On Thursday, the two sides are beginning what could be a two-day faceoff at meetings of the convention’s rules committee.
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They’ve been working out of their office for 20 days, trying to educate delegates that if they don’t want to vote for Trump, they don’t have to. Indeed, the proposal in the convention Rules Committee to “free” the delegates later this week may not even get enough votes (one quarter of the committee) to earn a vote in the full convention.
But an eleventh-hour battle is raging behind the scenes that could deny Trump the Republican nomination.
Although pledged to follow the party’s wishes, delegates from across the country are threatening to break away in an effort to prevent the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, from leading the GOP into the November election.
Angelo Merendino/Getty Images Quicken Loans Arena is decorated to welcome the Republican National Convention on July 11, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Trump: “And we will make American great again”. It’s all going down.
Rachel Hoff, an openly gay defense lobbyist for a center-right policy center, was among the GOP platform committee members who gathered Monday to shape the party’s platform.
During the CNN event, a woman in the audience asked Ryan how he can support Trump despite the latter’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims traveling to the U.S. Ryan said he’s not in lock step with Trump, but said the real estate mogul would be a better president than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Unruh said she knows the committee will vote her proposal down. “This is about saving the party and winning in the fall”.
“I’m ecstatic about being able to attend this convention, and to put my support behind Trump”, Dougherty, a DeLand native, said. Trump carried every Florida county except Miami-Dade.
NY delegate Annie Dickerson said the GOP Platform Committee has been resisting an obvious trend in the country toward gay rights, calling same-sex marriage “settled law”, saying it is only a matter of time before federal nondiscrimination statutes protecting LGBT rights are enacted.
“I’m not going to ignore the votes of over 13 million people”. At this point, the cake is baked. “And I can relate it really very much to myself”, Trump said.
Talk of releasing delegates clearly weighs on GOP officials. They say they’re upset that when it came time to appoint delegates, Trump’s California team passed them over in favor of party leaders and mega-donors like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Carl’s Jr.
“I would think that that’s pretty unlikely”, said John Fogarty, the general counsel for the Illinois Republican Party.
“There is certainly a movement afoot, I receive emails fairly frequently about an attempt to change the rules”, said Lyster, referring to the nominating process.
Louisiana RNC Committeeman Ross Little Jr., who was a big supporter of Cruz and sits on the Convention Rules Committee, said he is committed to making the changes to close primaries.
So say this actually works – that the dog catches the auto and, suddenly, enough delegates have voted for the new language that the convention can ditch Trump.
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Unruh said she could live with that. RNC and Trump campaign officials remain convinced that such an up-or-down floor vote would fall Trump’s way, but the worldwide spectacle of a floor fight would be worth its weight in gold.
