How Trump, RNC stopped a delegate revolt Tal Kopan CNN
In the end, Never Trump never stood a chance.
Despite plenty of positive media coverage and an active social media and email campaign, the effort to wrest the nomination from presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump in the 11th hour fizzled in a Cleveland conference room thanks to an alliance between the ultimate outsider candidate and insider party operatives.
The Trump campaign -- worried about efforts to unbind delegates -- tied itself to the Republican National Committee and their operations prepared to work together, sources involved told CNN.
Wednesday night, on the eve of the crucial Rules Committee meeting, Trump and RNC staff gathered friendly delegates on the sixth floor of the downtown Westin, the Trump campaign's home base here. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus personally addressed the room, and delegates were introduced to staff whips for each side and to delegates that would be offering guidance on the whole range of issues before the committee.
Trump's campaign created a texting system so that Rules Committee delegates could be alerted in real time to preferred positions on various amendments.
Running things for Trump was Bill McGinley, a veteran political attorney from Jones Day. On the RNC side, it was chief of staff Katie Walsh and chief operating officer Sean Cairncross.
Delegates were told to look for Maine's Alex Willette, Massachusetts's Vincent DeVito and California's Harmeet Dhillon on the Trump side of things and Georgia's Randy Evans, New Hampshire's Steve Duprey, Tennessee's John Ryder, also the general counsel for the RNC, and Texas' Steve Munisteri for the RNC perspective.
The preparation paid off. On vote after vote in the 112-member meeting Thursday, RNC and Trump supporters were largely in lockstep.
n addition to quelling efforts to unbind delegates from voting for the presumptive nominee, Trump's supporters helped the RNC to fight back a series of efforts by former Ted Cruz delegate guru Ken Cuccinelli and his supporters to reshape the primary map in 2020. One of the proposals, meant to close primaries and caucuses from non-Republicans, would have offered huge delegate bonuses to states that close theirs and making it so early state South Carolina couldn't be winner-take-all.
Trump and the RNC's strategy even extended to keeping Thursday's session going well into the night rather than recessing for the day and coming back Friday. That would have given Trump opponents time to regroup.
"When you're winning on the issues, you want to keep going," Duprey said. "And we were winning on every vote. When you're winning -- don't stop."
Nevada GOP whip and delegate Jordan Ross said the whole idea that the RNC and Trump delegates were out of step with the grassroots was a misnomer.
"The supposed grassroots movement was neither grassroots, nor was it a movement. It was AstroTurf," Ross said. "(Unbinding is) all as fake as somebody peddling aluminum siding on the Internet. It was not real, it was not a real movement. Fourteen million people supporting Donald Trump -- that's a movement."One of the intellectual fathers of the movement to unbind delegates, North Dakota RNC Committeeman Curly Haugland, said that the fight was over for 2016.
But, he added: "I've never seen anybody work so hard to win a one-horse race."
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