In Pennsylvania, Unbound Delegates Remain Wary of Donald TrumpPHILADELPHIA — Mary Ann Meloy, one of the 54 Republican delegates elected in Pennsylvania on Tuesday as free agents to the Republican National Convention, said she would find it very hard to vote for Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Meloy had a sister with cerebral palsy. And Mr. Trump’s disparaging treatment of people with disabilities, she said, “made me want to jump through the television screen.”
Because of the unusual latitude the Pennsylvania Republican Party gives to the delegates like Ms. Meloy who are not required to support any candidate, Mr. Trump’s crushing victory in the state on Tuesday is more complicated than it may appear.
“The bottom line is that being an uncommitted delegate gives you the ability to take all the facts into consideration,” said Ms. Meloy, who lives in Harmar Township outside Pittsburgh and got her start in politics volunteering for Richard M. Nixon in 1968. “Certainly the will of the people in your district — there’s a lot to be said for that.
But, she continued: “We have a representative form of government. Not a democracy. A representative democracy.”
Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania with nearly 57 percent of the vote. He carried every county, including Ms. Meloy’s, and even won large urban ones with diverse and highly educated populations like Philadelphia, the kind of territory that he has often found inhospitable to his rancorous brand of politics.
Yet in the trench warfare fight for the Republican presidential nomination — the smaller, less understood delegate races that could prove far more pivotal to Mr. Trump’s campaign — the situation remains fluid.
He appeared to have won about 40 of Pennsylvania’s 54 unbound delegates, along with another 17 awarded to him outright as the statewide winner. The remaining 14 delegates have either expressed no preference or said they would not vote for Mr. Trump....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/pennsylvania-delegates-donald-trump.html?_r=0
