Donald Trump’s campaign was affected after the results of Colorado’s GOP delegate’s election last Sunday, April 10, 2016. Trump lost against Ted Cruz, calling it a “voterless victory” because the Colorado’s process of electing GOP delegates happens at a state convention, and the selection process is in the hands of party insiders and activists. The Texas Senator’s campaign secured 17 delegates ahead of time and getting the remaining 17 at the state convention, which means he received all the state delegates without a popular vote.
Trump, angry, said that he considered the process as very unfair, and said that the politicians were stealing the votes from the people of Colorado, calling the “phony politicians”. Trump said that he is now an outsider, who came into the system and was winning by millions of votes, according to what he said to Fox News on Monday, April 11, 2016. He added that the system was rigged and crooked.
I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign. Bad system!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2016
Alice Stewart, one of Cruz spokeswoman, said that she was not surprised that Trump’s team would verbally attack Cruz’s team with lies because it is a way for him to distract himself from failure. The spokeswoman added Cruz’s team has been working hard and, therefore, it has earned success and built a superior organization, and that the team is following the rules that had been established.
Another of Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said, on retweeted, that the rules were “publicly available for months to people who know how to read and understand words”.
Trump is not the only one affected by the results in Colorado. A man named Larry Lindsey, one Trump supporter, posted a video on YouTube in which he set his Republican registration on fire.
“You’ve had it. You’re done. You’re toast. Because I quit the party. I’m voting for Trump, and to hell with the Republican Party,” he added.
How does the process work?
The way the primary process works is that, first, voters elect delegates who go to the Republican National Convention and, depending on state rules, those delegates need to vote for the candidate who won the state (or a specific district) on the ballots. But if no candidate wins the requisite 1,237 delegates through those ballots, delegates are often freed up to support whomever they want on later ballots.
There was a change adopted in Colorado last August (2015), by the state’s party leadership. The new rules say that the delegates have to be selected by “party insiders and activists”, not allowing republican’s supporters to vote.
According to the Associated Press, as of Sunday, Trump has 743 delegates to Cruz’s 545. Nonetheless, Trump has more than 100 delegates less than the combined totals of Cruz, Kasich (143) and ex-candidate Marco Rubio (171).
The Colorado GOP twitter account, seconds after Cruz was announced the convention winner, tweeted: “We did it. #NeverTrump”. Colorado GOP chairman, Steve House, reported a minute later that their Twitter account had been hacked, and the tweet was immediately deleted.
Source: The Washington Post