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Trump’s delegate danger

Ben Carson is hitting the trail for Donald Trump this weekend, but don’t expect to see him at any rallies or town halls. In fact, don’t expect to see him at all — unless you’re a North Dakota Republican insider.

Carson is flying into Fargo to huddle with the state’s GOP activists, who are convening to elect 25 delegates to the Republican National Convention.

This week, I wrote about the loom­ing dis­aster that a Trump nom­in­a­tion would cre­ate for House and Sen­ate Re­pub­lic­ans, but I didn’t ad­dress the oth­er ele­phant in the room: Ted Cruz. The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom sug­gests that Cruz is only slightly more elect­able than Trump—with some party lead­ers view­ing him as even more tox­ic than the front-run­ner.

As the possibility of a contested GOP convention becomes more likely, the three remaining Republican candidates are planning how to eke out a win on the first or any other ballot to be held. National Journal has an interesting look at the pursuit of so-called “unbound delegates,” those who arrive at the convention without any binding pledge to support a specific candidate:

The Race Is on for Unbound Delegates

On March 12, Rich Counts won a tick­et to the Re­pub­lic­an Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion ... Read More >>

Wisconsin is the next major battleground in the Republican presidential contest, and two of the campaigns — Senator Ted Cruz’s and Gov. John Kasich’s — are already buying television airtime.

The third candidate in the primary and the front-runner for the nomination, Donald J. Trump, has yet to invest in television time there, according to records compiled by two people tracking the media spending in the campaign.

On March 12, Rich Counts won a tick­et to the Re­pub­lic­an Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion in Clev­e­land as a D.C. del­eg­ate for Marco Ru­bio. Three days later, the sen­at­or dropped his pres­id­en­tial bid, and Counts be­came a wanted man.

“I didn’t even see the [con­ces­sion] speech for Ru­bio be­cause I was at an­oth­er event, but I was already get­ting emails from oth­er cam­paigns,” he said.

California poll: Trump leads GOP; Clinton, Sanders close

Donald Trump leads among likely California Republican primary voters months ahead of the state’s June 7 contest, while Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are within single digits, according to the results of a survey from the Public Policy Institute of California released Wednesday evening.

Shadow campaign to deny Trump his delegates begins

When South Dakota’s Republican activists convened in Pierre to pick their delegates to the Republican national convention, they got an unexpected visitor.

Merle Madrid, senior aide to Ohio Gov. John Kasich, had flown in from Columbus to make an appeal: If the convention fails to elect front-runner Donald Trump on the first ballot, consider Kasich on the second — even if the state’s Republican voters sent them there to back Trump or Ted Cruz.