On April 30, Republicans across Massachusetts will head to nine different spots to pick 27 of the 42 delegates they’ll send to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this July. (Twelve more will be picked at an upcoming meeting of the Mass. GOP’s State Committee, with the final three slots going to three top party officials.) When the nominating process actually begins in Cleveland, we know exactly what the Massachusetts delegates will do in the first round of voting: 22 will vote for Donald Trump, 8 for John Kasich, 8 for Marco Rubio, and 4 for Ted Cruz.
That’s where things gets interesting. If Trump gets the 1237 votes required to become the nominee, we’re done. But if he doesn’t—a scenario that’s still plausible, though less so than it was a few days ago—those same Massachusetts delegates will be free to back whomever they want as the voting proceeds. And in a so-called contested convention, every single free-range delegate could be pivotal.
Which makes Saturday’s caucuses a fascinating exercise in political gamesmanship. The Trump campaign would love every delegate chosen on Saturday to be a die-hard Trump fan, even if they’re obligated to back someone else in the first round of voting. Ted Cruz and John Kasich, meanwhile, would be thrilled if everyone who has to back Trump in round one deserts him at the earliest opportunity—and if a few of the delegates bound to Rubio join their ranks down the road. So the various campaigns are working to make sure that the caucus-goers they hope will turn out actually do (see, for example, this pro-Trump call to arms from state Rep. Geoff Diehl, the co-chair of Trump’s Massachusetts campaign).
It’s an esoteric, confusing process—but in this particular election cycle, it’s also important to understand. Hence, this brief overview of some lingering questions heading into the proceedings:
1. Will Mitt Romney’s anti-Trump activism matter? Former Massachusetts governor and GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s denunciation of Trump was a remarkable political moment—the first time in recent memory (and maybe ever) that a party’s previous nominee called its current front-runner unfit to hold office. Dramatic as it was, though, Romney’s speech didn’t halt Trump’s rise. And there’s zero sign it’s going to help the other candidates in Massachusetts on Saturday.
When I asked state Rep. Jim Lyons, Cruz’s Massachusetts Campaign chairman, if Romney’s remarks will have any effect at the delegate caucuses, his response was blunt. “In my opinion, no,” Lyons said. “I haven’t heard it even brought up in the last two weeks with anybody I’ve been discussing the caucuses with.”
One reason: Romney hasn’t been a local political figure, as opposed to a national one, for years. Another reason: here and elsewhere, Romney’s anti-Trump broadside may actually have backfired. “Some Republicans here might be more motivated to vote for Trump—because Romney doing that was a sign of the establishment telling them what to do,” says a Republican insider. And if any local Republicans were feeling guilty about not heeding Romney’s anti-Trump call, the revelation that Ron Kaufman—the Republican National Committee’s national committeeman from Massachusetts, and a longtime Romney advisor—has resigned himself to a Trump nomination should help them sleep soundly at night.
2. Is Charlie Baker really as hands off as everyone says? And if so: why? The conventional wisdom says that even though the governor recently strengthened his control of the state GOP , he’s not working to undermine Trump on Saturday —for example, by proposing his own delegate slates or working to shape the turnout. No one I spoke with had any evidence to the contrary, though there’s definitely lingering suspicion that Baker may be finding subtle ways to make his influence known.
So why the laissez-faire approach? After all, Baker has made it clear on several occasions that he’s not a big Trump fan. Then again, he’s also made it clear he’s sick of talking about Trump. And Peter Ubertaccio , who directs the Martin Institute for Law & Society at Stonehill College, says the governor has good reason to keep his distance.
“Republican governors in Massachusetts, or Republicans with statewide ambitions, have very little to gain by getting involved in national Republican politics in an overt way,” Ubertaccio says. After all, he notes, the hardcore Republican activists who turn out for events like the caucuses aren’t the people who get Massachusetts Republicans elected statewide. (That would be independent voters, many of whom are relatively moderate.)
What’s more, if Baker did decide to pull a Romney, and aggressively oppose Trump on principle, the state’s conservatives could make his life difficult down the road—say, by backing a primary challenger in the mold of Mark Fisher, who ran at Baker from the right during the last gubernatorial election. That’s a headache the governor doesn’t need.
3. So, how do these campaigns screen out would-be double agents? I’m using that dramatic phrase to refer, for example, to someone who might pass themselves off as a Trump supporter and win election as a delegate—then bolt to some anti-Trump alternative (Cruz? Kasich? Paul Ryan ?) if Trump doesn’t lock up the nomination on the first vote.
Actually, the answer here is pretty simple: the various campaigns are backing would-be delegates with a clear history of supporting their candidate—and steering away from anyone whose loyalty is dubious. As Lyons, Cruz’s MA campaign chairman, puts it: “We’re working to elect people who’ve been active [for Cruz] in the state.”
And if any would-be impostors are reading this, be forewarned: in the world of social media, you’ve been broadcasting your allegiance (or lack thereof) for months. “I’ve had people, just in the last week or so, come to me and say they want to be Trump delegates,” the aforementioned Trump loyalist says. “Knowing they hadn’t been to our campaign offices to help in the primary process, knowing they hadn’t reached out to Trump campaign staffers at all until this past week, and then looking at their Facebook timeline, which had no posts showing any indication of support for Donald Trump, made it very easy to weed out these folks.”
4. Will that Cruz-Kasich pact make any difference? Short answer: probably not. Longer answer: It’s been less than a week since the Ohio governor and Texas senator reached a deal to divvy up the remaining states on the electoral calendar in the hopes of stopping Trump. Almost immediately, there were signs of strain, with Kasich suggesting that voters in Indiana (which was supposed to be Cruz’s) should vote for him if they felt like it. Then came Tuesday’s primaries, which saw Trump roll to five wins and begin calling himself the GOP’s presumptive nominee.
So: not a big success so far, and highly unlikely to be a factor on Saturday. The last word here goes to the aforementioned Republican insider, who calls the Cruz-Kasich deal a “really weird alliance,” and adds: “Most of the delegates who are going to be picked [in Massachusetts] are people who are really tuned into politics, very opinionated, and most of them probably made up their minds in terms of who they want to support months and months ago.”
