The Independent View: Trump and Cruz Vie for Delegates at Virginia Convention

Battered by a string of recent losses, Cruz’s hope of becoming the Republican Pesidential nominee now rests with supporters traveling to a college campus in Virginia.

The Senator from Texas trails GOP front-runner Trump in the race for President, but Cruz’s campaign has excelled at the tricky process of getting supporters elected as delegates to attend the Republican National Convention this July in Cleveland.

Cruz backers easily collected delegate seats in states won by Trump, including Georgia and South Carolina. Cruz has scored delegates in Colorado and Wyoming, where Republicans hold conventions instead of Primaries to pick a candidate. And the Senator’s supporters won a majority of the seats last weekend in Maine after reneging on a compromise plan with Trump’s team.

This weekend in Virginia, Republicans say, Cruz has the edge among delegates because of his early and aggressive attention to the complex selection process.

But the jockeying for delegates could be meaningless if Trump, who now calls himself the presumptive nominee, accumulates 1,237 delegates before the National convention. Trump has won most of the states, and under current GOP rules, delegates’ votes must match Primary results on the first ballot.

Here, at James Madison University, about 6,000 Republicans are registered for the Convention, but far fewer are expected to make the trip.

Virginia Republicans will elect 13 of their delegates Saturday, with the rest chosen in smaller meetings held in Congressional Districts through May. Trump won the March 1 Presidential Primary, running ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who has since dropped out, and Cruz, who finished a distant third.

Virginia’s State Conventions are unpredictable affairs that can turn on a fiery speech.

The action started Friday afternoon with technical votes that could highlight divisions among conservatives who took over the intraparty Governing body in 2012 under the tutelage of then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, who at the time was preparing to run for Governor. Today, he is an active Cruz surrogate.

That group, which calls itself the Conservative Fellowship, had been united in its belief that a party-run Convention, not a State-sponsored Primary, is the best way to nominate candidates. But the Presidential race has scrambled previous alliances, with the most ardent activists split between Cruz and Trump.

Discord in the State Party has long reflected the split within the National GOP, and never more clearly than in 2014, when tea party-influenced voters helped upstart Dave Brat topple Eric Cantor, then the House Majority leader.

The multitiered process Republicans use to nominate candidates forces them to prove they can build support, both statewide and bit by bit at bingo halls and rubber-chicken dinners.

Party leaders will continue to try to mend the rift with hard-right conservatives and unify the party in a parade of speechmaking Saturday morning before voting begins that afternoon. “It doesn’t matter who the nominee is — we can’t win the White House without Virginia,” the State’s Party Chairman, John Whitbeck, said in an interview Thursday.

Virginia House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox (R-Colonial Heights) will critique Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s recent Executive order restoring the voting rights of 206,000 felons. Sen. Bryce E. Reeves (R-Spotsylvania), who is running for Lieutenant Governor, will talk about Federal overreach and a rare Legislative compromise on gun laws he helped broker.

Kenneth Reid, a former Loudoun County supervisor and delegate hopeful, backs Trump. “I hope they will give Trump his due, and Rubio and Kasich as well,” said Reid, who met Trump last year at the opening of the mogul’s tennis club in Sterling, Va.

Trump is poised to fare better in Arizona, where more than 740 people are running for 55 delegate seats in a State Trump won overwhelmingly. His slate of delegates is expected to include Jan Brewer, the former Republican Governor, and Joe Arpaio, the Republican Sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., known globally for his staunch anti-immigration stance.

“Most of our Trump slate are well known,” said Arizona State Treasurer Jeff DeWit, who is leading Trump’s campaign. “Everyone on our slate has done something to help the Trump campaign. We had a huge grass-roots effort.”

In Alaska, Republicans plan to pick their 28 delegates Saturday. And Cruz supporters are hoping to pick up a few seats in Missouri, where Republicans will meet in their Congressional Districts to pick some of the State’s 52 delegates.

Carl Bearden, a former State lawmaker leading Cruz’s Missouri campaign, said the senator’s supporters aren’t worried about Trump’s recent victories. “From our standpoint, nothing happened last Tuesday that’s expected to change what we believe happens,” he said, adding later that Trump “won’t capture it on the first round.”