In a surprising turn of events that’s sure to leave spectators scratching their heads, Ted Cruz won 15 delegates in Kentucky’s Republican primary on May 17, even though he suspended his campaign on May 4.
As with other states, Kentucky’s ballots were likely printed weeks before Cruz dropped out of the race and therefore didn’t reflect the ever-shrinking cast of Republican candidates. Many states, including Oregon which also held its primary on May 17, had Cruz and other now-dropped out candidates on their ballots. But Cruz’s relative “win” in Kentucky marked the first time this election season that the former presidential hopeful won a significant percentage of primary votes since he suspended his campaign (and his dreams of becoming POTUS) earlier this month.
According to The Green Papers (a site with an old-Internet aesthetic that’s become popular for totaling delegate counts in this delegate-crazy election), Trump only won 36 percent of the state’s Republican vote, which gave him 17 delegates and made him the winner of the Kentucky’s Republican primary. However, he had a narrow win over Cruz by only two delegates and four percentage points. Even more bizarrely, John Kasich and Marco Rubio, both of whom dropped out before the Kentucky primary as well, won seven delegates each.
Before this year’s election, the terms “delegate” and “superdelegate” were relatively unknown outside of political circles. Searches for “delegate count” spiked briefly in presidential election years, but those spikes are nothing in comparison to 2016, when search queries about delegates skyrocketed.
The recent explosion of interest in delegate counts is likely due to the tight race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. Sanders supporters have counted on the 712 unpledged “superdelegates” as the saving grace for their candidate’s campaign. As left-leaning wonks began digging into the complicated delegate system, others on the right, including Trump, began criticizing the delegate system by calling it corrupt.
Even in plain English, the system is complex: Each state is allocated a number of “delegates” that attend each party’s convention and vote for the party’s nominee for president. The way states allocate delegates is not uniform: Most states either have a “winner-take-all” system where all of the state’s pledged delegates go to the winning candidate, while others have a proportional system in which delegates are awarded based on percentage. Kentucky uses the proportional method, so with Cruz winning 32 percent of the Republican vote, 32 percent of their 46 delegates are technically pledged to vote for him at the convention.
Although Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich have all suspended their campaigns, they are not “officially” dropped out, and could still decide to re-enter the race. It’s more likely, however, that their pledged delegates will remain “unbound” and be able to vote for the candidate of their choosing at the RNC. With Trump as the presumptive nominee, many delegates are opting out of traveling to Cleveland in July at all. But at any rate, it was pretty impressive for Cruz to nearly tie Trump in this primary even after he dropped out. Maybe suspending his campaign was Cruz’s best bet for polling well against Trump?
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The post Ted Cruz Won A Surprising Number Of Delegates In The Kentucky Primary — Maybe Dropping Out Was His Best Bet? – Bustle appeared first on News Now Forever.
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