Jim Gilmore just can’t catch a break this election season.
After his longshot presidential campaign for the Republican nomination never took off, the former governor of Virginia and former chairman of the Republican National Committee failed to earn a spot as a delegate in his home state this weekend.
Gilmore had not pledged his support for any of the candidates, which left him by the wayside as Ted Cruz’s strong ground game in the state earned the Texas senator a near sweep of the delegate slate. By weekend’s end, Cruz walked away with 10 delegate supporters, while front-runner Donald Trump took three.
Gilmore blamed the “strongarm tactics at the convention” that left him out of the delegation. According to a Washington Post report, Gilmore seemed to echo Trump’s frustration with the GOP nomination process, in which states where he won the vote, Cruz walks away with most or all of the delegates.
Cruz “is trying to take a state where the people went and voted in an open primary for Donald Trump and convert that into a Ted Cruz state,” Gilmore said, calling the whole process a “very ruthless display.”
Gilmore ended his presidential run in February after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, in which he failed to gain any traction in a field originally comprised of 17 candidates. He had only received 145 votes combined in both states.
Gilmore had briefly run an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2007, and lost a bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2008 to former Democratic Gov. Mark Warner.
