Tag Archives: Delegates

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Organized Cruz wins 14 delegates in Wyoming, delegate rules in place since 2004

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Donald Trump with some of his supporters
Donald Trump with some of the “very best people” who are running his campaign

Trump’s “very good brain” fails him again. So frustrating when tweeting abuse doesn’t substitute for a ground game in all 50 states.

The leftist Washington Post explains:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) continued his romp through the Republican Party’s state conventions Saturday, winning 14 delegates in Wyoming to complete a near-sweep of the state. At the same time, in conventions in Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina, Cruz-friendly activists won delegate slots in congressional districts that had voted for someone else in the primaries.

The events capped off three remarkable weeks for Cruz in the sort of cloistered party meetings where grass-roots organizers can dominate. Cruz, the only Republican candidate to campaign in Wyoming, told delegates here that their votes could help him win “a battle in Cleveland,” where the party may host its first contested convention in 40 years.

“If you don’t want the convention in Cleveland to hand the election to Hillary Clinton — which is what a Donald Trump nomination does — I ask you to support this slate,” Cruz said.

These conventions came after Trump had spent much of the week panning Colorado for using a similar system to award 34 total delegates. As in Wyoming, activists had gathered at little-hyped local conventions, won places at the state convention, then voted for the national delegates — all while giving Cruz nine of the Wyoming delegates available in the March 1 county caucuses.

The GOP front-runner complained that the contest had been “rigged” against him, a charge that Colorado Republican leaders strongly denied, noting that they’d been using the same system since the 2004 presidential election.

[…]In Wyoming, Trump’s local operation was clearly outmatched, even though a number of attendees said they supported him. 

[…]Trump’s campaign was late to recognize the importance of the state conventions, much less the local contests that determined who could vote at those state conventions. In Wyoming, that effectively meant that Trump’s supporters were arriving at a marathon where Cruz had already run the first 25 miles.

Trump doesn’t think that TWELVE YEARS of no rule changes is enough time for him to understand how things work. His “very good brain” cannot understand state-specific rules, and he isn’t allowing his “very best people” to make any decisions. Cruz’s campaign has been on the ground in Wyoming for months. Trump cannot even find Wyoming on a map of the United States. And since he insists on controlling everything himself, rather than hiring people who know about these things, and letting them work on it, he keeps losing. He’s too full of himself to delegate to experts who aren’t clowns.

Trump vs Clinton: General election match-up polls
Trump vs Clinton: General election match-up polls

How is he supposed to beat Hillary Clinton when all he can do is clown around in front of crowds of people who are more impressed with his charisma than detailed policy proposals? If you’re hiring someone for a job, they have to do more than entertain you with talk. They have to know the rules in the different states, and be organized enough to win them. Trump HAS no organization , and that’s another reason to think that he can’t win against Hillary, as if his 70% disapproval rate and 11-point deficit in the head-to-head polls against Clinton were not enough of an indicator.

I do expect Trump to do well in the near-term in Democrat states, and that’s because he is a Democrat, and Democrats vote for him. They are supportive of his “very pro-choice” views, his promises of “forward motion” on gay rights, his support for tariffs, and his intent to appoint liberal judges like his sister.

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Cruz continues to win delegates in Colorado and Iowa

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz

Colorado doesn’t have a primary like other states. Delegates are elected at a convention. Colorado has 37 delegates in total, so let’s see what happened with them.

Leftist CNN reports:

Ted Cruz on Saturday clinched the support of every pledged delegate in Colorado, capturing all of the final 13 delegates who will go to the national convention in July and demonstrating his organizational strength in the all-important delegate race.

Even though voters didn’t head to the polls Saturday, Cruz’s strength here could help deny Donald Trump the 1,237 delegates that he needs to clinch the nomination.

Cruz’s victory Saturday, combined with delegates he had already earned, hands him 30 of the 37 delegates across the state who are legally bound to support him on the first ballot at the convention, along with four other delegates who gave him verbal commitments of support.

[…]In this first round for the GOP, Team Cruz once again proved its mettle — far outpacing the efforts of Trump and Kasich in the scramble for delegates at each of the congressional district gatherings this week.

How come Cruz gets all the delegates? Is he cheating?

CNN explains that he is not cheating:

In yet another sign of his airtight ground game, Cruz spoke before a huge screen displaying his slate of delegates for the final 13 spots, and he noted that his slate was also printed on the bright orange T-shirts that his many volunteers were wearing on the state convention floor.

Trump’s campaign, by contrast, initially distributed fliers listing the campaign’s national delegate candidates that were riddled with errors. The flier displaying the Trump slate is supposed to be the tip sheet that party members use to fill out their ballot. But on the first slate that the Trump campaign was giving out, more than a half dozen of their delegate candidates were listed with the wrong delegate number. At least one of the delegate numbers corresponded to a delegate supporting Cruz.

The Trump campaign reprinted the flier, but the second flier also included several errors.

I saw somewhere that the Trump campaign is accusing the Cruz campaign of stealing all the delegates, but the CNN report shows why that’s not true. Trump is losing the delegates because his campaign is not working as hard nor as intelligently as the Trump campaign.

What about Iowa?

Meanwhile, delegates were also being selected in Iowa on the weekend.

The leftist Des Moines Register reports:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz captured 11 of the 12 national party convention delegates chosen at four party meetings held across Iowa on Saturday.

The near-sweep in Iowa’s four congressional districts is the latest evidence of a well-organized national effort by Cruz to secure support from the activists who will formally nominate a Republican presidential candidate later this year in Cleveland.

That support could be crucial in the event that no Republican candidate clinches the nomination before convention — an increasingly likely prospect as the race between Cruz, Donald Trump and John Kasich drags on.

Well, this time Cruz cheated for sure, how else can we explain his getting 11 out of 12 delegates?

The Des Moines Register says no, though – no cheating again:

The Cruz campaign’s successes on Saturday come at the expense of Trump, the Republican race’s putative front-runner, whose campaign had vocal groups of supporters at each convention but showed little organizational prowess and will send zero committed delegates to Cleveland.

Delegates’ supported candidate will not matter in the national convention’s first round of balloting, but it could be decisive in subsequent rounds, as delegates are unbound from the results of their states’ primaries and caucuses and allowed to vote their conscience.

[…]The Cruz campaign demonstrated a strong organization from the outset of Saturday’s contests, peppering convention attendees with pro-Cruz text messages throughout the day and handing out half-sheets of paper at all four convention sites identifying slates of Cruz-aligned candidates for national convention delegate, national convention alternate and the nominating committee.

And there are still more delegates to go, and the Cruz campaign is working on them as well:

Iowa will send a total of 30 delegates to the national convention — the 12 selected on Saturday, 15 “at-large” delegates elected as a slate at next month’s state convention and three statewide party leaders.

These delegates are not able to vote for Cruz in the first round, life the Colorado ones can. Still, if we end up with a contested convention, most of them will go for Cruz. I have to say, it’s nice to have such a smart candidate who is so organized. I like having the smartest person – it’s like having William Lane Craig in the debate.

It seems to me that the more “closed” the process is for selecting delegates – Democrats and Independents cannot cross the aisle to vote – the better Cruz does. The exit polls show that Trump does very well with people who are liberal on fiscal, social and foreign policy. If the liberals and moderates are not allowed to pick the candidate, then Cruz does really well. Maybe in 2020, we should have only closed primaries?

News

Will there be a contested convention in Cleveland? Will Ted Cruz win it?

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Heidi Cruz

A lot of people are asking me what Cruz chances are to defeat Trump and win the nomination. I’m going to look at three columns, one from radically leftist CNN, one from the radically leftist Washington Post, and one from National Review. I found both of these stories at the Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz news aggregator, by the way. I check that site at least twice a day, and so should you.

The first one is from David Gergen at CNN. David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been a White House adviser to four presidents. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

His headline is “Ted Cruz: Now the odds-on favorite”:

With his decisive victory in Wisconsin, Sen. Ted Cruz has not only shaken up the Republican presidential race, but heading into the homestretch, he has suddenly become the odds-on favorite to win the nomination in Ohio.

With 16 primaries and caucuses remaining, Donald Trump has to win 70% of the delegates to secure the 1,237 needed to win a first ballot at the Republican convention. Several states are coming up that are more favorable territory for Trump than Cruz, especially New York and Pennsylvania where Trump still has significant leads.

Even so, winning more than two thirds of the remaining delegates is a daunting challenge for him. In the 36 primaries and caucuses leading up to Wisconsin, Trump won only 46% of the delegates. And now he heads down a tough homestretch with Cruz seizing the momentum.

In a year crammed with surprises, no one can say for sure what will unfold in Cleveland, Ohio. But there are two likely outcomes: First, Cruz and Trump have each vowed to vote against a change in the GOP’s Rule 40. That’s an obscure provision that requires any candidate to win at least eight primaries and caucuses before he or she can be nominated.

Trump and Cruz will be the only two people in Cleveland with that distinction. They should also have enough delegate strength between them to block a rewrite of Rule 40. In other words, potential candidates like John Kasich, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney won’t be eligible even if many delegates think them likely to fare better against Hillary Clinton — the race could narrow to Trump vs. Cruz.

If Trump then falls short on the first ballot, there will be a donnybrook. But it is now becoming apparent that Cruz is much better prepared to win that fight. Trump has run a campaign long on the outside game of televised rallies but short on the inside game of quietly piling up delegates.

By contrast, Cruz has been superlative playing to the inside. Just look at how craftily he captured delegates away from Trump a few days ago in North Dakota. (The capacity of the Obama team to play the inside game so well helped to propel them past Hillary Clinton in 2008.)

In a first ballot, delegates must vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged but thereafter, of course, may vote for someone else. Signs increasingly point to the fact that Republican party regulars pledged to Trump are ready to bolt on a second or third ballot. With Cruz the only other man in the race, that almost certainly means they will drift — rush? –toward the Texan, and he will take the crown.

That’s an accurate analysis. The most likely scenario now is that Cruz capitalizes on his momentum to deny Trump the delegates he needs to get to 1,237 before the convention, then wins the nomination on round 2 or later, when the GOP delegates from each state become “unbound”. And Cruz is already reaching out to the delegates to make sure that they choose him in round 2 and later rounds, as they free up.

Can Cruz win a contested convention?

 

Now, I’m going to balance that with something hilarious from moderate conservative Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist George Will, writing in National Review.

Will’s column is entitled “Ted Cruz Is Surging by Design”:

People here at Ted Cruz’s campaign headquarters are meticulously preparing to win a contested convention, if there is one. Because Donald Trump is a low-energy fellow, Cruz will be positioned to trounce him in Cleveland, where Trump’s slide toward earned oblivion would accelerate during a second ballot.

[…]For months Cruz’s national operation has been courting all convention delegates, including Trump’s. Cruz aims to make a third ballot decisive, or unnecessary.

On the eve of Wisconsin’s primary, the analytics people here knew how many undecided voters were choosing between Cruz and Trump (32,000) and how many between Cruz and John Kasich (72,000), and where they lived. Walls here are covered with notes outlining every step of each state’s multistage delegate-selection process. (Cruz’s campaign was active in Michigan when the process of selecting persons eligible to be delegates began in August 2014.) Cruz’s campaign is nurturing relationships with delegates now committed to Trump and others. In Louisiana’s primary, 58.6 percent of voters favored someone other than Trump; Cruz’s campaign knows which issues are particularly important to which Trump delegates, and Cruz people with similar values are talking to them.

[…]Usually, more than 40 percent of delegates to Republican conventions are seasoned activists who have attended prior conventions. A large majority of all delegates are officeholders — county commissioners, city council members, sheriffs, etc. — and state party officials. They tend to favor presidential aspirants who have been Republicans for longer than since last Friday.

Trump is a world-class complainer (he is never being treated “fairly”) but a bush-league preparer. A nomination contest poses policy and process tests, and he is flunking both.

Regarding policy, he is flummoxed by predictable abortion questions because he has been pro-life for only 15 minutes, and because he has lived almost seven decades without giving a scintilla of thought to any serious policy question. Regarding process, Trump, who recently took a week-long vacation from campaigning, has surfed a wave of free media to the mistaken conclusion that winning a nomination involves no more forethought than he gives to policy. He thinks he can fly in, stroke a crowd’s ideological erogenous zones, then fly away. He knows nothing about the art of the political deal.

The nomination process, says Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, “is a multilevel Rubik’s Cube. Trump thought it was a golf ball — you just had to whack it.” Roe says the Cruz campaign’s engagement with the granular details of delegate maintenance is producing a situation where “the guy who is trying to hijack the party runs into a guy with a machine gun.”

Cruz graduated at the top of his classes at Princeton and Harvard Law. He clerked for Court of Appeals Justice J. Michael Luttig and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Insofar as this primary election is a contest based on hard work and preparation, Cruz will win it. And then he’s going to beat Hillary.