Sir Xsarus wrote:
What joph is saying is that the support of the people don't matter if you don't have the campaign infrastructure set up so those votes actually count.
Yeah, this. As Joph very clearly pointed out earlier, even campaigns that don't wait until the last minute can have issues getting sufficient signatures to qualify for ballots in some state primaries. Each state is a little bit different and you have to account for that. You have to have people on the ground in every single state drumming up support. I think Alma believes that there's some central place a candidate goes and just puts his name on a list and that magically puts him on the ballot everywhere. It doesn't work that way. The federal stuff is necessary because there are legal restrictions placed on people running for office at the federal level. But the big time and money expense is the states. We don't technically have federal elections in this country. We call them that, they are for folks serving at the federal level, but all elections are held in each state. The citizens of each state elect their representatives to congress, and their representatives (delegates) in the electoral college (which goes on to actually elect a president, arguably the only actual "federal election" in our system).
For primaries (typically, again each state is a bit different), you don't just collect popular votes, with the person with the most "winning" (are there states with winner take all rules? No clue). There are appointed delegates for each campaign among people from that state who basically represent the share of support for said candidate in that state. The voting determines how many of that candidates delegates are then seated in the convention (again, representing that state on behalf of that candidate). Then, at the convention, the delegates determine who the nominee is by voting. The reason for this system is that candidates can drop out of the race, at which point the delegates they won earlier in various states don't just disappear. They can shift their support to another candidate (and can change their minds about this at any point). This allows for flexibility in the primary process, and can result in some interesting wheeling and dealing at the convention, but the main upshot is that if you don't take the time to build a campaign infrastructure in a state, you wont have delegates no matter how well you poll or how much the people want to support you (or, in Alma's scenario, how badly someone else's campaign implodes).
I mean, I suppose we could imagine some bizarre scenario where Clinton runs unopposed for awhile, then something happens that totally crashes her campaign, forcing her to withdraw (the only way this works), and in that case, any random person who qualifies as a candidate in the convention could potentially scoop up her delegates. But... Um... I don't think that's ever happened and it seems pretty massively unlikely. Clinton has issues, but her issues are pretty well known. Seems unlikely that there could be some skeleton in her closet so massive that it could cause something like this. But that's about the only scenario where "wait for the other guy to implode" could possibly work for someone who waits much past the time point we're at right now.
