After taking it on the chin from Sen. Ted Cruz in battles for delegates over the past month, Donald Trump was the big winner in the hunt for unbound delegates in Pennsylvania Tuesday night, which could prove crucial for him to reach the 1,237 delegate mark.
On top of automatically taking home 17 delegates with his landslide win in Pennsylvania, Trump’s delegate slate performed well at the ballot box.
Of the 41 names on the slate, 31 won. With at least eight others winning who have said they will support the winner of the congressional district, that brings his total to 39 unbound delegates who will likely support him at least on the first ballot. The real estate mogul also won every one Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
Meanwhile, only three of those on Cruz’s slate ended up winning, a sharp decline after posting big delegate wins in Colorado, North Dakota and Wyoming in the past month. Of the 54 going to the convention, 10 will go being uncommitted or undecided, with two others’ intentions unknown at this time.
Additionally, the #NeverTrump movement was hit hard. Only six candidates on the group’s slate won a delegate slot. Three are Cruz supporters, with the other three coming out as uncommitted prior to Tuesday.
“At the end of the day … clearly there was organization on the ground,” said Jeff Lord, a CNN analyst and Trump supporter who resides in the state’s 4th District, where the Trump-backed delegates swept all three slots. “They had their act together, totally.”
Lord, who served in the Reagan administration, pointed to the voters actually being able to vote directly for the delegates, unlike in Colorado and other states, where the voting base was more controlled. Without any indication on the ballot of which candidate a prospective delegate supports, it is on the campaigns to make sure their voters know.
“If you make an effort, as the Trump people clearly did … then yeah, I do think that that’s different than getting into these convoluted structures where the public is in essence cut out of the picture,” Lord said. “They elect somebody who elects somebody who elects somebody or however they do it — I do think that makes a difference.”
“People knew with certainty that if they voted for, say, Mark Scaringi in the 4th District, that he was going to vote for Trump [on the] first, second, third, fifth to the 103rd ballot, and that they could directly do that,” Lord added.
For the past few weeks, especially in the aftermath of Cruz sweeping all 34 of Colorado’s delegates, Trump railed constantly about the system being “rigged” against him, even going after the Republican National Committee for their primary contest rules, which were put into place long before Trump got into the race.
Pennsylvania holds the largest amount of the 136 overall unbound delegates heading into the July convention, giving the bloc an outsized role as delegate battles heat up.
