it does actually do a good job of making somebody into somebody who can compete on a national level.

00:13 Hi, I'm Walt Hickey. I'm here to talk about the presidential primary

00:17 and the secret weapon that Trump has to win it.

00:18 The state delegate allocation system depends on the party.

00:22 And so the Democrats now are actually a fairly direct system.

00:25 Each state gets a certain number of delegates.

00:28 They're allocated entirely proportionally.

00:30 The Republicans are a little bit more swashbuckling.

00:32 They have a somewhat more exciting primary structure

00:35 because they let states do all sorts of different primary types.

00:38 You can get all the delegates in a winner-take-all state with 35% of the vote

00:42 if you have enough people splitting the rest of it.

00:44 You're going to see winner-take-all states, which makes things pretty spicy.

00:47 And then you're going to see winner-take-most states,

00:49 which are situations where they have an algorithm

00:51 basically based on congressional district voting levels and state level voting.

00:55 We'll get to it later.

00:56 But either way, winner-take-most, winner-take-all, proportional.

00:59 That's going to make this a really interesting GOP primary.

01:02 The average American voter should care about how these delegates get assigned.

01:06 I know that this can be a little bit esoteric with specifically the Republican method.

01:10 We saw in 2016, most people in the GOP didn't vote for Donald Trump in that election.

01:16 They voted for other candidates.

01:18 Donald Trump won by finding 40% of the GOP that really liked Donald Trump.

01:24 Everyone else be damned.

01:26 And then eventually, once that 40% got him through those winner-take-most

01:30 and winner-take-all states, he had the party.

01:32 And so how a person wins can also speak to how they'll lead.

01:36 And so it is important to kind of see how these folks end up winning the country.

01:39 You could definitely call the winner-take-all, winner-take-most

01:45 the secret weapon for a frontrunner.

01:46 But it's also not really secret at this point.

01:49 When people win the Republican nomination,

01:50 they do so because they overperform in those states.

01:54 They do so because they've managed to build a coalition.

01:56 The reason that different states allocate their delegates in different ways

02:02 is because there's a kind of a couple different phases of a primary.

02:05 So in the first part of the primary, you've basically got states going one by one.

02:11 And the idea here is that these are states that are representative of

02:15 different parts of the country and different constituencies within each party.

02:18 You've got rural, agrarian states like Iowa.

02:21 You've got the Northeastern states that have a unique form of both liberalism

02:25 and republicanism in New Hampshire.

02:27 You've got a Southern state, and on the Democratic side,

02:30 a state with a large black population in South Carolina.

02:33 And then you've got Nevada, which is a mountainous Western state

02:36 that also has, you know, kind of a purplish state in the mix.

02:39 And so the reason that those states have historically been in the mix

02:41 is that they're cheap to campaign in.

02:44 And a theory that all these parties have is that, like, listen,

02:46 it shouldn't just be that the richest guy gets to become the president.

02:50 It should be possible for a good candidate to reveal themself.

02:54 And so they have these smaller states one by one because they want to tease out

02:59 who's actually got that retail campaigning attitude,

03:01 who can go to diners, kiss babies, go to high school football games,

03:05 and actually campaign to become the president,

03:07 regardless of how much money they've managed to raise.

03:10 And those typically tend to be proportionally allocated

03:13 because they want to give everybody a little bit of a chance.

03:16 The biggest night for these winner-take-all states is going to be something that we call

03:19 Mini Tuesday. It takes place two weeks after Super Tuesday,

03:22 where there's a mix of winner-take-most and winner-take-all.

03:24 So you've got states like Florida, you've got states like Ohio,

03:27 you've got states like Illinois, and you've got states like Arizona.

03:29 And they're just going to give a gusher of delegates

03:31 to whoever ends up winning those states.

03:33 Again, that's the moment in the primary where these guys are trying to be like,

03:37 "OK, time to wrap it up."

03:38 You know, it's not the biggest night by far,

03:41 but it is definitely the most decisive because it's going to see,

03:44 you know, one and maybe two people come away with a real lion's share of those delegates.

03:48 You're seeing a mix of proportionally allocated states

03:51 and a mix of winner-take-most states.

03:54 Those really start to wean out people who aren't going to be the president.

03:58 If on Super Tuesday you come in fifth in enough states,

04:01 you don't get to be the president this time.

04:03 You're probably going to have to drop out.

04:04 However, it still gives you a fighting chance,

04:08 because that's when you start getting into the later stages of the primary,

04:11 by the end of March.

04:12 And that is when you really start to get a lot of winner-take-all states

04:16 coming up to the plate and a lot of winner-take-most states.

04:19 And you actually kind of stop seeing proportional,

04:20 because we're not messing around anymore.

04:22 On the GOP side, they want to have a winner,

04:25 and they want to know that winner.

04:26 In order to win the nomination,

04:28 a Republican will need to win 1,215 delegates

04:33 across these nominating contests in all 50 states,

04:36 D.C., and the territories that get delegates.

04:39 So that's a pretty tall order.

04:41 Obviously, it takes a lot of talent, charisma,

04:44 money, and campaigning ability to get to 40% of the vote.

04:47 So I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, right?

04:50 But it is a thing that this party will have to contend with,

04:53 where they are structurally designed

04:55 to nominate a niche candidate for a fairly broad party,

04:59 while the Democratic primary is kind of designed

05:02 to nominate a very majority candidate

05:05 for a party that is really a coalition

05:07 of oftentimes minority interests within the United States.

05:10 Inherently, it's going to mean that a GOP nominee

05:13 is going to potentially not represent

05:15 the mainstream view of the Republican Party,

05:17 that the median Republican voter is, you know,

05:20 to the right or to the left fairly considerably,

05:22 whereas you wouldn't expect to see that

05:24 in the Democrats quite so much.

05:26 ♪♪

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