Inside Trump’s backroom bid to lock up the nomination
Seeks favorable primary rules from top officials
Not long after the new chair of the Republican Party in Hawaii was elected in May, he received a voicemail from none other than Donald Trump.
“It’s your all-time favorite president,” Trump told the chair, Tim Dalhouse. “I just called to congratulate you.”
The head of the Kansas GOP received a similar message after he became chair. The Nebraska chair had a couple of minutes and a photo arranged with the former president during an Iowa stop. And the chair of the Nevada Republican Party, Michael McDonald, who had served as a fake elector for Trump after the 2020 election, was among a group of state party officials who were treated to an hourslong Mar-a-Lago meal in Florida in March that ended with ice cream sundaes.
Months later, McDonald’s party in Nevada dramatically transformed the state’s influential early contest. The party enacted new rules that distinctively disadvantage Trump’s chief rival, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, by effectively blocking the super political action committee he relies upon from participating in the state’s new caucus.
McDonald has tilted the rules so significantly that some of Trump’s opponents have accused the party of manipulating the election for him — and have mostly pulled up stakes in the state entirely.
As Trump dodges debates and is regularly seen on his golf courses in branded white polo
‘They’ve rigged [primary rules] anywhere they thought they could pull it off.’
KEN CUCCINELLI, former Trump administration official who founded Never Back Down, the pro-Ron DeSantis super PAC
shirts and red MAGA hats, it can seem that he is bypassing the 2024 primary fight entirely. He has done relatively few public campaign events until recent weeks. But Trump and his political team have spent months working behind the scenes to build alliances and contingency plans with key party officials, seeking to twist the primary and delegate rules in their favor.
It amounts to a fail-safe in case DeSantis — or anyone else — scores a surprise victory in an early state. And it comes as Trump faces an extraordinary set of legal challenges, including four criminal indictments, that inject an unusual degree of uncertainty into a race Trump leads widely in national polling.
“They’ve rigged it anywhere they thought they could pull it off,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official who founded Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC that was essentially ousted from the Nevada caucus.
The maneuvering is the type of old-school party politics that Trump, who cut his teeth in the machine politics of 1970s and 1980s New York, relishes and knows best: personal calls and chits, glad-handing, relationships, and reprisals. Advisers say that in contrast to some tasks, getting him to make those calls is a breeze. Plus, the seemingly arcane issue of delegate accumulation — tallying up formal support in the states to secure the nomination at the party convention next summer — is deeply personal to Trump after he was outflanked in this fight in 2016.
Then, a better-organized Senator Ted Cruz of Texas worked Trump-skeptical state parties to win more delegates even in some places where he had lost at the ballot box. Cuccinelli was one of Cruz’s top delegate hunters at the time. Now, surrounded by a more experienced team and the authority of a former president with loyalists entrenched nationwide, Trump is doing to DeSantis exactly what he once accused Hillary Clinton of doing to Bernie Sanders: bending the system in his favor.
Trump’s backroom campaign reveals the extent to which he has become the establishment of the Republican Party.
“This is the kind of stuff that’s not talked about in the news,” said Scott Golden, chair of the Tennessee Republican Party, who was invited to speak briefly in private with Trump when the former president visited his state this spring. “It is ultimately about making sure your person is the nominee.”
In presidential primaries or caucuses, voters’ casting of ballots is only the first step. Those elections determine the individuals — called delegates — who go to the national party convention to formally choose their party’s nominee. The rules each state uses to allocate delegates and bind them to particular candidates can shift from year to year, and the people in charge of those rules are otherwise obscure state party officials.
Wooing those insiders can be crucial. Among those who attended the Mar-a-Lago dinner in March was Alida Benson, then the executive director of the Nevada Republican Party. Now she is Trump’s Nevada state director.
At one point, Trump’s campaign warned state parties nationwide about the legal risks of working with super PACs. In the past, super PACs have generally been allowed to organize and advertise in primaries and caucuses. But in Nevada, a new rule was enacted that banned super PACs from sending speakers or even literature to caucus sites, or getting data from the state party.
The unstated goal: to box out Never Back Down.
Alex Latcham, who oversees Trump’s early-state operations, called the Nevada party’s moves especially sweet. He noted that Nevada is where the super PAC’s largest donor, Robert Bigelow, lives and where its chair, Adam Laxalt, just ran for Senate.
“Not only is it a strategic victory, but it’s also a moral defeat for Always Back Down,” Latcham said, purposefully inverting the group’s name.
Cuccinelli accused Trump of hypocrisy. “No one has tried to rig the rules like Donald Trump has been doing here at least in a very long time,” he said. “And no one has ever done it who, in other circumstances, complains about the rules being rigged.”
Latcham called that “sour grapes on behalf of less sophisticated candidates or their organizations who were outworked and outmaneuvered. I mean, the reality is, this is politics.”
Just how tilted is the field in Nevada now? DeSantis’s campaign won’t even say if he will apply to be on the ballot, and no serious candidate or super PAC has spent a dollar on television ads there since late June. McDonald, the state party chair, claims neutrality but remains one of Trump’s closest allies. He and the Nevada GOP did not respond to requests for comment.
Perhaps the most significant change in primary rules took place in California. Republican officials in the state, whose primary was moved up to Super Tuesday by Democrats in the Legislature, adopted rules over the objection of DeSantis allies that will award all 169 of its delegates to any candidate who tops 50 percent of the vote statewide — a threshold only Trump is currently anywhere near.
“By nature, President Trump is a gambling type of guy, and I think to have that opportunity is . . . appealing to him,” Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of the California Republican Party, said of a potential delegate sweep.
Previously, each of the state’s 52 congressional districts delivered delegates independently, allowing candidates to cherry-pick more favorable political terrain. The change caused Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, to essentially give up on California, halting a door-knocking operation that had already visited more than 100,000 homes in the state.
Another state that has shifted its delegate rules is Michigan. While those changes came about after the Legislature moved up the primary date, state Republicans have implemented a complicated dual primary and caucus, with many of the delegates determined by a system seen as favoring Trump.
“It’s a slam dunk for Trump,” Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said of the shift. “I don’t think it’s a mistake that Trump-aligned party leaders engineered that.”