As much as I dislike Trump, this is truly disguisting.
I have to agree. The voters are choosing Trump; they should let him have the nomination.
"The voters are choosing Trump." Except that not a single state that's voted so far has seen a majority of voters support him.
It would be great if we had some sort of IRV system or runoff or something like that. Unfortunately we don't, so the only candidate who can really be argued to have a democratic mandate is Donald Trump.
I’d say none of them have a democratic mandate. But if we’re talking about potential arguments for a democratic mandate, you could say that the 3rd, 4th, 5th etc. place candidates represent the people who they voted for, so if enough of them endorse the candidate who came in 2nd that would be good enough. That is, since Cruz + Kasich + Rubio collectively got a majority of the votes, would Kasich and Rubio endorsing Cruz grant him more legitimacy, especially if one of them joins him on the ticket?
Or what if there were no ninja delegates, but just regular Kasich and Rubio delegates shifting to Cruz? Seems like in that case, there’s nothing nefarious going on. No one has a majority of delegates, so the losing candidates’ delegates are swayed over to back one of the top contenders. It’s the ninja delegate thing that makes it look sketchy, IMHO. If the candidates picked their own delegates, they’d have an easier time selling the process to skeptics.
