Ron Paul supporters believe a lot of whacky things–like, for example, that he is a Texan, when all sensible people know that he is a 3000-year-old Bronze Age shaman doomed to walk the earth until the gold of Osiris is returned.
This past week, I’ve noticed two particularly crack-potty theories being promulgated by Paul supporters, which I will deconstruct for you. The first is that Gingrich and Santorum are mathematically incapable of being nominated, because they aren’t on the ballot in enough states; the second is that Ron Paul’s fiendishly clever plan to lose every primary will get him enough delegates to get nominated.
Let’s look at the “564 Delegates” myth. To get the Republican nomination, you need to get 1144 out of 2286 delegates to wear your silly hats and wave your signs at the GOP convention in Tampa. You can get delegates by winning primaries and caucuses. Plenty of political sites, like the New York Times and CNN, have handy maps of the US showing how many delegates are at stake in the various state contests. Some states award delegates proportionally, so you can come in second or third overall but still get a few delegates if you did ok in certain districts. Barack Obama in 2008 did a masterful job of doing really well proportionally even in states he didn’t win. Other states–like South Carolina and Florida–are winner-take-all. Some states have a vote that is just a beauty contest, which doesn’t actually award any delegates.
The CNN and NYT maps make it easy to figure out how many delegates there are per state, but one thing they don’t show–which candidates are actually on the ballot? To win these various state contests, you have to actually be on the ballot, and figuring who is on what ballot is surprisingly difficult. The opacity of the ballot access process has led to some zany rumors, including the idea that Gingrich and Santorum are not on enough ballots to get enough delegates to get the nomination. The genesis of this not-enough-delegates idea comes from the fiasco involving Newt Gingrich and poor doomed idiot Rick Perry’s clumsy failure at getting on the Virginia ballot. Different states have different procedures for getting on the ballot–typically there’s a filing fee, and some sort of petition signature requirement. Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, and Huntsman all failed to fulfill Virginia’s particularly picky signature requirements. So, Virginia’s 49 delegates will be split in some fashion between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, who did qualify. Paul supporters began crowing–with varying degrees of veracity–about other states Gingrich or Santorum were screwing up. The Washington Times ran a story on Gingrich scrambling to get on various ballots. The Los Angeles Times mentioned Santorum ballot problems in four states and this apparently got interpreted on Ron Paul sites like dailypaul as meaning that only Paul or Romney could mathematically get the nomination. This theory metastasized on January 21st when Ron Paul advisor Doug Wead said there were 564 delegates that Gingrich was incapable of getting, because he wasn’t on enough ballots.
He says this about three minutes in, and Alex Witt just lets this astonishing claim slide right by, in a magnificent burst of journalism fail.
This 564 claim is completely unsourced. Various Ron Paul sites began claiming that Gingrich and Santorum weren’t on the ballots in Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee. Even if this was true, that’s only 294 delegates out of 2286, not 564. They are both on the ballot in Illinois, and Ohio. Gingrich isn’t on the ballot in Missouri, but Santorum is–but the Missouri primary doesn’t award delegates anyway. Santorum is not on the ballot in Tennessee, but Gingrich is. That puts them down in the 100-150 range, nowhere near 574.
In fact, Santorum and Gingrich are on enough ballots to mathematically have a shot at the nomination. One candidate the math is not being kind to is Ron Paul, which brings us to the next crazy Ron Paul talking point–that Ron Paul can somehow sneak up on the nomination with his awesome ground game. Obama won the nomination by having a good ground game, so that he did really well with the proportional allocation of delegates, AND he put effort into obscure caucus states that Clinton ignored. If you win Texas by 10 points, vote-wise, but we get almost the same number of delegates because I have gamed the proportionality with my 11-dimensional chess, and I win 10 delegates in the Idaho caucus that you ignored so you could run up the numbers in Texas, I end up with more delegates, even though you have a big win (Texas) and I have a crappy win (Idaho). Ron Paul supporters like to claim this is what Ron Paul is doing.
They argue that losing South Carolina was all part of some hyper-dimensional super-plan, that Romney and Gingrich, with their primary wins, are too stupid to understand. Ron Paul will third-place himself all the way to the nomination! What they are missing, though, is that at this point, Obama had won TWO of the three contests so far, and had created a situation where Clinton, even with some big wins, could never numerically catch up. Ron Paul has lost all three contests so far, and he is polling dead last in Florida. By the end of January 2008, Obama was up about 40 delegates on Clinton. By the end of January 2012, Paul will be down about 60 delegates behind Romney or Gingrich. Paul isn’t emulating Obama’s clever strategy of picking up delegates all the time, he’s emulating Bill Richardson’s clever 2008 strategy of losing all the time. Ron Paul is basically an empty vessel into which various kinds of crazy people can pour their crazy-juice. He’s not cleverly winning by losing. He’s losing by losing.
