We Asked An Expert if Donald Trump Is Right About the Republican Nomination Scam

On April 10, the day after he lost every Republican delegate in the state of Colorado to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump screamed across Twitter that "the people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians." He clarified that claim last week, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, using his bitter defeat in Colorado to launch another attack on the political establishment, writing that "on every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong."

Since then, the Trump campaign has continued to make plenty of hay out of the fairness—or lack thereof—in the Republican Party's delegate selection process. At a campaign rally in Indianapolis Wednesday, he brought up the issue once again: Pointing to the press pen, he declared, "the system's not working too well, and you know, even my enemies up there in the media agree with me in almost all cases." Naturally, this was a pretty big exaggeration.

To be fair, Trump does have a handful of political opinion-makers in his corner; in a piece last week, for example, Business Insider's Josh Barro defended Trump's outrage, agreeing with the candidate's assessment that the Republican nominating process is a "scam." But others have accused the billionaire populist of "whining like a child," pointing out that the rules have been in place for a while; Trump's campaign just never bothered to learn them.

The debate raises big questions about the fairness of the nation's democratic process—but it can also get a bit arcane, veering into the nitty-gritty of state party rules and convention procedures. To try to make sense of it, I got in touch with Richard Berg-Andersson, who runs the election tracking site The Green Papers, which follows state delegate selection procedures, and asked whether he thinks Trump has a point about the problems in the process. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let's get right to it: Are Donald Trump's complaints about the Republican delegate selection process justified?
Richard Berg-Andersson: I would say no, it's not justified. The rules have been in place since the fall of 2015, since the state and territorial GOPs were required to send in what they call Rule 16F filings.

And the national party makes sure those rules are fair?
The Republican National Committee theoretically approves them, but I think they more just take them, and sort of glance through them and say "OK that's fine."

But isn't Trump complaining about a larger problem with the system?
He knew what the rules were. Were they rigged in October as opposed to being rigged recently? I don't get the complaint. I think part of the problem is that this is someone who is running for office who is telling his own core supporters what they want to hear: the system is rigged against them, and the politicians are corrupt. Trump said earlier—although he's kinda calmed down as he's getting closer to the potential nomination—that the politicians are stupid or whatever. That's what he's telling them. But they're not rigged.

The system really does look like it could thwart Trump's massive grassroots support, and Cruz could win the nomination simply because he's gamed the minutiae of these state rules. How would you answer a complaint like that?
I would say it's the Republican Party. The Republican Party as a culture is dedicated to the concept of a Republic, where there's more indirect input from the people. Donald Trump chose to run as a Republican. So he chose to run for the Republican presidential nomination, and he has to deal with whatever the culture is of the party in which he's running.

Do you think the average Republican knows that this is the culture of the party? Or has the party been heading toward this kind of identity crisis for a long time?
That's exactly what's been happening. This has actually been building for a couple decades now. Once [Ronald] Reagan was no longer President, the Reagan coalition began to fracture, and essentially the Republicans have been trying to sweep it under the rug, in my opinion.

Part of the problem is that populism and traditional conservatism really don't mix. The populist [Republican voters] of today would [have been] Democrats two generations ago; they made up the major support of southern politicians who ran as Democrats, not Republicans.

But returning to the main point, isn't it unfair if to members of a party if that party's system shuts out a populist candidate that they like?
My answer to the people who support Trump who are complaining about this is, "Wait, if the rules are rigged, how does your candidate have more delegates than anyone? How did your candidate get 90 delegates out of 95 out of New York State yesterday? How did that happen?" If it was rigged, there'd be methodologies in place trying to stop him.

Cruz is taking a behind-the-scenes approach to stopping Trump, appealing to party insiders to try to sway delegates. Is this a classic strategy?
In a sense, Cruz is just doing what Ron Paul did four years ago, when he got delegates [who supported him] seated [at the convention], even though they had to vote for [Mitt] Romney on the first ballot—by basically being almost like a wedding crasher, crashing certain conventions at the county level.

Cruz is doing basically the same thing without having to "crash the party," so to speak. This is where Trump has a disadvantage as an outsider. Cruz—even though he's apparently not well-liked by most politicians in the Republican Party—is a politician. He's a senator. He's able to play the "game" in a way that Trump can't.

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