Paul supporters rallied in Tampa Sunday. Paul delegates get nosebleed seats

TAMPA — The GOP is shoving the Ron Paul Revolution to the margins — of the Tampa Bay Times Forum.

The Republican National Convention seating chart, obtained by POLITICO Sunday, shows the delegations from Nevada, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma all located on the outer fringe of the convention floor. Each are states with significant Paul followings.


The delegation for the Northern Mariana Islands, on the other hand, is right in front behind the gang from Michigan, birth state of Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Other groups with pretty good seats include those from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and American Samoa. None has electoral votes that can impact the outcome of the election.

It’s yet another indignity for the party’s cantankerous libertarian faction for their revered retiring Rep. Paul, R-Texas, who accumulated 177 delegates during his run for the GOP nomination this year. While he didn’t win a single state, his supporters used procedural mechanisms available to them in several states to take a majority of delegates from Nevada, Iowa and Minnesota.

It is customary for vanquished candidates to cede delegates to the presumptive nominee, but Paul has insisted he cannot tell his followers what to do.

Paul supporters rallied in Tampa Sunday.

The GOP has been concerned that rebellious Paul supporters could cause hiccups for Romney’s coronation as some have stated they may try to give their delegates to Paul during the roll call. A candidate needs five states to be officially recognized on the floor and Paul supporters have made claims to Louisiana, Oregon, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Maine. Romney’s lawyers blocked that from happening in any official way, but there’s little to prevent a delegation leader from going a different route.

Originally, the RNC’s ceremonial roll call had been slated for Monday to get it over with before the days on which the TV networks would provide prime time coverage. That plan has been scuttled by the weather cancellation of Monday’s proceedings; the roll call will now take place late Tuesday afternoon and will easily be included in evening news reports.

RNC spokesman Kyle Downey would not explain the logic of how states are arrayed around the Forum floor and responded to inquiries with an e-mail: “There’s not a bad seat in the house.”

Paul told The New York Times on Sunday he turned down a speaking slot at the convention because he refused to allow Romney’s team to vet his speech. “I don’t fully endorse him for president,” he told the paper.

Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton declined to speculate about the seating snubs except to quip: “I am glad so many of our delegates get to sit close together.”

Yet others freely admitted the arrangement seemed intentional.

“I’m not surprised,” said Sue Lowden, a former Nevada GOP chairwoman whose tenure was marred in 2008 by efforts by Paul supporters to control the delegation despite Romney’s easy triumph in that year’s Nevada caucuses. “Many [Paul delegates] have stated that they are not voting for Romney. We Nevada alternates have great seats.”

Indeed, the alternates — in most cases for Nevada, Romney backers who did not get selected at the state convention — sit in a section slightly raised with a perfect view eye-level with the podium.

Of all the Paul states at issue, Iowa and Massachusetts received the best seats. The Bay State is, of course, where Romney lives and was governor, so it will sit in the front of its section. And the Hawkeye State group is near the center; it’s a hotly contested swing state with seven delegates.

Nevada, too, is a swing state, but polls show President Barack Obama starting to pull away from Romney.

While the GOP wants to prevent Paul acolytes from disrupting the stage-managed part of the process, the party actually bowed to them in several significant ways in writing the platform document. Only 11 of the 112 platform committee members were Paul supporters but the document calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve and a presidential commission to study metallic basing of the currency, accepted Internet freedom language written by a Paul group and language opposing the use of domestic drones and eminent domain seizures.