Re: Election 2016
Posted: Thu July 07, 2016 1:10 am
Anti-Trump Forces See Convention Coup as Within Reach
http://on.wsj.com/29PNpKh
By REID J. EPSTEIN
Updated July 6, 2016 7:38 p.m. ET
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Months after Donald Trump appeared to seal the Republican nomination for president, anti-Trump forces are making one last push to force a vote on the party’s convention floor that would throw open the GOP contest again.
It’s a long shot, but by some counts they are remarkably close to getting past the first hurdle next week in Cleveland.
Mr. Trump’s intraparty foes, led by a group of rogue delegates, are waging an intense behind-the-scenes effort to push the Republican National Convention’s Rules Committee for a vote on freeing delegates to back whomever they wish, rather than being bound to Mr. Trump.
The presumptive nominee’s team is fighting back just as vehemently, with an organized campaign of dozens of aides and volunteers. It’s a power struggle that has prompted threats of reprisals and left many Republicans anxious that it could hurt the party’s prospects in November.
The anti-Trump camp needs the backing of 28, or one-quarter, of 112 Convention Rules Committee members to place the issue before the full convention. A Wall Street Journal survey suggests it could be close.
Others counting votes have their own tallies. Internal surveys of the Rules Committee conducted by RNC member Randy Evans of Georgia, who is trying to help Mr. Trump fend off the insurrection, found at least 18 committee members open to voting to unbind. The Trump campaign’s count shows about 15 leaning toward unbinding, according to people familiar with the campaign.
Kendal Unruh, a Colorado teacher on the committee leading part of the anti-Trump movement, said she has private commitments from more than 30 committee members, but that many aren’t willing to admit so publicly.
All involved in counting votes say those numbers fluctuate day-to-day. If the provision gets the necessary committee votes when the panel meets beginning next Wednesday, it would place the issue before the convention, where it would need 1,237 votes—half the delegates—to pass.
Though a majority of the convention delegates are bound to support Mr. Trump, Mr. Evans’s count shows just about 890 delegates are personally loyal to the New Yorker. Another 680 oppose Mr. Trump. That leaves 900 delegates who are presumed to be “in play,” he said. The stop-Trump forces would have to take nearly two-thirds of them to block his nomination.
Pushing the measure to the floor would create chaos, with the party delegates fighting over a nomination long viewed as settled in full display of the international news media. With such enormous stakes, members of the committee, including Graham Hunt, an insurance salesman from Orting, Wash., are the focus of a heated behind-the-scenes lobbying effort from both camps.
“It’s intensifying,” Mr. Hunt said one recent day at 9:30 a.m. “I have 83 emails already today.” On average, he gets more than 200 emails a day from unbinding proponents along with several daily phone calls from Mr. Trump’s campaign staff.
Mr. Trump, who for nearly a year ignored the nuts and bolts of securing delegate slots, realized such a fight was brewing in March when The Wall Street Journal reported he garnered fewer delegates in Louisiana than primary rival Ted Cruz, even though Mr. Trump won more of the state’s votes. He hired longtime Republican operative Paul Manafort, who led President Gerald Ford’s whip operation in 1976.
Mr. Trump is confident he will prevail.
“It’s ridiculous. We won more votes than any other Republican, we won 38 states and now they want to try to” take it away, he said in an interview last week. “No one is even writing about it anymore.”
Yet every day last week, Mr. Hunt received a phone call, and on some days several, from a Trump campaign aide or surrogate seeking to win him over to their camp.
What would it take for the former state lawmaker to back the New York businessman, Mr. Trump’s allies ask, or at least to come out in opposition to the effort to unbind delegates?
“Verbatim, they said, ‘Let me ask you, what would make Donald Trump a better candidate in your opinion? We want to know because we’re going to send this up to the campaign,’ ” said Mr. Hunt, who led Mr. Cruz’s campaign in Washington state.
He remains offended at Mr. Trump’s July 2015 assertion that Sen. John McCain is “not a war hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War, Mr. Hunt tells them. He also offered suggestions about specific policy proposals to help war veterans. A Trump aide told Mr. Hunt they would seek to add his suggestions to the party’s official platform.
“Actions will be sufficient and we’re not there yet,” Mr. Hunt said.
Some delegates report receiving veiled threats. One said a Trump surrogate called to say she was being monitored closely, a message she viewed as an attempt at intimidation.
Mike Stuart, Mr. Trump’s state co-chairman from West Virginia who is a member of the Rules Committee, said he would ask the panel to issue a formal reprimand of anti-Trump Republicans such as Mrs. Unruh and Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee who has been a strident voice against Mr. Trump.
“I would support consideration of sanctions against established Republicans who work to undermine our nominee,” Mr. Stuart said.
An aide to the 2012 GOP nominee declined to comment for this article. He hasn’t said if he believes delegates should be unbound.
Mrs. Unruh and many of her allies see Mr. Trump as a historically bad nominee who would doom fellow Republians. In addition, they are arguing that Mr. Trump’s team shouldn’t fear one final test of his popularity from the party’s delegates.
“If we are a party of liberty, what are we afraid of?” wrote Gina Blanchard-Reed, of Washington state, in an email to her fellow Rules Committee members. “What are we unwilling to do? Does it mean that Donald Trump would be denied the nomination? Possibly. Possibly not. He would come out of the Convention stronger if he won the nomination as a result of a FREE WILL vote.”
The Trump campaign is preparing for some nightmare scenarios if the opposition gets close to the 28 votes it needs. One fear is that Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who has been critical of Mr. Trump and is the highest-profile Rules Committee member, urges votes in favor of unbinding delegates. Mr. Lee, whose wife is also on the committee, hasn’t revealed his opinion on the binding question to Mrs. Unruh, the Trump campaign or RNC members and declined to do so in an interview.
Some establishment Republicans are pushing against the unbind movement. Wisconsin’s Steve King and Mary Buestrin, both of the RNC and Rules Committee, wrote Friday to panel committee members that those behind the unbinding effort “are asking you to disenfranchise the votes of our family members, friends and neighbors.” Mr. King is the longtime chairman of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s campaigns.
Art Wittich, a Montana state legislator on the committee, is undecided on unbinding but is troubled that the effort hasn’t presented an alternative candidate who could plausibly be nominated from the convention floor, he said.
“My question is, if you get what you want, then what?” Mr. Wittich said. “Nobody can really answer that.”
—Beth Reinhard and Julian Routh contributed to this article.
Write to Reid J. Epstein at Reid.Epstein@wsj.com