Cruz speaks with reporters at the RNC meeting, April 20, 2016. (Joe Raedle/Getty)

Hollywood, Fla. — Ted Cruz moved with dispatch from meeting room to meeting room at the Diplomat Resort and Spa, trailed by an entourage of security, staff, and the top strategists on his campaign, who had come to help sell their candidate to members of the Republican National Committee.

The 168 members of the RNC have converged on the hotel for their quarterly meeting. What is often a dull affair has become the center of the political universe this week, with candidates, campaigns, donors, reporters, and even RNC members try to figure out what on earth will happen in July if Republicans arrive at the convention with no clear nominee.


Cruz himself was not originally scheduled to attend. His campaign announced only this morning that he would make an appearance at the affair. But the meeting is a treasure trove of delegates, because every committee member will attend the convention as a delegate. For Cruz and his brain trust, taking Wednesday afternoon to press his case was time well spent. Given that the convention will probably be contested, they must fight for every delegate.

“It’s one of the largest delegate pools in the country besides California,” Cruz’s campaign manager Jeff Roe told reporters. “So it’s a lot of delegates.”

Cruz spent the afternoon holding back-to-back meetings with small groups of RNC members — about a dozen in each 30- to 45-minute meeting, according to members who attended. The purpose of those meetings, said the Cruz campaign and RNC members, was to give Cruz the opportunity to get to know the RNC members as he prepares to fight for the nomination at the convention.



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“People got to see him as a person,” explains Saul Anuzis, the former Michigan GOP chairman who is running Cruz’s delegate operation. “This is really a very powerful moment, when he was able to give all these people who are leaders in their own right in their own states — to get to know them better, to be able to go back and say, ‘This is the real Ted Cruz, this is the guy we talked to, this is the guy we know.’”

An RNC member in the meeting echoed that explanation, saying Cruz told them he knew they were influential within their state delegations, and he wanted to make sure they were comfortable with him and knew him.

A major selling point Cruz’s campaign emphasized: Cruz would help elect down-ballot candidates.

The meetings were question-and-answer style — “just chatting,” says Peter Goldberg, the Alaska GOP chairman, who attended one of the meetings. Members got to talk to Cruz, take photos with him, and address the issues important to their states. In the meeting Goldberg attended, subjects ranged from Supreme Court nominees to the use and management of federal lands. Numerous members from western states were in attendance, and they discussed their concerns over how much land the federal government owns in their part of the country. Goldberg says he brought up the military, which he believes has become “a social experiment instead of a fighting force” under President Obama. “Senator Cruz indicated he would turn that around. He indicated he would overturn a lot of executive decisions that Obama made, going around Congress.”

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Wyoming GOP chairwoman Marti Halverson said that the meetings were more focused on informing Cruz about the issues in the members’ states than on informing members about the Cruz campaign. Halverson has pledged to back Cruz on the first ballot because he won the most delegates in her state. But, she adds, “we are only bound for the first ballot; I don’t know what’s going to happen after that.”

Later, Cruz spoke at a reception for all members, as did John Kasich, who was also in attendance Wednesday. When the members left for a dinner outing on the Grand Floridian yacht (“don’t want to get on the wrong boat!” one member declared, as she asked for directions to the affair), Cruz and most of his team headed out as well. Cruz has a campaign event scheduled in Maryland at 10:30 a.m. Thursday.

#share#Before Cruz arrived for his meetings — before it was even public that he would be attending the meeting in person — Cruz’s campaign team was already in full swing. Roe, Anuzis, Ken Cuccinelli, and strategists Jason Johnson and David Polyansky emerged from the committee meeting room around half past noon, having come from briefing the members on what the general election would look like with Cruz as the nominee.


A major selling point Roe said they emphasized: Cruz would help elect down-ballot candidates.

“One of the critical components if you’re an RNC member who has worked all your life to get Republicans elected in your state is, How do you get them reelected?” he told reporters after the briefing, adding:

And the Republican nominee — what is the nominee of your party going to do for you as a state party? We will build an infrastructure that supports the local elected officials running for reelection. With Cruz at the top of the ballot, you will see record numbers of conservatives coming out to vote, and we are built as an infrastructure to compete where others haven’t competed: for Hispanics and younger voters. We have a life story that’s compelling to women, that’s compelling to minorities; it’s compelling to younger voters. Our opponent in this primary doesn’t have that.

Trump, Roe argued, would be a disaster for down-ballot candidates. “It’ll be a white-wash. It’ll be a situation where we’d have to rename our party.”

#related#Throughout the course of the afternoon, Cruz’s team, along with pollster Chris Wilson, moved around the hotel, chatting with RNC members. Roe sat in the palm-tree-filled atrium and had a long chat with Missouri GOP chairman John Hancock, before stopping off to talk with reporters seated nearby. The meeting made for an odd mix of people — RNC members in their suits sat and chatted as other hotel guests wandered by in short shorts and flip-flops, en route to the one of the beachside resort’s several pools.

Team Cruz was dressed for business, a group of dark suits. Roe worked the atrium in a pin-striped suit and a purple-and-blue tie. Cuccinelli, on the other hand, had dressed for the Florida weather in a short-sleeve yellow polo shirt and slacks. It was Cuccinelli, Roe lamented later, who had been the one to insist he wear the suit and tie.