Ted Cruz lands in California on Monday for two rallies in a state where voters won’t head to the polls for nearly 60 days, but the West Coast swing is anything but a diversion. It’s preparation for the campaign’s endgame.

If Cruz is to stop Donald Trump short of 1,237 delegates, the final, decisive stand will almost certainly come in California. And that realization has spurred a behind-the-scenes arms race, with Cruz, Trump, John Kasich and their allies making new hires, planning new field offices and forming new big-money groups in what is set to be the sprawling state’s most consequential Republican primary in a half-century.


“California is likely to be where this fight is decided,” said Ray McNally, a Republican strategist in the state, who is one of the strategists behind a new California-specific anti-Trump super PAC.

Cruz will have the state to himself on Monday, which is nothing new after placing his first operative on the ground here more than six months before his rivals. But Trump and Kasich are busily playing catch-up.

Trump has tapped former Ben Carson Nevada operative Jimmy Stracner to lead his West Coast political operations and is nearing naming a California state director, sources familiar with his efforts said. So far, Trump’s campaign has assembled a motley crew of GOP politicians and operatives to help in the state but built little formal infrastructure. But POLITICO has learned some of Trump’s California allies are preparing to launch an independent pro-Trump group, possibly as early as this week, to help him in the state.

“We’re targeting an eight-figure budget,” said Tim Yale, who is spearheading the effort and who raised money briefly for the pro-Trump super PAC launched by former Trump adviser Roger Stone last year.

Kasich, meanwhile, selected a California state director, Scott Scheid, in late March but, like Stracner for Trump, Scheid’s in charge not just of California, but of the entire West Coast. Kasich also has plans in the works to bring his signature town halls to the liberal Bay Area at the end of the month, according to people familiar with his plans.

And Cruz, hoping not to cede a single step of the organizational lead he’s built here, is scouting locations and nearing agreements to open multiple brick-and-mortar offices across the state, from the Bay Area to Orange County, people involved in his campaign said. Cruz has also quietly begun expanding his paid staff on the ground in California.

With Trump mathematically unable to seal the Republican nomination until the final day of the calendar, June 7, when California delivers its massive 172-delegate haul, there is a big-money push underway in the nation’s most populous state.

That’s why McNally, along with two other GOP veteran operatives, Rob Stutzman and Richard Temple, recently formed the first state-specific super PAC in the nation, Victory California, devoted exclusively to defeating Trump in the Golden State.

Yale’s group — which hasn’t yet been formed — will be designed as a counterweight. “We can’t go to a gunfight with a knife,” said Yale, whose Orange County home boasts a helipad. It’s not clear how serious the effort is (Stone said he was unaware of it) but Yale has been in contact with several pro-Trump strategists in the state.

Current polls show Trump leading Cruz in a tight race, by a razor-thin 36 percent to 35 percent among likely voters in a Los Angeles Times poll, and with a wider 7 percent lead in the Field Poll. But California’s primary rules complicate matters. The state gives away three delegates to the winner of each of its 53 congressional districts — ensuring there will not be a single California campaign here but dozens of smaller ones, waged district by district.

The polls show dramatically different results by region, with Cruz ahead in the less populous and more conservative Central Valley, but trailing in the Bay Area and badly in Southern California, beyond Los Angeles. (Kasich was strongest in the San Francisco region, but placed no better than third anywhere.) On Monday, Cruz will campaign in Orange County and San Diego, regions where Trump has been strongest.

Cruz prioritized California long before his rivals: He named Ron Nehring, a former state Republican Party chairman, as his California campaign chairman nearly a year ago. He’s since lined up numerous connected backers, including former state chairman Michael Schroeder, who is serving as a political director, and Dan Palmer, the son-in-law of prominent GOP financier Donald Bren, as finance chairman.

“When you begin that process, it's not yet clear whether the race will go all the way to the end or not, but the more compelling reality is, if it does come to the end, you cannot organize a state the size of California in six weeks,” Nehring said. “It's too big.”

Cruz has been tending to his grass-roots team. Last month, between a big-money fundraiser in Newport Beach and an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, Cruz invited top activists and volunteers to an hourlong private meeting at an Irvine hotel, where he delivered a briefing on the state of the race and a pep talk.

The organizational challenges posed by California’s primary are substantial, and they begin long before June 7.

Here, the candidates must pick their own delegate slates — an enormous logistical lift to identify, recruit and vet 318 loyalists — three delegates and three alternates in each of the 53 congressional districts. Those lists are due in early May.

The Cruz campaign is nearly done. Nehring has been shepherding delegate applicants through his own website, asking for references, whether they’ve ever previously supported a non-Republican and what they’ve done for Cruz’s campaign. He mocked how far behind Kasich and Trump are. “I imagine their spin will be, ‘Oh man, that’s under control.’ But it’s a substantial organizational lift,” he said.

And with the growing possibility of a contested convention, the strength of individual delegates’ allegiances could prove crucial.

Harmeet Dhillon, vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said the Trump team is worried about his rivals’ supporters infiltrating his slate. “They’re concerned about Trojan horse delegates,” Dhillon said. “They ought to be concerned about that.”

Ted Costa, a longtime GOP activist who pushed the 2003 recall that ultimately led to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election, is in charge of finding pro-Trump delegates. “We’re way, way, way over halfway,” Costa said, though he acknowledged the particular challenge in inner-city Los Angeles districts dominated by Democrats.

Costa is part of a loose network of formal and informal Trump helpers across the state, including Tony Strickland, a onetime state legislator and losing candidate for statewide office, Elizabeth Emken, who lost to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2012, and state Sen. Joel Anderson. Jeff Corless, who served as political director on Carly Fiorina’s 2010 Senate campaign, is also supporting Trump. Trump’s most prominent California endorser is Rep. Duncan Hunter, but Hunter’s political sphere of influence does not extend much beyond his district in the greater San Diego area.

“It’s not a very organized campaign yet,” said Jim Lacey, a longtime Republican election attorney, who is signing up as a delegate for Trump in Orange County. “I think it will become one.”

In addition to Yale’s new effort, another Californian, Eric Beach, is the co-chair of a national pro-Trump super PAC, the Great America PAC, which Beach said planned to eventually get involved in the California campaign.

Kasich’s team is playing up catch-up to Cruz, too. The Ohio governor does have some key allies, including the last two Republicans elected statewide: Schwarzenegger and former Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a multimillionaire who ran for governor in 2010 and has provided Kasich’s team contacts as California chairman. Matt David, the chief strategist for Kasich’s super PAC, is also a California operative, as is the super PAC’s ad man, Fred Davis.

The first in-person clash between candidates will come later this month, when the state GOP holds its convention in Burlingame. Kasich and Cruz (plus top Cruz surrogate Carly Fiorina) are set to deliver keynote addresses. The party has invited Trump, but he has not committed.

“We are in communication with the campaign,” Dhillon said. “He may think it’s beneath his normal, stadium-arena type audiences.”

Reed Galen, an unaligned GOP strategist in California, said that while Cruz is running laps around Trump organizationally, California remains a state dominated by mass media — and no one can compete with Trump in that realm.

“While you might want to have Cruz’s organization, this is a state of 38 million people and at some point you must have an operation to reach people via the biggest medium California has, which is broadcast media,” Galen said.

Rank-and-file California Republicans, who have long had a chip on their shoulder for serving as a political ATM for national Republicans who come for campaign cash but never stay to invest in the deteriorating GOP base, are positively giddy about their newfound importance.

“The last time California mattered like this was 1964. It was Goldwater vs. Rockefeller and I worked on the Goldwater campaign,” said Steve Frank, a 69-year-old activist in the state now helping Cruz. “Fifty-two years to get to be relevant again. I’m just shocked I’m still here.”