LET THE PRIMARY VOTERS DECIDE: Even Anti-Trump Rank-and-File Republicans Don’t Want Open Convention.
The unifying battle cry of the anti-Trump Republicans, from an energized Mitt Romney on down, has become, “Let the Convention Decide.” It is a strategy that I have endorsed as a columnist seeing Trump as “the embodiment of the authoritarian temptation.”
What I didn’t calculate, though, was how wedded rank-and-file Republicans are to voter sovereignty in the primaries. Conventions are now viewed as TV backdrops – not decision-making bodies. That, at least, was the overwhelming reaction Saturday night at the Saginaw County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Gala.
“I think if someone’s winning by the rules set out, he should be the nominee,” said Saginaw state Rep. Tim Kelly in a welcoming address to the dinner. “We’re a party of rules, we’re a party of laws. Otherwise, we would just play into the narrative of the left that the system is rigged.”
Kelly, who voted for Cruz by absentee ballot, added in an interview, “I think it was wrong for Mitt Romney to do what he did the other day by pulling the fire alarm one-third of the way through the primaries.” (In the GOP 2012 primary, Romney narrowly edged Rick Santorum in Saginaw County, which is north of Flint).
Rick Perry pulled the fire alarm back at the beginning. No one cared then.