Trump: I was cheated in Colorado by failing to follow rules that were clear to everyone months ago

The funniest part of this is when he says the rules in Colorado were changed to help “a guy like Cruz.” In reality the rules were changed to block guys like Cruz. Colorado used to award its delegates via a caucus, but that backfired in 2012 when Rick Santorum upset Mitt Romney there. That’s how it tends to go with caucuses — unlike a statewide primary, they benefit well-organized candidates with a passionate grassroots following, both of which are hallmarks of Cruz’s campaign. When the rules were altered last August, decoupling the caucus from the process of awarding delegates, it was done with the intent of preventing another victory by an outsider — not just Trump but Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, and so on. The hope, I’m sure, was that an establishment champion would emerge this year and would, by dint of his greater campaign resources and “insider” support,” be able to out-organize all of the insurgent candidates in electing delegates directly. Trump’s not wrong, in other words, to believe that the system was “rigged,” but it was rigged to try to hurt Cruz as much as to hurt him. So what happened? Cruz adapted and Trump didn’t. As the establishment candidates crumbled, Cruz got organized to target delegates at the state and district level while Trump glided on with his media-saturation campaign strategy. If Trump had been paying attention, he’d have brought Paul Manafort into the campaign the day after Colorado changed its rules, knowing that delegate-wrangling could end up playing a key role in claiming the nomination. He didn’t.

Which, says Ben Domenech, raises the question: If Trump can’t anticipate his opponents’ moves in a straightforward game like this, where the rules are written down and publicly available, how’s he going to do with foreign policy?

There have been plenty of examples of Ted Cruz being a savvy tactician during the 2016 cycle, but this Colorado disaster for Trump was not one of them, any more than Trump irritating everyone on the abortion issue was Cruz’s fault, or Trump driving up his negatives with women to “you will never get this rose” territory was Cruz’s fault. This is another own-goal where America’s king of the deal seems uninterested in doing the actual work to make the deal happen. Even a modicum of preparation could’ve landed Trump several delegates from Colorado – instead, he and his team appear uninterested in doing the work everyone has been reporting for weeks that they need to do in order to win.

For their part, the Trump team is vowing to win a delegate majority before the convention. But they have now experienced serious setbacks in South Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Georgia. In each of these cases, Trump’s setbacks would not have been as significant if he had simply paid attention to how the delegate process works.

“[T]wo key Trump claims have fallen apart thanks to his inability to fight for delegates properly, writes Ben Shapiro: “[H]e’s not a great dealmaker, and he doesn’t hire all the very best people.” Pay attention to the clip below, in fact, and you’ll find Trump complaining at one point about the process of wooing delegates, “They offer him trips, they offer him all sorts of things, and you’re allowed to do that.” That’s the second-funniest moment here. The billionaire who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” who’s bragged for months about how shrewd he was in buying influence with pols like Hillary Clinton by cutting them big checks for donations, is now whining that it’s unfair to dangle goodies in front of political actors to get them to do your bidding.

If anything, in fact, the delegate-wrangling process should be a godsend for Trump. It moves the race out of the ballot box, where he’s vulnerable to a surge of #NeverTrump votes as the primaries near their conclusion, to the backroom, where he can work his fatcat dealmaking magic. In practice, Cruz is beating the pants off of him, something that should never happen per the mystique that surrounds Trump of being a master negotiator. Noah Rothman claimed this morning that the fact that two of Trump’s kids failed to register in New York as Republicans in time to vote in this year’s primary is a microcosm of Trump’s disorganization generally, which is fair enough. But I’d add to that that him getting consistently beaten by Cruz at the delegate level is a microcosm of how Trump’s image as wheeler-dealer extraordinaire is oversold. An ingenious salesman should not be at this sort of chronic disadvantage against a guy who’s not very personally likable, whose methods are loathed by the establishmentarians who “rigged” the system, and who’s operating at a financial handicap compared to Trump. But he is. How come?

And one more thing. Why doesn’t Trump ever talk about the ways in which the system has been “rigged” to benefit him?

Trump now leads the Republican field with 756 delegates — or 45 percent of all delegates awarded to date. Yet he has won about 37 percent of all votes in the primaries, according to the NBC analysis, meaning Trump’s delegate support is greater than his actual support from voters.

For each percentage point of total primary votes that Trump has won, he has been awarded 1.22 percent of the total delegates…

By contrast, Cruz has been awarded about 1.14 percent of the delegates for each percentage point of votes he has won — a delegate bonus of 14 percent above his raw support…

Taken together, the data show Trump has been awarded 8 percent more delegates than Cruz for the same rate of voter support.

Trump’s delegate lead over Cruz, in other words, is bigger proportionally than his actual vote lead over Cruz thanks to the “bonus” delegates he’s won by winning more states than Cruz has. If you’re an advocate of strict, straightforward democracy, where every vote counts the same, then Trump’s lead is bigger than it “should be” and the size of his delegate lead is “unfair” to Cruz. But it’s ridiculous to object to that, of course, for the simple reason that those rules were clear from the beginning. Delegate bonuses for statewide winners were always part of the process. If Cruz has failed to claim them, well, that’s his problem for failing to execute. Same goes for Trump at the delegate level. He could have built the best, biggest, classiest delegate-wrangling outfit in the field but he neglected to do so, thinking that he’d stomp Cruz at the ballot box and render all of that irrelevant. He failed to execute, most notably in Wisconsin. That, I think, is the ultimate objection to Trump on democratic grounds: Why are we even talking about delegates now? Why, if he has this unstoppable movement, is he still struggling to break 40 percent in many states when the only alternatives are unlikable Ted Cruz and, um, John Kasich? A brokered convention can’t happen unless every candidate — every candidate — fails to notch a critical level of support. Trump hasn’t failed yet. But he probably will.

Hey does anyone know the number of votes Cruz, Kasich and Trump each got in Colorado??

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:

15 Cruz
11 Rubio
6 Trump
1 Carson
1 Kasich

When it came to electing delegates from our own caucus to the County, State and CD (Congr. Distr) Assemblies, those supporting Cruz always filled the top slots, with unpledged members coming next, and the sole Trump supporter who ran for delegate slots was dead last. This was in spite of the fact that he is obviously a genuinely nice guy, and a friend of mine, and was the guy who ran the entire meeting - which virtually ALWAYS gives you a big boost if you choose to run for the various Delegate & Alternate positions.

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:

1583 Cruz (46%)
780 Rubio (23%)
495 Trump (14%)
358 Carson (10%)
199 Kasich (6%)
? Others

Got the above from Larimer County GOP main page

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:

40% Cruz
25% Rubio
18% Trump
6% Kasich

The figures are so heavily in favor of Cruz among grass-roots caucus-goers, that even if we did have a Primary system and it was the winner-takes-all type, Trump would still have been shut out. There's no way that expanding the voter base from "Those who attend on Caucus Night" of the Caucus System into "Registered GOP voters who return their mail-in ballots" of the Primary System, would have turned his 40%-25% loss into a win.

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:

364 Unpledged
188 Cruz
48 Trump
12 Kasich
6 Rubio
1 Carson

Each was given 15 seconds of Fame & Glory overshadowed by the Evil Soundboard Man who mercilessly cut off their mikes at exactly 15 seconds ... or maybe I should say, mercilessly for them but mercifully for us. Some were so disorganized they failed to state their name and ballot # before the mike went dead. Ningwats! Hey, important advice to you stepping over that magic threshold into your big Fifteen Seconds of Glory in front of an audience of 8000: Don't allocate your first 14 seconds to controlling your stage fright, taking deep breaths, and composing yourself to say the all-important thing you came to say!

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:

A sitting Congressman who's proud that various liberal "watchdog" groups label him the most conservative Congressman in the US,
The head of the major regional gun owners group, who was instrumental in spearheading a recall effort that flipped the Colorado Senate from blue to red after an all-Democrat State Govt (both houses + Governor) flexed their muscle by passing extremely unpopular anti-gun laws,
A number of state-wide elected officials, incl the Colo State Treasurer and I believe 2 members of the CU Board of Regents, who of course are still taking victory laps for forcing the notorious fraud Ward Churchill out of CU,
A number of other sitting and former elected officials, including a popular state Senator who was also running for the nomination for US Senator,
And just in general the best-known, most conservative, most pro-2nd Amendment, pro-Traditional Marriage, anti-Abortion politicians in the state.

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 ---

Slots 1-17 (incl all 13 Delegates and Alternates #1-4): Cruz-pledged.
Slots 18-21 (ie Alternates #5-8): Trump-pledged.
Slots 22-26 (Alternates #9-13): Mix of 3 Cruz, 2 Trump.

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.

PART II

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:

Douglas County's method of selecting Delegates to State is different than Larimer County, in that instead of being directly selected on Caucus night, they are indirectly selected by first being elected to the County Assembly, and then they have to compete at that later date with other County Delegates and garner enough votes there in order to win a slot as Delegate to State.
Larry Lindsey and his wife went to their Precinct Caucus in Parker (Douglas County), close to Denver in the direction of Colorado Springs. And he was elected to go to the County Assembly.
His next step should have been to go to County and run for State, but his facebook posting that same night demonstrates that he was confused and thought he had been directly elected to be a Delegate to State
He totally blew off going to County. Not only did the County Assy registration log show him as not logging in, but he also received *0* votes for Delegate to State, which is a pretty big hint that he wasn't there to vote for himself.
So several weeks after his County's Assembly, he drove to the State Convention and apparently waited in the Douglas County line for 45 minutes (in another video he says an hour), only to be informed he wasn't a Delegate. (BTW, this State Convention set records for attendance, so long lines everywhere were the rule of the day).
Whether he really only discovered his mistake that day after driving 60 mi from Parker to the World Arena is questionable, given his references to a conversation he had with his Precinct Committee Person where he claims she told him she would remove him from the list of State delegates. TRUTH METER ALERT --- she couldn't have removed him from a list he was never on because he never showed up to run for the spot!
Whoever edited his video, whether him or someone else, is disingenuous in how they cut the part short where the lady typing his name into her cell phone says, "I don't show you on the list of Republicans in Douglas County" followed by him telling her how many years he's been a GOP voter in Douglas. The video is immediately cut there, and one very important thing you don't see is that the woman retries and *does* find him. Did she misspell Lindsey as the more common Lindsay? Or if his legal first name on his driver's license or passport was Lawrence or Laurence, not Larry, then that's how it would show up in the voter db too. But that's all moot, because she found it right after the first failed attempt, yet the editor chose to end the video there! Interesting that it's also the shortest of the 4 videos. The outrage at this Machiavellianly-edited video is misdirected: Instead of being against the woman with the cell phone, it should be against the two-faced editor of the video! Because if they didn't cut it there but instead let it roll a few more seconds, there would be absolutely no point in posting the video at all. There's nothing else of note in it.

Conclusion on these viral videos: A setup. A fraud. All smoke and no fire. Democrat Morals & Tactics being adopted by Republicans. For shame.

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!!!

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