Pennsylvania GOP presidential chase adds to mystery
Published 10:10 am Thursday, April 21, 2016
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania, long an afterthought in presidential primary stakes, may emerge as a key player in crowning this year’s Republican presidential nominee.
Pennsylvania will send a whopping number of delegates to July’s unsettled Republican National Convention who, under a state party rule, can vote for whichever candidate they choose.
As a result, Pennsylvania’s April 26 statewide primary election is relatively meaningless — a beauty pageant. What is meaningful, however, is whom primary voters will select to send to Cleveland as the 54 uncommitted delegates.
“And then the drama begins,” said Michael McMonagle, a delegate candidate from Montgomery County who supports Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “Who can persuade who?”
Polls show New York businessman Donald Trump leading both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in Pennsylvania, where primary contests are usually so late that the eventual presidential nominee is no longer in doubt.
This year, there’s a real campaign in Pennsylvania, and it’s about the delegates.
On Pennsylvania’s primary ballot are 162 people who are running to be a GOP convention delegate. They are elected by congressional district, three for each of Pennsylvania’s 18 districts for a total of 54.
Seventeen other delegates — the state party chairman, Rob Gleason, Pennsylvania’s two national GOP committee members and 14 picked in May by party leaders — must vote for the winner of Pennsylvania’s statewide primary election, but only on the first convention ballot. Beginning with the second ballot, they are as uncommitted as the 54 elected delegates.
For now, campaigns are trying to win pledges of allegiance from delegate candidates and, later, they expect to jockey to get party leaders to pick the campaigns’ supporters as the 14 delegates.
Many delegate candidates are relatively anonymous, and some are better-known officeholders. But the delegate candidates’ names appear on the ballot without any affiliation to a presidential candidate, meaning voters won’t necessarily know who they are really supporting.
