From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

Colorado will award 12 more national delegates Friday at four congressional district conventions. The final 13 are elected at the state GOP convention Saturday.

Of the three alternates selected, two are committed Cruz supporters and one, Jefferson County GOP Chair Don Ytterberg, is unpledged…

The Texas senator found deep support at the 7th Congressional District convention in Arvada among pledged and unpledged delegates, much like he did Saturday when he swept all six slots award at two conventions .

Ted Cruz added to his lead in Colorado, winning three more national delegates Thursday to boost his total to nine.

As our Ian Tuttle notes, whatever you think of Cruz as a potential president, he’s looking pretty good as a manager, team-builder, and strategist:

To this must be added the fact that the Cruz campaign managed to adapt its strategy mid-race after Trump’s surprise victories in the South earlier in the primary season — states that, with their large numbers of Evangelicals, were supposed to be Cruz strongholds. The Cruz campaign didn’t flail; it pivoted, successfully shifting its firewall to the Midwest and the Mountain West. Now, after a resounding victory in Wisconsin, Cruz is within reach of shutting out Trump in Indiana and Nebraska. If he can win a few pockets of delegates along the way, Trump will be kept under the 1,237 threshold.

Two more different campaigns would be difficult to find. Cruz seems to have surrounded himself with knowledgeable, capable professionals operating quietly but confidently behind the scenes to win him the election. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, seems to be a whirlwind of incompetence and egotism that has not flown apart only because of the centripetal force of the personality at its center. And there is no reason to believe that Trump’s campaign will continue to be anything but chaotic, fractious, and inept.

One big question for Republicans is what lesson they take from Obama’s victories. Some may have tried to emulate Obama’s previous status as a blank slate that voters could project their preferences onto; others may have wanted to mimic that soaring oratory.

Ted Cruz looked at Obama 2012 and chose to imitate the data operation:

For the closing days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest. It was just the latest way that Cruz’s analytics department had tried to slice the Iowa caucus electorate in search of an advantage for its candidate. They had divided voters by faction, self-identified ideology, religious belief, personality type—creating 150 different clusters of Iowa caucus-goers—down to sixty Iowa Republicans its statistical models showed as likely to share Cruz’s desire to end a state ban on fireworks sales.

Unlike most of his opponents, Cruz has put a voter-contact specialist in charge of his operation, and it shows in nearly every aspect of the campaign he has run thus far and intends to sustain through a long primary season. Cruz, it should be noted, had no public position on Iowa’s fireworks law until his analysts identified sixty votes that could potentially be swayed because of it.

“People wonder about ‘New York values’?” Wilson says, referring to Cruz’s attack on Trump for once holding liberal views towards abortion and gay marriage. “That wasn’t made in a vacuum.”

Taking a stance on an obscure issue that most candidates ignore in order to win 60 votes? Beautiful. I feel like I’m watching Tiger Woods sink a long putt.

Of course, now Cruz’s “New York values” comment is going to hurt him in the New York primary…