Doug Wead: Ron Paul’s delegate math, an accurate update

Doug Wead clears up some false (or should we say, premature) reports of delegate wins in Washington and Iowa on his blog:

"Has Ron Paul won the majority of delegates from Washington State to the Republican National Convention? That is the claim in a report that filed by the International Business Times last night. Has Ron Paul won the majority of delegates from Iowa? That was a recent report from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC the day before.

Now, here are the facts. No delegates to the Republican National Convention have been chosen from either state. The selection of the official delegation from Washington State will take place May 30, 2012. And the official delegation from Iowa will take place June 16, 2012.

Last Sunday night I reported on wins for Ron Paul in Minnesota and Iowa at the state’s respective district conventions. Delegates were indeed chosen in Minnesota, at the district level, to be part of the official state delegation to the RNC in Tampa. But not in Iowa. The rules are different there.

The wins that I referred to in Iowa had to do with committee selection and the elections of district delegates to the state convention that could lead to a Ron Paul heavy delegation to the RNC. The point to keep in mind is this. It hasn’t happened yet.

In the end, Rachel Maddow will likely be right. In fact, it will likely be better than what she is saying. She either got inside information from our campaign on the makeup of those delegates to state or she had her staff at MSNBC make phone calls to the delegates themselves to determine their favorite candidates.

By the way. I misspoke on her show when I incorrectly claimed that Ron Paul had carried a county in 2008 that he had not actually won. My point was right, that a Romney county chairman had postponed a county caucus that Ron Paul was expected to win, and one that he did eventually carry, but he had not won that county in the last cycle. So mistakes are easy to make.

Which brings me to one more correction. The International Business Times claims that Ron Paul will win a majority of the delegates from North Dakota. Nada. That will not happen. In fact, that process is done and it is one of the states where the Ron Paul people were ambushed by Romney’s Goldman Sachs brigade. While Ron Paul beat Mitt Romney, who came in third place in the North Dakota state vote, Romney still won 60% of the delegation at the state convention by a combination of lawyers, parliamentarians, the elimination of paper ballots and controlling the audio visuals. As the former state chairman said, “What could the Ron Paul people do? Go up and write a delegates name on the screen?”

The point here is to be accurate. And when a mistake is made to correct it. Which is a lot better than the New York Times or the Associated Press seem willing to do. They have still refused to correct their lists of delegates that are now wholesale fiction.

So what does it all mean?

It means that journalists are beginning to catch on to the truth of the Ron Paul delegate strategy which is very different from what has been reported. It means that we are on schedule to win many of those delegations from a number of states. It means that a brokered convention probably would have happened if the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns had not collapsed. And there are a number of options possible even now. But it also means that things can go wrong. It isn’t done yet.

Journalism is dead in America. This is the age of entertainment. Keep that in mind. And double check your sources."

http://dougwead.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/ron-pauls-delegate-...

An important takeaway here is that we do NOT have half of the delegates in Washington as has been reported in the past couple days.