Ted Cruz set to sweep Wyoming after Donald Trump cedes delegate fight
Ted Cruz set to sweep Wyoming after Donald Trump cedes delegate fight
Saturday 16 April 2016 15.03 EDT
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign all but threw in the towel in Wyoming, ahead of Saturday’s Republican convention.
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Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s closest challenger for the presidential nomination, was expected to sweep the delegates on offer.
Trump’s campaign made a conscious decision not to commit resources to the state, according to Alan Cobb, a senior Trump adviser. Trump picked only one delegate in last month’s Wyoming county conventions while Cruz scored nine. There are 14 more delegates at stake this weekend, as 475 party activists gather.
Cruz spoke at the convention on Saturday, capping a months-long effort to organize support in the state.
Trump had planned to send former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who remains popular among conservatives, as a surrogate, but she canceled at the last minute.
Cruz spoke about local issues in Wyoming, the largest coal-producing state. He discussed the Democratic “attack” on fossil fuels, saying President Obama had tried to put the coal industry out of business through government regulations targeting air pollution.
“America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and we are going to develop our industry,” Cruz said.
At the same time, Trump was speaking at a rally in Syracuse, New York, ahead of the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday.
Trump criticized the delegate-apportioning process, referring to Wyoming and to Colorado, which awarded all 34 of its delegates to Cruz despite not holding a popular vote.
“They’re going nuts out there; they’re angry,” Trump said. “The bosses took away their vote, and I wasn’t going to send big teams of people three, four months ago, have them out there.”
Cobb said: “This process is favorable toward party insider folks. When you don’t have a vote of the people, it just favors [Cruz]. The very insider, narrow pathways like Wyoming, they just don’t work very well for us.
“Campaigns make strategic choices on where to go and where to invest, and just given your process here, it just doesn’t lend itself to our kind of campaign and candidate.”
Even so, Cobb said he still saw Trump on track to win the 1,237 delegates required to secure the Republican nomination on the first ballot at the national convention this summer.
“We’ve got the north-east states,” he said. “I think we’ll do well in California, Oregon, Washington.”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...ming-delegates