Editor’s Note: Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor of government at Harvard University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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To keep extremism at bay, Republicans need to use proportional representation as the method for selecting delegates to their 2024 presidential convention. Current rules have a strong winner-take-all bias – designed in many states to create horserace elections, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in any given state, wins all, or most of, the delegates from that state.
Horserace rules helped former President Donald Trump win the 2016 Republican nomination, and horserace rules could make Trump the 2024 Republican frontrunner. In 2016, facing over a dozen Republican contenders, Trump won only a plurality, rather than a majority, of primary voters. Because of state winner-take-all rules, Trump was able to turn the 45% of the votes he won into the primary into the support of 70% of the delegates to the GOP convention.
Approaching 2024, the former president retains a loyal, if limited, constituency, and the most promising alternative to Trump could find votes siphoned off to as many as a dozen “anyone but Trump” candidates. If multiple states run horseraces, Trump can be expected to win a majority of the delegates despite capturing only a minority of the primary vote – leaving him yet again with an excellent chance of winning all or most of the delegates in these states.
Proportional representation, which gives candidates approximately the same share of convention delegates from a state as the proportion of the votes they receive, could slow, and perhaps halt, what now seems to be a slow-moving train wreck. As Ben Ginsberg, a former lawyer for the Republican Party, observes, “there ought to be a lot of attention paid to” how the rules of the game can affect the number of delegates a candidate wins.
Even though each state sets its own primary election rules, the problem could be addressed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), because it sets the number of delegates from each state. It can thus reduce the number of delegates from any state that fails to comply with national party rules, a severe penalty that generally…
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