Sorry, Republicans: It’s too late for new presidential candidates

[morningfog]

Monday, Jan 30, 2012

A "white knight" candidate would have no shot at winning enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination
By Alex Pareene

We all owe a great big thanks to political scientist Josh Putnam. Putnam actually went to the trouble of looking up the filing deadlines for all the coming primaries and caucuses in order to see whether it would be possible for a new candidate to enter the Republican presidential race and actually win the nomination. Short answer: Sure, if they entered today and won enough write-ins and uncommitted delegates. But by tomorrow, it would be effectively impossible to win the nomination before the convention.

To sum up:

If the list is constrained more simply to the states where filing deadlines have not passed, the total delegates open to a late entrant drops to 1157. After Tuesday, when Kentucky’s (and Indiana’s petition — see footnote 17 above) deadlines pass that total will drop below 1144 to 1066.

A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Tomorrow, when Florida votes, the door for any magical new non-Romney (or non-Newt) candidate will have closed. No one will be able to show up and ride a wave of elite and base enthusiasm to the nomination, even if a character who generated that enthusiasm existed instead of being an idle George Will daydream. Mitch “Mr. Excitement” Daniels cannot possibly enter the race now and make it onto enough ballots to win the nomination without taking the fight all the way to the first Republican National Convention without a predetermined nominee since 1976. (A convention that would, as Jonathan Bernstein argues, be “deadlocked” and not “brokered,” because there is not much “brokering” possible when each delegate is allowed to vote for whomever he or she likes rather than beholden to a boss.)

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/sorry_republicans_its_too_late_for_new_presidential_candidates/

[liberal N proud]

1. Are the delagetes obligated to vote according to primary results?

The convention could be brokered or the delegates could revolt and move to an entirely new candidate, one we may not have seen yet.

[morningfog]

2. It depends on the state. But, yes, in theory, if there is no winner on the first vote,

most delegates will be released and then all bets are off.

The take away from the article, though, is that it is too late for a new candidate to arrive and accumulate enough delegates to win outright. If a new candidate were to be crowned at the convention (and it should be framed that way), the primary voters would be seen as usurped by party leaders. It would be a gop disaster and completely awesome.

[WI_DEM]

3. well a new candidate could get in and try to get enough delegates so that nobody has a

majority at the convention which would lead to a brokered convention and the possibility that somebody other than the clowns running now is nominated. It's very unlikely to happen, however.

[JNelson6563]

4. haha They're trapped!