Trump, Cruz nomination fight could become a case of results vs. rules | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Who should have more claim to a party’s presidential nomination: the candidate who has amassed the most votes and delegates, or the one who falls short but benefits from the quirkiness of the rules?

As Donald Trump and Ted Cruz battle over delegates to the Republican National Convention this summer, that’s what their increasingly testy contest is beginning to resemble.

It seems like a pretty simple question, really. What should count more, the will of Republican voters, who so far have handed Trump – the GOP front-runner – 19 victories, 743 delegates and 8.2 million votes, or a set of arcane rules few can follow but that could deny him the crown?

Indeed, pollsters and other political experts suggest that Trump’s impressive tally, which is certain to increase after the New York primary Tuesday, could add up to zero if the nominating process in Cleveland lasts more than one ballot. His support, while wide, might not be so deep.

The rules governing delegate loyalty are also pretty elastic, and that’s what Trump’s closest competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, with 545 delegates so far, is counting on.

The remaining Republican candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, is far behind, with 143 delegates. But he remains in the race, hoping for dissatisfaction with Trump and Cruz, and for lightning to strike at the convention.

But try explaining the convoluted – and, as some have suggested, not very democratic – delegate selection process to an impassioned Trump supporter who has embraced the New York billionaire as the antidote to a grab bag of grievances against Washington.

“There’s a huge disconnect and there will be a lot of acrimony,” said Rick Beltram, a longtime Republican Party activist from South Carolina.

A CNN/ORC poll last month found that nearly two-thirds of Republican voters think that whoever has drawn the most support during the primaries should win the nomination, even if he doesn’t have the required simple majority of delegates – 1,237 out of the 2,472 in the hall – after the first ballot.

Or what about the massive crowds in the Democratic contest, filled with millennials and first-time voters drawn by the liberal ideals of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont? He trails front-runner Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates and votes, yet has steadily racked up wins.

But what would appear to doom Sanders’ quest is Clinton’s overwhelming lead in so-called “superdelegates,” a group of unelected Democratic delegates from each state – usually lawmakers, officials and activists – who also have a vote in choosing the nominee, according to party rules.

“The average person doesn’t understand them, the average partisan doesn’t understand them, the average attorney doesn’t understand them,” said former Virginia Congressman Tom Davis, a top Republican Party strategist when he served in the House of Representatives. “The rules are different in every state. It’s inevitable that people are going to go away thinking they got screwed, that the rules didn’t work for them.”

It’s a notion that feels right at home in a campaign where one of the overarching messages from voters in both parties has been that they are angry, frustrated and disillusioned, and want someone to speak to those concerns. Trump, Cruz and Sanders, viewed early on as frivolous or niche candidates, have stoked those anxieties and are now among the remaining contenders.

Delegates are key. The uproar in the GOP race over how they are selected, with its reports of loyalty pledges and threatening emails, has highlighted how pivotal they can be.

“Most of America thinks of delegates as people with funny hats who cheer people on at the convention,” said Elaine Kamarck, a public policy lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a longtime activist in Democratic Party politics. “They have no idea what they do.”

Now they might. The trigger was Trump’s utter wipeout in the delegate hunt in Colorado last weekend. Because Colorado held party caucuses involving regulars and activists, most of the state’s Republican voters were unable to participate.

Cruz, who has been gathering what could be described as second-chance delegates in some states that Trump won, understood the rules early on and worked the political grass roots.

The result exposed Trump’s vulnerability and his campaign’s embarrassing inattention to detail, leaving him without a single delegate in Colorado, while Cruz, who pocketed 34, enjoyed a field day.

Trump, never one to tiptoe through a controversy when an Abrams tank will do, lashed out this past week, claiming the system was rigged and was trying in every way possible to deprive him of the presidential nomination. His allies were angry as well.

“This business in Colorado, I get it. It’s the rules,” said Sandy King, a Trump supporter and Republican Party chairman in Yates County, New York. “But people also have a right to vote, and we thought our vote counted.”

While Trump charged that the delegate system was corrupt, it appears to be more of a witches’ brew of state-by-state rules governing the selection, distribution and ultimate political independence of the delegates.

“The rules are here for a reason,” said Joan Camera, a New York City health care consultant and Republican voter. “They have to be abided by, whether they are fair or not.”

Most states require delegates to support the winners of their state primaries during a first ballot at the convention. And that’s what usually occurs. A nomination contest hasn’t gone more than one round since 1952, when Democrats finally settled on Adlai Stevenson after three ballots.

“Because you have intense races in both parties, the voters are learning about a process that has always existed but never is seen,” said Kamarck. “In fact, we rarely get this far. Usually somebody wins and everybody else drops out.”

So if Trump falls short of the necessary delegates on the first ballot, a second will occur. The catch is that on a second ballot many states allow their delegates to declare their independence and side with any candidates they choose.

“People have come to expect that the winner of the most votes would be the winner of the convention, but everything is different this year,” said Nathan Persily, an expert on the Constitution and election law at Stanford Law School. “The uniqueness of having a convention in which someone might not have a majority of delegates, that’s not something that people are accustomed to, just as they were not accustomed to the presidential recount in 2000 or the impeachment of a president a few years earlier.”

As chaotic and unpredictable as this campaign has been so far, more turmoil could be in store when the conventions vote.

“The election administrator’s prayer is, ‘God, whatever happens, please don’t let it be close,’ ” Persily said. “When it is, you see the fragile underbelly of the American political system.”

David Lightman contributed to this report.