Joseph Gerth

Opinion Columnist | Louisville Courier Journal

Scott Hofstra is worried the Republican Party of Kentucky is going to throw a caucus on March 5 and nobody is going to show.

“I have real concerns that the Republican Party has been doing an abysmal job getting the word out,” said Hofstra, of Elizabethtown, the volunteer chairman of Ted Cruz’s campaign in Kentucky.

Hofstra said he is constantly running into Republicans who don’t even know that the caucus is coming up, let alone for whom they are going to vote.

It will be the first time since 1984 that one of the major parties used anything but a primary election to choose presidential candidates in Kentucky. That year, Democrats used a caucus to nominate Walter Mondale, and Republicans used a convention system to nominate Ronald Reagan.

The Republican Party made a conscious decision not to spend the money on its bargain-basement caucus getting the word out, figuring the candidates would do that.

But the candidates have been tied up in Iowa and New Hampshire and then South Carolina and Nevada.

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Then all attention turns to the all-important Super Tuesday Primaries, where on March 1, Republicans in 11 states will choose their nominees for president. There are 595 delegates up for grabs on that day, nearly half the total delegates a Republican needs to win the nomination.

There’s a small window for the candidates to slip into Kentucky to campaign before its caucus, but there is no assurance they all will get here then. In Kentucky, there are 46 Republican delegates at stake.

“People that follow the news see that in Iowa and New Hampshire, that there’s a town hall meeting that every candidate hosts in every community … they’re in the coffee shops,” said former U.S. Rep. Anne Northup, chairman of Marco Rubio’s campaign in Kentucky.

“That can convey to them that that’s what we’re going to have, but of course that’s not what any of the candidates can do,” Northup said. “They have to work Iowa and New Hampshire just to survive. There’s no point in being in Kentucky last December because three-fourths of the candidates didn’t make it to Kentucky.“

The five remaining candidates (if there are that many after Super Tuesday), will debate in Detroit on March 3, likely keeping the candidates out of the state that day. And the state will be competing for attention with Kansas and Maine, which are having March 5 caucuses, too, and Louisiana, which is holding a primary.

The field now has been pared down to Donald Trump, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Rubio and Cruz. Even Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, at whose insistence the caucus was created to allow him to run for both president and re-election to the Senate simultaneously, dropped out after the Iowa caucus.

Hofstra said that Cruz is trying to get to Kentucky during that small window but that is being handled by the national campaign out of Houston and he hasn’t heard anything certain.

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Trump announced on his campaign website Friday that he will hold a rally at the Louisville International Convention Center on Tuesday. Carson also announced that he will hold a town hall meeting in Lexington on Monday.

Northup said she doesn’t know if Rubio will be in the Bluegrass State at all, saying she doesn't expect his campaign and others think about Kentucky until after Super Tuesday.

Jim Stansbury, the chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, said his group is doing whatever it can to raise awareness using social media and telephone calls, and he said it seems to be working.

“Our phone has been ringing off the hook,” said Stansbury, saying that voters have been calling Republican headquarters to find out where to vote.

This is not like a regular primary in which voters go to a polling place in their neighborhood. Most counties will only have one caucus location. Nine counties will have none – and voters there will have to go to a designated adjoining county to vote.

And Stansbury said the party has had absolutely no trouble finding workers to staff the caucuses at the nine sites in Jefferson County. “We’ll have nearly 300 people,” he said.

At eight of the caucus locations in Jefferson County, voters will cast ballots on voting machines, but at the Trinity Family Life Center in Louisville’s West End, people will vote on paper ballots, which will be hand-counted.

Many expect turnout to be low, even though Stansbury said Jefferson County has planned for 50 percent turnout, just to be on the safe side. “We just don’t know.”

Although the state party hasn't done a massive mailing to all Republicans or invested in television ads, Mike Biagi, the party's executive director, said the state party and county parties have spread the word through local media. "I, myself, have done over 100 interviews since the Iowa caucuses," he said.

Biagi said he's also seen web ads and heard paid radio ads reminding people about the caucus and that some of the candidates are working to mobilize their voters. "I'm proud of the effort that's been made," he said.

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Traditionally, turnout at Kentucky’s presidential Republican primary has been low. That’s in part because Kentucky doesn’t have a strong Republican tradition and often had few contested GOP primaries, and in part because the Kentucky primary comes the third week of May, long after presidential nominees have been chosen.

In 2012, Republican turnout was 15.6 percent. Four years earlier, 19 percent showed up. And in 2000, when George W. Bush was nominated, a miserable 11.1 showed up to vote.

In what appears to be a kind of “Field of Dreams” move – if you build it, they will come – the Jefferson County Republican Party has rented space at the Crowne Plaza Hotel near the Louisville International Airport all day on March 4 in hopes they draw candidates for rallies.

They’ll be able to fly in, get to the venue quickly and then leave.

The Rubio camp has been most visible in Kentucky, announcing two lists of endorsements in recent weeks that it hopes will help convince GOP partisans to choose the U.S. senator from Florida.

Northup also got some media attention for her candidate when she complained that a key figure in a Ted Cruz super PAC was the state GOP’s general council. The lawyer, Eric Lycan, agreed not to take part in any caucus-related activities.

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“We have been trying to engage the press because we don’t want it to come and go and for people who live very busy lives with family and work and other activities to go, the next day, ‘Oh, I missed it,’ ” she said.

Eric Deters, chairman of Donald Trumps’ efforts in Northern Kentucky said that holding the caucus was a mistake, but he said that probably helps Trump.

“If Trump does very, very well on March 1, which everyone believes that he’s going to, I have a hard time believing that the other candidates are going to have the state of Kentucky be organized well. … The enthusiasm with the general public is what counts, and that’s what Trump has,” he said.

“If Rubio gets smoked and if Cruz gets smoked on March 1, their people are just going to say the heck with this, this thing’s over,” he said.

Reporter Joseph Gerth can be reached at (502) 582-4702 or jgerth@courier-journal.com.

Delegates each candidate has earned so far

Donald Trump - 81

Ted Cruz - 17

Marco Rubio - 17

John Kasich - 6

Ben Carson - 4