Hey does anyone know the number of votes Cruz, Kasich and Trump each got in Colorado??
I’d like to compare to other states, some people are calling me names and insulting me for asking. It seems like a simple question.
It is. the problem is that no one knows the answer. So, why do you keep on asking it?
. Up through the 1976 election, which accelerated the number of states holding Primaries, the CAUCUS/CONVENTION method was the usual method for choosing delegates to the National Convention: it was a system easily controlled - and, in many cases, manipulated - by the party hierarchy. In the Democratic Party of the early 1970’s, the McGovern-Fraser reforms - seeking to reduce the influence of “bossism” in the nominating process - encouraged many states to change over from this method of choosing National Convention delegates to the Primary and, since Primaries are elections regulated by state law and the majority of statehouses in the 1970’s came to be controlled by Democrats, the GOP was also forced - by laws in the several states - to begin turning away from the CAUCUS/CONVENTION. In 1960, there were only 16 presidential primaries: by 1980, there were 35 and, in 2000, there were 45 presidential primaries
Hey does anyone know the number of votes Cruz, Kasich and Trump each got in Colorado??
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60,000 attended the local meeting to select the delegates to the state conventions. Too bad Trump didn’t participate.
Nobody knows for sure, but I have a pretty good idea.
But first, I'd like to address the "COLORADO CHEATED!!!" bullcrap I'm seeing here. People who live in Primary states == over 90% of you (ie all states other than Alaska Hawaii Wyoming North Dakota Maine Colorado Kansas Minnesota Nevada Iowa) should not feel that their lack of knowledge of the caucus system qualifies them to cast aspersions on Colorado's system.
Many of us conservative Colorado activists didn't like the biggest change made this year, namely the complete elimination of the non-binding Prez Preference Straw Poll. I repeat: we didn't like it either for various reasons. But to take it a step further and allege it's a way to gerrymander the rules to favor Cruz over Trump is just ludicrous.
That change - made last August - was triggered by the RNC, who decreed that all such statewide Straw Polls would bind delegates to the winner(s) of the straw poll. The Colo GOP leadership was thus forced to either eliminate our straw poll, or to keep it and cough up major bucks to ensure its integrity would be above question. Eg, in my county alone - Larimer - there's no way we could hire outside poll watchers to be at every single one of our 180 far-flung precincts. When a poll is nonbinding - as ours has been up to this year - there's not a great deal of concern about who watches the ballot boxes, who watches the ballot box watchers, who watches those who watch the ballot box watchers, etc, so we can run a caucus on a shoestring budget and depend on the integrity of the many hundreds of volunteers (in just our county alone) who run the process on Caucus night.
BOTTOM LINE: THESE RULES HAVE BEEN UNCHANGED SINCE LAST AUGUST, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!! AND IF ONE PLAYER CHOOSES TO MAKE THE BEST USE OF THE RULES BY ORGANIZING EARLY WHILE THE OTHER PLAYER ACTS LIKE THEY COULDN'T CARE LESS, I HAVE NO SYMPATHY FOR THE TEARS OF THE OTHER PLAYER.
I suspect Trump's staff figured Iowa was the only Caucus state that mattered, as the only evidence I saw of his organization in Colo was at the very last moment at the State Convention itself. And even then it was too little too late. More on that later....
First, let's start with Caucus night on March 1st. The RNC had forced COLO into either doing away with the straw poll, or making it really expensive (or a 3rd alternative worse than the first two). But so many of us grass roots activists were miffed about the lack of a statewide straw poll that a few counties with large #s of GOP voters - Larimer, Weld, and Adams, and a 4th one with a tiny but vocal band of GOP rebels == Boulder County (of all places!) voted to have their own County-wide straw poll, naturally ignored by our state party, the RNC, the media and everyone else except a few bloggers.
Starting in the center and moving outwards, here's what I saw on Caucus night:
Precinct Level: We were packed with 34 voters at my home precinct, a precinct that as late as 2006 had maybe 6 or 8 attendees, went up to almost 30 in 2010 with the influx of strongly motivated Tea Partiers, and again in 2012 with the influx of strongly motivated Romney supporters (lot of LDS in my precinct, though they were outvoted in other precincts by equally motivated Santorum supporters), only to drop back down to barely 20 in the 2010 Caucus.
During the open discussion period, the vast majority supported Cruz over Trump, though they spent more time finding things wrong with Trump instead of focusing on saying nice things about their candidate, which I always find a bit annoying, but whatever.
I put in a plug for our precinct to use a secret/paper-ballot for the Prez Pref Poll - which is what we ended up doing, because I hate to see minorities feeling intimidated by majorities. Our results were as follows:
But the conventional wisdom was tossed out the door this time around. It was definitely a pro-Cruz year, or at least an anti-Trump year, and no matter how nice you were, if you had "Supports Trump" after your name, you were going down. Like it or not, that's how democracy works, in a caucus system.
(Note: Some Counties don't elect State & CD delegates on Caucus night like we do, but later at the County Assembly).
District Level: I happen to be the District Captain overseeing 5 Precinct Caucuses including my own Precinct, and managed to ask 3 of the other PCP's their results. None of them had any Trump votes to report, even though two, maybe all three, of them held secret ballots too. All the other caucuses had record numbers too, from what I saw while overseeing the caucus night check-in downstairs. We were all maxed out on seating, with attendees at one caucus alternating between the floor and standing against a wall.
(Larimer) County Level:
Multi-County Level: A State Senator from my own Larimer County who I trust, informally collected figures from his contacts in the 3 other rebellious counties besides us (Weld, Adams, Boulder) who held their own ad-hoc unauthorized Straw Polls, and came up with these figures:
His only chance of getting a nice chunk of COLO's delegates would have been *IF* we had a Primary System instead of the Caucus, and *IF* delegates were awarded proportionally to the state-wide percentage.
Congressional Distict Level
I didn't go, so can only report second-hand. I heard from multiple attendees of my CD#2 assembly that all 3 delegates were pledged to Ted Cruz, and only 1 or 2 of the Alternates were Unpledged, with zero Trump-pledges elected. The local newspapers & blogs also confirm that (the above Larimer County GOP link is wrong: the 2 Delegates they list as unpledged both openly ran on "Ted Cruz Slates"). I heard similar stories thirdhand of the other 6 Congressional Districts. So in the 7 days preceding the State Assembly, 21 out of Colorado's 37 delegates were chosen, with each CD electing 3.
Statewide Level
At the State Assembly, each of us got to vote for 26 out of 619 candidates, to choose 13 Delegates + 13 Alternates, with 3 unelected Delegates (State GOP Chair, National Committeewoman, Natl Committeeman) rounding out the total of 37 Delegates and 34 Alternates. This is where Cruz's people outperformed Trump's people by an order of magnitude.
The delegates running for these 13+13 spots broke down as follows:
Kasich supporters had no problem with candidate selection, since their people didn't put up even half the number of candidates needed to cover the 13 Delegates and 13 Alternates. But Cruz & Trump did have one huge problem - how do you direct your supporters to not dilute their votes among the dozens of Trump-pledged delegates or the hundreds of Cruz-pledged delegates?
Simple answer for Cruz: You look at the list of all known Cruz supporters, and choose from it a "slate" of 13 candidates who are among the likeliest to win anyway, just based on name recognition and prestige. This slate included:
Furthermore, while there were a tiny smattering of organized Trump supporters here & there, they were dwarfed by the number of Cruz supporters, who bothered to do the basic research needed to find out that the color orange, besides being eye-catching, is also the color of the local beloved World-Champ Denver Broncos. And so you saw their orange tshirts everywhere.
And get this, each T-shirt had printed on it their slate of 13 candidates. Imagine that. No such forethought from Team Trump.
And the Cruz slate was printed everywhere. At least 2 adverts containing the slate were bought in a free-distribution newspaper that was otherwise mostly ads for Senator-wannabe's plus a number of interesting stories. Zero ads were bought by the Trump campaign ... which makes me wonder if they ever did put together a slate before the very last minute?
And there were fliers all over with the Cruz slate. One came late in the week in my snail mail postbox; zero came from Trump. Three or four were handed to me by people standing outside the entrance; zero from Trump people (though I wasn't out front early on).
Furthermore, the pro-2nd Amend group were handing out fliers with their own slate, and it coincided with the pro-Cruz slate maybe 90%?
Same thing with the fliers for a "Faith & Freedom" slate plugged by a group who's hot button issues were de-fund Planned Parenthood, halt or slow the LGBT Juggernaut, and fight for religious freedom of speech.
Another crucial thing Cruz's organizers did was very apparent during the "15 seconds of fame" given to each of the 619 candidates: Again and again you heard delegates listed as Cruz supporters on the ballot say, "My name and ballot # are (_) and (_). Please don't vote for me! Vote for the Cruz slate!"
I don't remember a single Trump-pledged delegate saying anything similar (though I didn't hear every one of them since I was desperately trying to fill out my ballot before the deadline, having been the last in my County to receive one due to being part of the team passing them out).
OTOH, I'm sure if I'd approached any of the few Trump Team members identifiable by their stickers & shirts & labels, they would surely have had Trump slates to pass out to me. Perhaps they simply hadn't brought enough fliers to pass out en masse at the doors, and were hoarding them for distribution to Trump voters who sought them out? I don't know. I didn't enter the doors for the first time until 8:30am. But somehow there must have been a printed "Trump Slate Consolidation" flier somewhere, or else they'd have not won as many of the Alternate slots as they did.
DELEGATES ELECTED AT STATE:
The top 13 vote getters out of 619 candidates got the coveted Delegate slots, and the next 13 after them are Alternates. According to that same link I posted ---
These results were not surprising, given everything I'd seen from day 1 up until this past Saturday.
In short, the strong pro-Cruz and anti-Trump sentiment in Colorado at every level from the first-time Caucus attendees and the longtime grassroots activists on up to the highest levels of conservative GOP elected officials and major single-issue activist leaders, meant that Trump's team started off not just "fighting a headwind" in an "uphill battle," but more like climbing a cliff in a hurricane.
But even with their great disadvantage at the start of the race, I really believe they could have picked up at least one or two delegates if they'd done half the job they should have, of organizing just prior to and on the day of the State Convention.
What I saw of the Team Trump's performance at the State Convention, getting out-organized, outnumbered, out-worked, outrun, out-advertised, out-hustled, out-spent, outperformed, out-everythinged by Team Cruz, made it crystal clear to me how Cruz's sweep happened. So to stand there and look at all of that, and to conclude that, "CRUZ CHEATED!" is beneath contempt.
And one last comment on yet another aspect of this bogus "COLORADO REPUBLICANS ARE CHEATERS!!!" claim...
There's a set of videos gone viral showing this older man saying he was a "delegate to the State Convention" who was "removed and replaced" for the reason that "he was a Trump supporter". Not a single word of that is true.
Doesn't anyone use google any more to first verify whether some outrage that's alleged to have been committed by some group they detest, and that sounds "almost too good to be true" (in terms of giving us that exquisite empowering feeling of "A Towering Rage of Righteous Anger" that we all crave so much) might not actually be "TOO good to be true"?
It's really sad what happened to this elderly guy due to his not understanding his county's delegate selection process. But the true outrage is the incredible volume of the lying that's been going on about this incident. In a nutshell:
All I had to do to find out the above was to read the titles of the videos and watch enough to find out his name (Larry Lindsey) and his county (Douglas County), and google those 4 words together, to find a number of debunking links mixed in with much more numerous screams of righteous outrage against the Colorado GOP.
Here's a good one that clearly shows the very start of his problem, where he posts on FB the night of the caucus that he's been elected to "go to the State Caucus!" ---
Did Larry Lindsey not understand full caucus-assembly process?
I rest my case. DON'T DISS US COLORADO REPUBLICANS!!!