CLEVELAND – Stroll on the floor of the Republican National Convention and it isn’t hard to detect a pattern.
The rows of seats ringing around the front of the stage where Donald Trump is expected to accept the GOP nomination will be seating delegations of states that helped Trump rack up his delegate margins: Alabama, Connecticut, California, Pennsylvania and his home state of New York.
But way in the back of the convention floor, which my colleague Michael Barone dubbed “Siberia,” you start to see states that were won by Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz: Wyoming, Maine, Kansas, Texas, D.C., Idaho, Montana, Utah, Minnesota and Colorado.
To Kendal Unruh, the Colorado delegate who has been leading an anti-Trump rebellion, this is no coincidence.
“We expected to be back by the bathrooms, it’s no surprise to us,” Unruh told the Washington Examiner. “We’re being punished because this is what the party does. Is that they whip people into line and keep them obedient. Just like a child, they deprive them of their cookies.”
Unruh has vowed continued resistance to the Trump nomination when the convention convenes Monday afternoon.
Cruz swept all 34 delegates in Colorado’s hybrid caucus and convention system, which prompted Trump to attack the state party for running a “rigged” and “crooked” system that denied people the ability to vote for president.
Below is a photo of the view from the stage from where the Colorado delegation is sitting.
