Thread: Ted Cruz set to sweep Wyoming after Donald Trump cedes delegate fight

Ted Cruz set to sweep Wyoming after Donald Trump cedes delegate fight

• Senior Trump adviser says process is ‘favorable to party insider folks’
• Cruz tells convention ‘America is the Saudi Arabia of coal’
• Few and furious: could GOP delegates protest be taste of things to come?

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.

Few and furious: could a protest of GOP delegates be a taste of what's to come?

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

BREAKING NEWS

Sen. Ted Cruz gets all 14 delegates available at today's Wyoming Republican Convention.

Wyoming caucus

Last updated Mar 12, 2016 at 5:11 PM PT

REPUBLICAN
DEMOCRATIC

Mar 12
26 delegates

100% reporting	Delegates	Votes
Cruz	9	66.3% 644
Rubio	1	19.5% 189
Trump	1	7.2% 70
Kasich	0	0.0% 0

Dropped out: Carson, Paul

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Source: AP https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...short/m.0846v/ http://www.alipac.us/f9/wyoming-cauc...2016-a-330015/