Ready to flee

Delegates ready to flee Trump at contested convention

If Trump fails to clinch 1,237 delegates outright, already more than a hundred are poised to break from him on a second ballot.

By Kyle Cheney and Ben Schreckinger

The reality of a contested convention has become more real than ever, with Donald Trump facing the risk of losing Wisconsin next week, meaning he’d have to win roughly 60 percent of the remaining delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination outright.

If Trump heads into the convention without the magic number of 1,237, already more than a hundred delegates are poised to break with him on a second ballot, according to interviews with dozens of delegates, delegate candidates, operatives and party leaders.

In one of starkest examples of Trump’s lack of support, out of the 168 Republican National Committee members — each of whom doubles as a convention delegate — only one publicly supports Trump, and she knows of only a handful of others who support him privately.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has been whipping Trump in the quiet, early race to elect his own loyalists to become delegates to the convention, meaning that the Texas senator could triumph through delegates who are freed to vote their own preferences on a second ballot, regardless of who won their state.

“As far as the stealing of the Trump nomination, that’s a big concern for everybody,” said Diana Orrock, the RNC committeewoman from Nevada and the only one of 112 committeemen and women who openly supports Trump. None of the nation’s 56 state and territory GOP chairmen, also convention delegates, have endorsed Trump either. They are subjected to a mix of state-based rules as far as their obligation to back Trump on the first vote.

The risk of a routing at a contested convention is becoming more acute because of Trump’s uncertain standing going into Wisconsin’s primary on Tuesday. Two polls this week showed Cruz 10 points ahead of Trump in the state.

A loss in Wisconsin would hardly be devastating, but it would surely embolden the anti-Trump forces in other states, making his efforts to win the 60 percent of the yet-to-be-awarded delegates to reach the 1,237 figure needed to clinch the nomination outright that much more difficult, according to a POLITICO analysis.

“They’ve got to get their s--- together in Wisconsin,” said a top Trump ally in the South. “If he doesn’t have 1,237, I'd be very concerned with what happens in Cleveland.”

Barry Bennett, a Trump adviser involved in convention preparations, panned the doomsday predictions as "inside Beltway talk” in an interview with POLITICO on Thursday evening.

And while he acknowledged that Cruz had been more active on the delegate courting front so far, he added, "Big deal. We're doing it now. We're going to talk to all these people. Everybody on the campaign, including Mr. Trump. We're at it."

However, the apparent realization of the magnitude of the delegate flight risk has prompted a sharp and sudden reordering of Trump’s delegate strategy. The campaign this week tapped convention veteran Paul Manafort to become his campaign’s point person on corralling delegates.

Sources close to the campaign say Manafort will, in duty rather than title, become the most powerful strategist in the Trump orbit over the next few weeks as he brings aboard a team that includes veterans of the 1976 convention, when he helped Gerald Ford neutralize a challenge from Ronald Reagan. Manafort is running the delegate operation out of a new campaign office opened this week in Washington.

Trump has also become more vocal about the prospect of losing the nomination at the convention — arguing that a plurality of delegates should be sufficient to win the nomination and predicting riots in Cleveland if he enters with a lead but loses.

One of Trump's top advisers privately acknowledged worries to a Republican operative that Trump might not make it to 1,237 and aired concerns that his rivals are better-positioned to win a drawn-out convention, according to the operative.

Trump, according to the New York Times, scolded his aides Thursday during a private meeting with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus for allowing themselves to get outmaneuvered in some of the delegate selection processes.

Charlie Black, a veteran of Republican conventions who is advising John Kasich’s campaign, said Trump could find himself in third place on a second ballot in Cleveland.

“I do know the nature of the delegates. The majority of them, they’re conservatives but they’re party regulars — County chairmen, state regulars, local sheriffs,” he said, suggesting they’re less inclined to vote for Trump if left to their own devices.

In recent days, evidence has emerged that Cruz has proven especially adept at outmaneuvering Trump in the delegate scramble, especially in Louisiana, South Dakota, South Carolina and Wyoming. Reports suggest Cruz is also better organized in Georgia, too.

Perhaps the most glaring warning sign for Trump is the looming battle for delegates in Massachusetts. Trump scored 49 percent of the vote there, 31 points ahead of second-place Kasich. Cruz finished a distant fourth with 9.6 percent. Yet, it’s Cruz who seems to have the momentum as the state GOP prepares to hold Congressional District conventions and a state party meeting that will elect 39 national delegates.

“The Trump campaign hasn’t really gotten out of first gear, but the Cruz campaign is starting to accelerate,” said Brad Wyatt, a longtime party activist who’s not aligned with either the Cruz or Trump camps. Another top Massachusetts Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity said that at best, Trump will find himself in a dogfight for delegates in the state, despite his dominance at the polls.

The cause seems clear to many party insiders: Trump cleaned up among Massachusetts’s huge population of independent voters. But delegate elections are restricted only to the state’s much smaller population of registered Republicans, many of whom more naturally line up with Cruz. That scenario could play out across the country in states that held open primaries, since Republican Party rules limit delegate selection contests to registered Republicans.

“In order to get into the [delegate] caucuses, you have to be a registered Republican by February 10,” said Massachusetts state committeeman Reed Hillman, a Kasich supporter. “That’s going to change the dynamics in terms of the universe of potential participants. The Trump percentage will be significantly lower. The caucuses — I think they’re going to have a lot of energetic people showing up for either Kasich delegates or Cruz delegates.”

Trump allies in Massachusetts huddled Tuesday to begin strategizing for the delegate fight and expressed confidence they’d help the mogul win his fair share of supporters to the convention. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure we have Trump delegates who are elected at those caucuses,” said state Rep. Geoff Diehl, Trump’s point man in the state. “We feel very confident that we’re going to be able to achieve that.”

Two longtime party activists in Massachusetts — Amy Carnevale and Vincent DeVito — said they intend to run to become convention delegates for Trump over the next two months.

But Cruz’s operation, helmed by Diehl’s state House colleague Jim Lyons, has been earning more looks from party insiders who see it as better positioned to capture a disproportionate share of delegates. Kasich’s operation, too, is mobilizing in Massachusetts to deny Trump.

“We’re building out a statewide organization to elect delegates at caucuses in Massachusetts,” said Andrew Boucher, one of two national strategists helming Kasich’s delegate operation. “Trump might’ve won the state, but John Kasich came in a strong second. There are a lot of Kasich supporters in the state, there are a lot of Kasich volunteers in the state.”

Trump’s statement on Tuesday that he might not support the eventual Republican nominee has

his opponents claiming he violated the state party’s loyalty pledge — a requirement to get on the ballot in South Carolina — and are planning to challenge their binding to Trump, as first reported by Time.

But a top Trump supporter in the state pointed out that Kasich and Cruz have both cast doubt on whether they would support Trump if he were to become the nominee. The Trump ally dismissed the theory and talk of delegate double agents as “the parlor games that the college Republican tools of the party sit around playing.”

The Trump campaign is not planning to go down without a fight. For months, Dan Scavino, a longtime Trump loyalist and the campaign’s director of social media, has been conducting a charm offensive with likely and definite delegates, holding meetings around the country with RNC members — including Georgia Committeeman Randy Evans — and other Republican VIPs.

On Thursday, Trump himself traveled to Washington to meet with Priebus, and he emerged professing a renewed commitment to party unity just two days after he discarded the loyalty oath.

Priebus, speaking to Fox on Thursday night, acknowledged that the delegate selection has gotten “very intense.” He said that Trump and Cruz both still have the chance of reaching the “magic number” of delegates but acknowledged that it’s a very real possibility that the party is headed to a contested convention.

In South Carolina, Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster, who endorsed Trump in January, has been making calls and holding meetings in an effort to find Trump loyalists among the eligible pool of delegates, who were selected at party conventions last year.

And an unaligned senior Republican official in the state said he has seen more potential delegates openly campaigning as Trump delegates at meetings of party activists, though he said that was not necessarily a sign that Trump had more support among potential delegates. “Kasich and Cruz delegates are being a bit more circumspect about their intentions,” he said. “It could be a strategic mistake to openly campaign at this point for a candidate.”

Though Trump won all 50 delegates in the South Carolina primary, interviews with two dozen prospective delegates and state party insiders suggest many are likely to abandon him on a second ballot. The process in South Carolina is largely dictated by party insiders. And Trump's decision to sideline his loyalty pledge raised another unnerving specter for his campaign: State Party Chairman Matt Moore suggested on Twitter that the move could disqualify Trump from earning delegates at all, according to state rules.

The next test of Trump’s ability to prevail in Cleveland will begin this weekend in North Dakota, where Republican insiders will elect 25 national delegates at a state convention. Trump is dispatching a top surrogate, Ben Carson. Kasich is deploying former New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphrey on his behalf. The Cruz campaign is sending the candidate himself.