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United States News Title: Trump Beat Cruz at His Own Organizational Game in Pennsylvania Trump Beat Cruz at His Own Organizational Game in Pennsylvania By Ed Kilgore On April 19, NBC News reported the Cruz campaign was bragging that its organizational wizardry would enable the Texan to pick up a lot of Pennsylvania's 57 unbound delegates on April 26 — delegates that were elected at the congressional-district level with no indication on the ballot of their presidential-candidate preferences. Indeed, Cruz's Keystone power was supposedly why he was spending the evening of April 19 in that state rather than personally witnessing his drubbing in New York that night. "He'll be in Philly for his watch party tonight," NBC's Hallie Jackson said. "That's indicative of where he and his campaign see this race going, to Pennsylvania, where they are looking to make a play for these unbound delegates. Even if they come in a distant third, a top campaign aide tells me, they will still, they believe, pick up more than half the delegates there." "They're looking at more than 30," she reported. Well, as it happened, Cruz did better than a "distant third" in Pennsylvania yesterday. He was a distant second to Donald Trump with about 22 percent of the vote to Donald Trump's 57 percent and John Kasich's 19 percent. As expected, Trump won all 17 of the statewide delegates. But at the congressional-district level, Cruz did not win more than half the unbound delegates, and certainly didn't win "more than 30." According to another NBC report after the primary, Cruz won two. And the big winner was the organizationally inept — or so it was thought — Mr. Trump. Eight delegates remain uncommitted to any candidate. They have until the first ballot at the convention to decide their vote (and any of the 54 could technically change their minds any time before that first vote). There was a lot of talk going into primary day in Pennsylvania that a lot of candidates for these unbound and unidentified delegate slots were promising to vote for their district winner. Is that how Trump rolled up his shocking number of pledges? Not really: So only ten of these 35 Trumpsters — and again, the numbers are likely to rise before the counting's done — are backing him only because he won their districts. Unless it was all a bizarre coincidence, most of them won because somehow or other voters figured out, without any information being on the ballot, that they were with the Donald. That would suggest it was Trump, not Cruz, who had the superior organization in Pennsylvania, by a goodly margin. Perhaps the narrative that Cruz was limiting Trump's odds of a first-ballot victory by winning all the unbound delegates in the land was a bit premature, eh? Beyond that, you have to wonder if Team Trump is catching up in the secondary game of getting its own people into delegate slots already bound to him by primary or caucus results, making a second-ballot Cruz win a bit less likely in case Trump fails to get to 1,237 before Cleveland. Anyway you look at it, Trump's big night on April 26 is getting bigger by the moment. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: nolu chan (#0)
Trump has engineered such a blowout this primary season, the thought that somehow a guy who won, what, four actual elections? - was going to sneak in there and have all of these unbound delegates go against the will of the people of their state and the rest of the nation, and side with him over Trump. Why would they do that? Delegates are not grandees. They're mostly relatively average folks with a taste for politics. And standing by some guy who is just not winning anything real while a popular juggernaut rolls across the country is just not what most people are going to do. Most people back the strongest horse. That's Trump. That's why the billionaires are breaking for Trump, the politicians are breaking for Trump, everything is moving in Trump's direction. He's the presumptive heir, and there's nobody else even in the ring, really. Cruz is just a spoiler, and he's not going to actually spoil it. So, these delegates who hitch themselves too firmly to Cruz. What happens? Trump gets the nomination anyway, and these guys backed the wrong horse and earned the enmity of people in their own states for ignoring the popular will. It's not going to be a contested convention.
“Last Tuesday was the nail in the coffin, Indiana is when he realizes he’s inside it.”
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