Why now? The likelihood of a contested convention has increased with the Republican Party shifting away from a winner-take-all strategy, in recent years, to a more proportional way of allocating delegates.
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His key goal, because of New York’s unusual delegate allocation rules, is to keep Trump under 50% of the vote.
While GOP voters view both Trump and Cruz positively, both are seen highly unfavorably among the state’s overall electorate, according to the poll.
“Trump has essentially walked off the field”.
Trump’s lead is narrowing, but he still has the most at 743 delegates, over Cruz with 559 (including Colorado’s 21 delegates) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 143 delegates.
The actual 59 people traveling to Cleveland will consist of 42 from congressional districts in the state (14 for each candidate), with the other 17 to be proposed by party leaders and voted on Saturday.
GOP voters with no high school education have a preference for Trump over Cruz, while post-graduates are dividing their preferences among all candidates.
Delegates in each congressional district elect three delegates.
On the Republican side, Trump holds a wide delegate lead nationally, but there seems to be a real chance no one will claim a majority of GOP delegates before the national convention in Cleveland in July.
S.C. Treasurer Curtis Loftis, a Lexington Republican, said he does not expect the convention to be “nearly as rambunctious as people think”.
That has meant recruiting local activists, many of them practiced political hands who know how each state’s delegate allocation process works.
The delegate race in Colorado morphed into a complex, multi-layered endeavor for the GOP campaigns when the state decided not to hold a presidential caucus or primary because of the cost.
“I’ve got this guy standing over there talking about New York values with scorn on his face, with hatred of New York”, Trump said Wednesday at a Long Island rally. “But you can’t beat the shoe leather aspect of it”, said Gessler, a Cruz delegate from Denver.
“It’s just, to me, scary if our nation is going to be looking to Donald Trump for answers”, said Bravo, a 32-year-old cosmetology instructor who will cast her primary ballot for Cruz. Reagan locked down the vast majority of the delegation thanks in large part to that personal ask, Call said. Cruz supporters sported bright orange T-shirts with his slate of delegates printed on the back. He campaigned through swing regions of Wisconsin long before Trump set foot there. Trump volunteers printed new lists with new names and ballot numbers – but those lists also had mistakes, including the wrong ballot numbers or the names of people who had pledged to vote for Cruz.
Keeping up his tussle with Trump over values, Cruz told the Colorado crowd earlier that it’s easy to talk about making America great again – “you can even print that on a baseball cap” – but that the more important question is which candidate understands “the principles and values that made America great in the first place”.
Is the Republican establishment, having been repudiated in the primaries in a historic turnout by the party base, now engaged in a willful act of self-deception? “Rubio has since dropped out, and the delegates felt like they needed to get behind somebody, and the Cruz campaign was active, but there is an alternative to Cruz and Trump and that is John Kasich”, she said.
These party insiders can influence whether Trump, Texas Sen.
It’s going to be a big weekend for Colorado Republicans.
By the end of the balloting, Cruz supporters have taken every single delegate spot.
“Clearly we play a fairly pivotal role in the total process especially given that this is a potentially contested convention where ten delegates, fifteen delegates, twenty delegate could make the difference”. “If these regional differences persist, the delegate allocations will be more divided (among candidates)”.
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“There’s a lot of interest in hearing from Ted Cruz in light of his win in Wisconsin and the impact that has on re-shaping the race”, said Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks.
