David Jackson

USA TODAY

Donald Trump has won more primaries, but Ted Cruz and his team are coming back by winning a series of state-by-state battles for bigger prizes: delegates.

A year of planning is paying off for Cruz as his campaign racks up delegates from Virginia to Louisiana to Colorado, cutting into Trump's once-formidable lead and threatening the businessman's ability to secure a first-ballot win at the July convention in Cleveland.

Placing people in states and U.S. territories; learning the often-arcane rules of delegation selection in different venues; making sure Cruz loyalists are at the right meetings and votes — the campaign has been planning these kinds of things for months, allies said.

"They've really thought this thing through," said Rick Tyler, a former Cruz communications director and current MSNBC political analyst. "It's integrated into the organizational system."

While Trump just recently appointed veteran Republican operative Paul Manafort to head up his convention planning — a sign of how much that campaign needs to catch up in the delegate chase, critics said — allies said the Cruz camp has taken more of a team approach.

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The Cruz campaign has tapped Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, to supervise delegation selection efforts, but months of work has also involved political director Mark Campbell, campaign manager Jeff Roe, and the candidate himself, an attorney and Texas senator who has made strategic decisions for his presidential campaign.

As far as back as the summer, Cruz and allies began looking for delegates in various states, as well as U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands. Staff members and volunteers at the state and local levels have been busy meeting deadlines, attending meetings, and lining up specific people to serve as delegates.

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And the deadlines and early planning can be critical. While Indiana holds a primary on May 3, the deadline for trying to become a delegate passed last month. Deadlines have also passed in Virginia and Arkansas, states where Cruz is aggressively playing the delegate acquisition game.

The details are paying off for Cruz. He figures to rack up more delegates than Trump in Louisiana, even though he lost the primary to the businessman there. At a convention last weekend in Colorado, the Cruz completed a sweep of another 34 delegates.

Voting in primaries and caucuses — stages where Trump has excelled — is only part of the nomination process. Many states also select specific delegates via conventions. In many cases, delegates who are bound to a candidate on a first ballot are free to back anybody on subsequent votes.

In Pennsylvania, at least 54 delegates — three in each of the state's 18 congressional districts — will be unbound when they head to Cleveland, regardless of the results of the state's primary April 26. Cruz operatives have been busy since Thanksgiving recruiting delegate candidate and soliciting the signatures needed to get them on the primary ballot.

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"Ted Cruz and his organization understood from the very beginning that the nomination is voted on by delegates," said Lowman Henry, the Cruz state chairman in Pennsylvania. "It's not a direct election primary."

The complex, confusing process is frustrating Trump, who has accused Cruz and the Republican Party of trying to "steal" the nomination via a "corrupt" delegate allocation system. The "Republican system is absolutely rigged," Trump told supporters this week.

The Cruz camp says Trump should be complaining about his own lack of organization.

“Donald’s ground game is nonexistent,” Cruz told radio host Glenn Beck, a Cruz supporter. "Apparently, when anyone votes against him, it’s an act of theft."

Like the third remaining Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Cruz and his team are trying to block a Trump victory on the first ballot of the convention that opens July 18.

Kasich convention guru outlines messy fight

Trump currently has 743 delegates to Cruz's 545, according to the Associated Press — a majority of 1,237 delegates is required to win the nomination.

Part of the Cruz effort is to recruit delegates who will back the candidate in subsequent ballots. That is part of their strategy in a state like Virginia, where Cruz placed third in the March 1 primary behind Trump and ex-candidate Marco Rubio.

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant in Texas, said the Cruz camp has been quiet about their delegate acquisition efforts, but it is apparent they "understand who these folks are and what they are about."

"The rules, the deadlines," Mackowiak said. "They've been ahead of the curve strategically a lot in this race."