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?
WINTERY KNIGHT 