Whining isn't winning

Mollie Hemingway reports at The Federalist,

Trump’s campaign strategy of emphasizing his ability to win has been a good one. It’s a bit circular — “Vote for me because I win” — but it’s worked well enough to get him just over one-third of Republican-contest votes. However, if he wants to actually achieve victory for the whole enchilada, he needs to do much better. Sometimes he can win a state contest simply with the able assist provided by a compliant media that blushes whenever Trump pays attention to it. But other times it requires even just a little bit of work.

Trump has done very well when states allocate delegates through an open primary that enables Democrats and independents to support him. He’s done far less well securing delegates to the Republican National Convention (the actual entity that nominates the party candidate for president) when votes are limited to actual Republicans.

Donald Trump says he will make for an amazing and terrific president. But how is going to be an awesome president when he can’t even run a mildly functional operation in Colorado? Caucus-based assemblies are more difficult to win than open primaries, granted. But it’s not like this is brain surgery. It’s entirely doable with just a little bit of understanding about how delegate allocation works.

It’s not just Colorado, of course. Trump had no ground game in Wyoming, which picks delegates in a manner similar to Colorado. And because he didn’t understand how the delegate process worked in other locations, he had completely unnecessary struggles in South Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia. In Louisiana, his campaign’s cluelessness about party politics might mean he has 10 fewer delegates than Cruz, even though he edged Cruz out in the popular vote.

Whining isn’t winning. If Trump wants to secure the necessary delegates to win the Republican nomination when the National Convention assembles for its first vote, he needs to drop the ineffectual and impotent cry of “unfairness” and start learning the rules to the game he’s trying to win.

Read more here.