How Trump is gaining an advantage in the battle for delegates

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NEW YORK (AP) Put aside the polls, fundraising numbers or Donald Trump’s name recognition as measures of his early dominance in the Republican presidential contest. He has what may prove to be the most important advantage in the race: a leg up on the delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination.

While the delegate count won’t begin to take shape until voting begins next January, the Trump frontrunners in the race to win their votes have been years in the making. Many state Republican parties have made changes to their rules ahead of the 2020 election by adding more winner-take-all contests and requiring candidates to get a higher percentage of the vote to claim any delegates. Those changes all benefit a front-runner, a position Trump holds despite his mounting legal risk, blame for his parties lackluster performance in the 2022 election and the turbulent years of his presidency.

As Trump runs again for the White House, he is focused on the looming battle for delegates, according to people with knowledge of his effort who requested anonymity to discuss strategy. He has regular discussions with state party chairs, many of the leadership races he has been involved in, and has hosted delegations from the Republican parties in Nevada, Louisiana and Pennsylvania at his homes in Florida and New Jersey.

The moves are a sign of how Trumps team is focusing on important, if less glamorous, aspects of winning the GOP nomination. That’s a marked change from his first bid for the White House in 2016, when his team of rookie operatives were unfamiliar with the minutia of the delegate contest and sometimes found themselves outmaneuvered by better-prepared rivals, particularly Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

That doesn’t seem to be the case this time as election experts say few other campaigns seem to match Trump’s years of work.

They were asleep at the switch, election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg said.

More than 2,000 party activists, insiders and elected officials make up the pool of delegates who will vote at next summer’s Republican National Convention to formally select a nominee. The rules governing how delegates are chosen are determined by state parties, which have until October to submit their plans for next year’s elections.

Many of the proposed changes that are beginning to emerge in state parties appear to benefit the former president.

In Michigan, where the state’s GOP has become increasingly loyal to Trump, party leadership this year voted to change the state’s long-standing process of allocating all its presidential delegates based on an open primary election. Under the new plan that is widely expected to benefit Trump, 16 of the states will be awarded 55 delegates based on the results of a primary on February 27. The other 39 will be distributed four days later in closed-door caucus meetings of party activists.

Other Republican parties are looking to shift from primary elections to party-run caucuses, where Trump’s support among the parties’ grassroots activists could put his rivals at a disadvantage.

In Idaho, one of the most Republican states in the country, a new law passed by the state legislature earlier this year eliminated the presidential primary process by moving state elections to May as lawmakers tried to unify the voting calendar. The parties’ state central committee decided last month to hold caucuses on March 2 instead.

In Nevada, the state Republican Party is waging a legal battle to try to hold a party-run caucus instead of a state-run primary election. The party’s chairman, Michael McDonald, said he had spoken with Trumps team about the process and the ongoing lawsuit but had not heard from the campaign of his strongest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Other changes in the works will reduce the potential for any last-minute maneuvering at the convention.

At least two states, Louisiana and Colorado, are proposing changes this year that would bind delegates to vote for their designated candidate during the second round of voting at the national convention in the unlikely event that no candidate has a majority on the first ballot.

Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita said the campaign has spoken with state parties around the country about their delegate selection plans and continues to monitor what its opponents are doing or not doing.

As an example of the effort, LaCivita cited a single-day trip he made to Las Vegas in May to address a gathering of hundreds of Nevada Republicans.

We are aggressive at every level and on every front, he said. We don’t leave anything to chance.

In 2016, Trump forced his way to the GOP nomination despite his campaign being out-organized by Cruzs team. When Cruz swept all of Colorados 34 delegates after a process in which party insiders voted in a series of caucus meetings, Trump wrote an op-ed complaining about a rigged system. He threatened to sue after the Louisiana primary, where he won a larger percentage of the vote but Cruz was poised to take more delegates.

This time, Trump is taking steps to cultivate ties with party insiders who could serve as delegates in 2024, making phone calls or in some cases schmoozing at large private dinners, such as one he hosted in Iowa in May attended by state attorneys general, local lawmakers and precinct organizers. A similar Trump reception in South Carolina saw 75 people, including Gov. Henry McMaster of the state, state legislators and party activists packed into a warm tent.

From a tactical perspective, LaCivita said, Where we are now is very fast from where the campaign, a similar campaign, was in 2016.

DeSantis has veterans from Cruzs 2016 campaign working on his behalf.

Jeff Roe, who served as campaign manager on Cruzs campaign, is advising Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting the DeSantis campaign, but the organization is not involved in the delegate strategy and does not currently plan to be, according to a person familiar with the effort who was not authorized to disclose internal strategy.

Sam Cooper, the political director of the DeSantis campaign and another veteran of Cruzs 2016 bid, said the Florida governors team is closely monitoring developments in the states around delegate selection plans.

The DeSantis campaign is trying to identify local party activists who can serve as delegates but is also specifically courting state lawmakers, who are typically active in their local GOP groups.

They are surrogates for us on earth, says Cooper. But they are also close to the process.

The campaign boasts that more than 250 state legislators have endorsed DeSantis. The governor himself is very involved, Cooper said, and speaks directly to lawmakers either in one-on-one calls or, as he did in June, in a Zoom call with more than 100 lawmakers across the country.

Cooper noted that DeSantis has made his own trips to speak before state and local GOP officials, appearing at 10 events in eight states since March and leading fundraisers for Republican groups.

The DeSantis campaign declined to identify any states where the campaign has provided feedback on a delegate selection plan, but Cooper said the campaign feels very good about the map.

We have not seen a state party or a state take a step away from the wall that can only support one candidate or the other, he said.

A potential opening for a challenger like DeSantis could be California, which has 169 delegates to give, more than any other state.

Thanks to changes passed by Democrats in the state Capitol, California’s primary contest will be March 5, requiring the state GOP to change its delegate plan to comply with national GOP rules for early contests.

The changes, which are set to be considered and approved by the Republican Party later this month, are set to award delegates proportionally to the candidates’ share of the vote, rather than awarding all delegates to the winner.

That could give a second-place candidate a chance to build on someone like DeSantis, who has made a point of campaigning in the state.

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Bryan Watkins, the chief operating officer and executive director of the California GOP, said the organization has been in contact with Republican campaigns about the proposed change.

As the state with the most delegates in the country, CAGOP wants California to be a place where Republican presidential candidates spend their time talking to our voters and winning their support, he said in a statement. So we appreciate the campaigns’ feedback and insight on how best to accomplish that goal.

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Steve Peoples in New York, Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, Gabe Stern in Carson City, Nevada and Adriana Gmez Licn in Miami contributed to this report.

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