A few hundreds Republicans are gathered in Fairbanks today for the state party convention. APRN’s Liz Ruskin is reporting from there.
TOWNSEND: Liz, you left us with a bit of a cliffhanger yesterday. What’s the big news party chairman Peter Goldberg was hinting at?
RUSKIN: OK, you have to remember: this is a gathering of political animals, who live and breathe delegate counts. Everybody’s wondering if Donald Trump can get the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination. He’s still more than 200 delegates short. So the “big news” here in Fairbanks was, the party central committee decided to keep the allocation of Alaska delegates the same: 12 for Ted Cruz, 11 for Trump and five for Marco Rubio.
TOWNSEND: Rather than split up the Rubio delegates because he’s suspended his campaign?
RUSKIN: Right. So maybe not the hugest news. But today, the convention here in Fairbanks started the process of deciding who they’ll send in those roles. 160 people have applied and they have to narrow it to 25 people, plus 25 alternates.
TOWNSEND: How’s that going?
RUSKIN: It’s competitive! The delegate hopefuls have printed up flyers, like campaign brochures, with photos and graphics. One woman’s pic showed her with an AR-15 on her lap. Jennifer Clutts of Anchor Point. She said she was trying to stand out from the crowd, and show her Second Amendment colors. Meanwhile, the campaigns have people running around with rosters of their preferred delegates, the ones they’re sure will remain loyal in Cleveland. David Morgan, from Anchorage, was keeping a list for the Trump campaign. He was kind of agitated last night when he says a new yellow sheet for delegates appeared, and he thought the other campaigns had advance knowledge.
MORGAN: “They’re adding an extra form, which some of us don’t feel is necessarily necessary. So we just now have to make sure that our guys fill out the form. It’s one more thing to do before 9 o’clock in the morning. Hold on. (Did you need one of these?) I need 35 of them. (Oh, well Kristi has 35.)”
RUSKIN: It soon blew over. But it’s the kind of minor tension running around here.
TOWNSEND: So Trump does have people working it on the ground.
RUSKIN: Yes. They seem calm and confident their candidate will win. And then there are people like Mary Bishop of Fairbanks.
BISHOP: “I’m a ‘never Trump’ person.”
RUSKIN: Mary’s from Fairbanks. She says she’d like to be a delegate to Cleveland, but only if she thought it’d be an opportunity to stop Trump. She says Trump seems to inspire his supporters to displays of bigotry.
BISHOP: “It just reminds me of what happened in Nazi Germany back in the ‘30s, and that scares me. He may not be that way, but he brings out the people who are that way. And I don’t think that’s good for the country.”
TOWNSEND: Wow.
RUSKIN: Yep. We’ve got all brands of Republican here. But it’s been quite smooth.
TOWNSEND: When does the convention make its decision on the delegates?
RUSKIN: That becomes final tomorrow. The nominations committee has been working on THEIR list behind closed doors for hours. The biggest kerfuffle of the whole convention that I’ve seen, actually, was just before they closed the doors, when Committee Chairwoman Paulette Simpson of Juneau asked members to relinquish their cell phones, to avoid any leaks.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
