{"id":22838,"date":"2016-04-13T08:04:48","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/trump-amassing-delegates-who-might-not-remain-loyal\/"},"modified":"2016-04-13T08:04:48","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:04:48","slug":"trump-amassing-delegates-who-might-not-remain-loyal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/trump-amassing-delegates-who-might-not-remain-loyal\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump amassing delegates who might not remain loyal"},"content":{"rendered":"

DES MOINES, Iowa<\/strong> \u2014 Already behind the curve in organizing for the Republican convention, Donald Trump has missed crucial deadlines in a number of states to lock up delegates who would stay loyal beyond the first ballot.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s shortcomings in this behind-the-scenes campaign, which hasn\u2019t played much of a role in selecting the GOP nominee in decades, could doom his presidential candidacy if he is unable to win the nomination in the initial voting at this summer\u2019s national convention in Cleveland.<\/p>\n

After that first ballot, most delegates are no longer bound to support the winner of their state\u2019s party primary or caucuses \u2014 they\u2019re free agents who can support the candidate of their choosing.<\/p>\n

Most of the actual delegates are elected at state and congressional district conventions run by party insiders, members of the Republican establishment that Trump has run against from the outset of his campaign.<\/p>\n

And while Trump\u2019s team has had little contact with these loyal party activists, his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has been actively courting them for months.<\/p>\n

Trump has spent the past two days hammering at his party\u2019s delegate selection process as \u201crigged,\u201d \u2018\u2019unfair\u201d and \u201ccorrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a rally in Albany, New York, Monday night that drew thousands, Trump angrily denounced Saturday\u2019s final allocation of all of Colorado\u2019s delegates to Cruz as \u201cdirty and disgusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s team is only now starting to engage in the delegate selection process, the choosing of the actual people who will attend and vote at the convention. Republicans have already selected delegates in at least nine states. And in others, such as Virginia and Arizona, the deadline to apply to be a delegate has passed.<\/p>\n

Indiana\u2019s primary, for example, won\u2019t take place until next month. But the deadline to become a national convention delegate was in mid-March.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre we concerned? Yes, definitely,\u201d said Tony Samuel, vice chairman of Trump\u2019s Indiana campaign.<\/p>\n

The Cruz team feels the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if (Trump) jumped into high gear, he can\u2019t do it,\u201d said Shak Hill, a Cruz campaign leader in Virginia. \u201cThat\u2019s where he\u2019s been shut out of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s delegates must vote for him on the first ballot at the convention. But if no one gets a majority, most of the delegates can then bolt if they choose.<\/p>\n

Trump is the only candidate with a realistic path to the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the convention. But the path is narrow, and Cruz is working to block him.<\/p>\n

Cruz has built an organization of volunteers who are working in state after state to get his supporters selected as delegates, even those who must vote for Trump at first.<\/p>\n

Trump is just ramping up his operation, but in some states he\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

In Virginia \u2014 a state where Trump won the primary \u2014 he has missed the deadlines to assemble lists of potential delegates. Cruz, however, has delegate candidates in 10 of Virginia\u2019s 11 congressional districts.<\/p>\n

The application deadline was last month.<\/p>\n

Indiana\u2019s primary is May 3, but 27 of the state\u2019s 57 delegates \u2014 the actual people \u2014 have already been selected at congressional district caucuses. The deadline to register as a candidate for delegate was March 15.<\/p>\n

In all, at least nine states have picked some or all of their delegates: Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

Trump has won a total of 100 delegates in primaries and caucuses in these states. In most, however, the candidates had no formal role in selecting the people who will fill those slots.<\/p>\n

To help manage the process, Trump\u2019s campaign hired a convention manager, Paul Manafort, last week. Manafort helped lead the fight against Ronald Reagan\u2019s challenge of then-President Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City.<\/p>\n

Manafort has accused Cruz\u2019s campaign of strong-arming would-be delegates. However, he said Trump was successful in selecting delegates in Michigan, and predicted the same in Nevada.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, we wiped him out,\u201d Manafort said in an NBC interview Sunday. \u201cAnd we\u2019re going to see Ted Cruz get skunked in Nevada.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former South Carolina Republican Chairman Katon Dawson, who has been publicly neutral in the race, said he\u2019s seen no difference in Trump\u2019s delegate strategy since Manafort\u2019s hire.<\/p>\n

Said Dawson, a veteran national GOP strategist, \u201cHe\u2019s not a household name or miracle worker by any stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump won all 50 of South Carolina\u2019s delegates. But in order to be a delegate at the national convention, you had to be a delegate at last year\u2019s state convention.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people that are going to fill those slots were already selected anyway,\u201d said Republican political consultant Tony Denny, who has been a delegate to three previous GOP national conventions.<\/p>\n

Cruz has already done a lot of groundwork to get supporters selected as delegates in South Carolina.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe delegate selection process is in their DNA,\u201d Denny said of Cruz\u2019s ground operation.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Ohlemacher reported from Washington. AP reporters Jonathan Lemire in Albany, New York, Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, and Brian Slodysko in Indianapolis contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DES MOINES, Iowa \u2014 Already behind the curve in organizing for the Republican convention, Donald Trump has missed crucial deadlines in a number of states to lock up delegates who would stay loyal beyond the first ballot. Trump\u2019s shortcomings in this behind-the-scenes campaign, which hasn\u2019t played much of a role in selecting the GOP nominee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22838"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}