After being severely out-gunned by Ted Cruz in Colorado, Wyoming and Georgia, Donald Trump spent the last several days complaining to any reporter who would listen about a “rigged” Republican delegates system. At one point, Trump even went so far as to threaten that July would be “rough” for the GOP if they didn’t pay attention to his frequent, public meltdowns over the delegate system.
But while Trump has learned to complain about his failings, he’s not learning from his mistakes. And, thanks to that lack of foresight, Team Trump is staring down what could be a major failure in California, a state that is going to be essential to locking down the nomination. It’s all of his own acid-orange, Muppet-y making.
Just last week, Donald Trump crowed about hiring a California campaign director, but he’s still a full year behind Ted Cruz in the Golden State. Cruz had the right idea: The California delegate system is complex (actually, it’s legitimately insane) and to start preparing for it now—actually, last Wednesday—is straight-up crazy.
California is a by-Congressional-district winner-take-all state so, even if Trump wins a district, he’ll have to also win that district’s delegates, which the campaigns are responsible for recruiting. They must find a minimum of three loyal supporters willing to put their names on the primary ballot in every one of the state’s 53 Congressional districts, plus three alternates. Those six loyalists will run in 53 separate elections, one in each district, to win a seat at the RNC—and some districts have fewer than 5,000 Republican voters, which means that loyalists could make a lot of impact on their fellow voters.
Finding, confirming, signing and registering Cruz’s delegates was, according to his California campaign director, a five-month job. And Trump has between now and May 7, when the California GOP begins printing ballots —just a little over two weeks —to locate 169 delegates and 169 alternates, a task that Team Trump began last Wednesday.
There’s no state convention; the delegates commit to the California GOP that they will vote for the candidate who recruited them. So, bottom line, a candidate could lose California, but win its delegates, who would, of course, remain loyal to said candidate when a hypothetical contested convention convenes in July.
For Trump, California may be the difference between locking down the nomination and that hypothetical contested convention. Even if Trump takes New York by the expected 50% margin, he’ll still need to win more than half of all available delegates to secure the 1,237 for the nomination. And at best estimate, he’ll need 97 of California’s 172 delegates, or a vast majority of California’s Congressional districts, which could be swayed heavily by campaign-loyal delegates.
And he started working on that last Wednesday.
For a candidate who is supposedly hell-bent on winning 1,237 delegates and securing the nomination before the RNC—and within mathematical striking distance of doing so—he’s allowing quite a few contests slip through his fingers. It’s almost as though he’s not as committed to this whole nomination thing as he’s claimed.