“Yes, a straw poll at the caucuses.”
The national party said that the Colorado party could not conduct a straws poll and then ignore the results when assigning delegates.
That was the issue. Rather than take the straw poll or have an actual primary the Cruz supporters simply rigged the caucus and cancelled the poll. There was more support for Trump in the building than the results showed.
It may not have been an underhanded, dirty, sleazy or cheap trick but it certainly LOOKED like it was especially when a Cruz zombie in the state party tweeted “We did it!” shortly after the caucus had ended. This was where the “Trump’s too stupid to follow the rules” meme started and many Republicans that had previously had Ted Cruz as their second choice abandoned him completely.
Colorado was, paradoxically a last gasp for Ted Cruz because even though he “won” he came out looking like a slime-ball whether he was or not. The whole caucus in Colorado just reeked of dirty politics.
By using the word “caucus,” some Cruzers would like for people to think of real presidential caucuses like the ones in IA or NV, where people actually got to vote for their choice for the nominee of the party. That was not the case with CO, where the people only had a binding vote in caucuses for delegates to their local county convention. Then the delegates at that county convention, separate from regular voters, chose delegates to the state convention. Then those delegates independently chose whichever delegates to the national convention they personally preferred. Regular voters were a few steps removed from the vote that actually mattered.
The whole point of the convoluted way it was set up was to make it challenging for anyone who was not already involved in local party politics to participate in any meaningful way. Regular voters were definitely not the target audience for all these multiple stages of delegate selection of local Republican figures. They used to at least have a presidential straw poll too, as you mentioned, so the populace’s preferences for presidential nominee could be noted, but they cancelled that this time after Trump’s rise, because it might be too obvious how much the state convention was going against the wishes of the people.
Because people only got a chance to vote for very low-level local delegates instead of the presidential candidates, there is naturally no vote tally by candidate for the so-called Colorado caucuses. Every other state (except for ND, which likewise passed on a vote among the populace for the nominee) has vote totals from their caucus or primary. If CO had a real vote, then there would be a vote tally by presidential candidate for that state. CO does not and cannot have one, since they never had a vote. That’s also why the CO “caucuses” got next to no national coverage on Super Tuesday. Why would the press cover a bunch of little local elections at the CO “caucuses” when they had real elections for the presidential nominee to cover in many other states?
