How the GOP creates extreme candidates
Business Insider's Walt Hickey explains how the GOP primaries work and why their design benefits Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
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00:00 The primaries are not only a way to help lots of people who don't have money to compete early on,
00:04 but also as kind of a whetstone to sharpen someone into a good candidate.
00:08 And it does actually do a good job of making somebody into somebody who can compete on a national level.
00:13 Hi, I'm Walt Hickey. I'm here to talk about the presidential primary
00:17 and the secret weapon that Trump has to win it.
00:18 The state delegate allocation system depends on the party.
00:22 And so the Democrats now are actually a fairly direct system.
00:25 Each state gets a certain number of delegates.
00:28 They're allocated entirely proportionally.
00:30 The Republicans are a little bit more swashbuckling.
00:32 They have a somewhat more exciting primary structure
00:35 because they let states do all sorts of different primary types.
00:38 You can get all the delegates in a winner-take-all state with 35% of the vote
00:42 if you have enough people splitting the rest of it.
00:44 You're going to see winner-take-all states, which makes things pretty spicy.
00:47 And then you're going to see winner-take-most states,
00:49 which are situations where they have an algorithm
00:51 basically based on congressional district voting levels and state level voting.
00:55 We'll get to it later.
00:56 But either way, winner-take-most, winner-take-all, proportional.
00:59 That's going to make this a really interesting GOP primary.
01:02 The average American voter should care about how these delegates get assigned.
01:06 I know that this can be a little bit esoteric with specifically the Republican method.
01:10 We saw in 2016, most people in the GOP didn't vote for Donald Trump in that election.
01:16 They voted for other candidates.
01:18 Donald Trump won by finding 40% of the GOP that really liked Donald Trump.
01:24 Everyone else be damned.
01:26 And then eventually, once that 40% got him through those winner-take-most
01:30 and winner-take-all states, he had the party.
01:32 And so how a person wins can also speak to how they'll lead.
01:36 And so it is important to kind of see how these folks end up winning the country.
01:39 You could definitely call the winner-take-all, winner-take-most
01:45 the secret weapon for a frontrunner.
01:46 But it's also not really secret at this point.
01:49 When people win the Republican nomination,
01:50 they do so because they overperform in those states.
01:54 They do so because they've managed to build a coalition.
01:56 The reason that different states allocate their delegates in different ways
02:02 is because there's a kind of a couple different phases of a primary.
02:05 So in the first part of the primary, you've basically got states going one by one.
02:11 And the idea here is that these are states that are representative of
02:15 different parts of the country and different constituencies within each party.
02:18 You've got rural, agrarian states like Iowa.
02:21 You've got the Northeastern states that have a unique form of both liberalism
02:25 and republicanism in New Hampshire.
02:27 You've got a Southern state, and on the Democratic side,
02:30 a state with a large black population in South Carolina.
02:33 And then you've got Nevada, which is a mountainous Western state
02:36 that also has, you know, kind of a purplish state in the mix.
02:39 And so the reason that those states have historically been in the mix
02:41 is that they're cheap to campaign in.
02:44 And a theory that all these parties have is that, like, listen,
02:46 it shouldn't just be that the richest guy gets to become the president.
02:50 It should be possible for a good candidate to reveal themself.
02:54 And so they have these smaller states one by one because they want to tease out
02:59 who's actually got that retail campaigning attitude,
03:01 who can go to diners, kiss babies, go to high school football games,
03:05 and actually campaign to become the president,
03:07 regardless of how much money they've managed to raise.
03:10 And those typically tend to be proportionally allocated
03:13 because they want to give everybody a little bit of a chance.
03:16 The biggest night for these winner-take-all states is going to be something that we call
03:19 Mini Tuesday. It takes place two weeks after Super Tuesday,
03:22 where there's a mix of winner-take-most and winner-take-all.
03:24 So you've got states like Florida, you've got states like Ohio,
03:27 you've got states like Illinois, and you've got states like Arizona.
03:29 And they're just going to give a gusher of delegates
03:31 to whoever ends up winning those states.
03:33 Again, that's the moment in the primary where these guys are trying to be like,
03:37 "OK, time to wrap it up."
03:38 You know, it's not the biggest night by far,
03:41 but it is definitely the most decisive because it's going to see,
03:44 you know, one and maybe two people come away with a real lion's share of those delegates.
03:48 You're seeing a mix of proportionally allocated states
03:51 and a mix of winner-take-most states.
03:54 Those really start to wean out people who aren't going to be the president.
03:58 If on Super Tuesday you come in fifth in enough states,
04:01 you don't get to be the president this time.
04:03 You're probably going to have to drop out.
04:04 However, it still gives you a fighting chance,
04:08 because that's when you start getting into the later stages of the primary,
04:11 by the end of March.
04:12 And that is when you really start to get a lot of winner-take-all states
04:16 coming up to the plate and a lot of winner-take-most states.
04:19 And you actually kind of stop seeing proportional,
04:20 because we're not messing around anymore.
04:22 On the GOP side, they want to have a winner,
04:25 and they want to know that winner.
04:26 In order to win the nomination,
04:28 a Republican will need to win 1,215 delegates
04:33 across these nominating contests in all 50 states,
04:36 D.C., and the territories that get delegates.
04:39 So that's a pretty tall order.
04:41 Obviously, it takes a lot of talent, charisma,
04:44 money, and campaigning ability to get to 40% of the vote.
04:47 So I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, right?
04:50 But it is a thing that this party will have to contend with,
04:53 where they are structurally designed
04:55 to nominate a niche candidate for a fairly broad party,
04:59 while the Democratic primary is kind of designed
05:02 to nominate a very majority candidate
05:05 for a party that is really a coalition
05:07 of oftentimes minority interests within the United States.
05:10 Inherently, it's going to mean that a GOP nominee
05:13 is going to potentially not represent
05:15 the mainstream view of the Republican Party,
05:17 that the median Republican voter is, you know,
05:20 to the right or to the left fairly considerably,
05:22 whereas you wouldn't expect to see that
05:24 in the Democrats quite so much.
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