HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Ted Cruz was in the midst of a pitch to a dozen members of the Republican National Committee when the Massachusetts party chairwoman cut him off.

“How,” pressed Kirsten Hughes, "are you going to appeal to moderates?”


She hasn't been the only party leader to push for answers from the GOP's 2016 contenders this week. Cruz, John Kasich and Donald Trump’s political team have spent two days humbling themselves before the 168 members of the RNC — all delegates to what could be the first contested national convention in a generation -- trying to sell the party elite on the merits of their candidacies.

The three-day, beachside meeting has amounted to a dry run of the kind of aggressive delegate hunting that would define an open convention this summer in Cleveland — and it saw some sharp elbows thrown between the Cruz and Kasich teams.

Kasich backer Matt Borges, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, ripped Cruz’s argument that he could win in November.

"I heard him say two different times, ‘Poll after poll after poll shows me beating Hillary Clinton in the fall.’ No they don’t! They actually show the opposite. I think it’s one of these things where I think he feels like if he just says it enough times, it’ll be true,” Borges said.

And Borges said party members were telling him that Cruz didn’t sufficiently “thank” the RNC in his speech, as Kasich had.

But Saul Anuzis, a former RNC member from Michigan and top Cruz delegate chaser, called foul. “That’s just not true.”

“Kasich’s folks tend to say things like that all the time,” Anuzis said, calling out one of Kasich’s top advisers. "John Weaver is like kind of the Baghdad Bob of American politics today” — a reference to the information minister under Saddam Hussein — “This guy will say anything.”

Asked about Kasich, Cruz’s campaign manager trolled best: “Who?” said Jeff Roe.

The sniping reflects the stakes: the RNC members gathered here in Hollywood are not just a bloc of convention delegates but party leaders who could sway hundreds of other delegates at a contested Republican convention. Add to that the top strategists and aides from across the country also in attendance and it’s possible that as many as 250 potential delegates — 10 percent of the national convention — were here.

“It’s the largest gathering of delegates anywhere in America before Cleveland,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a top Cruz delegate adviser.

"They’re influencers,” said Anuzis. "On the second and third ballot, these are the leaders in every one of the Republican parties in every state and territory. The people that represent their states and territories here have huge amounts of influence with their delegates.”

And so the charm offensive began early and often, from the breakfast buffet, where Trump’s top operatives gathered Thursday morning around a corner table, to late at night at the hotel bar. In between, there were hallway tete-a-tetes, chats over cigars on a party-sponsored yacht, a cocktail reception with Ben Carson and a series of PowerPoint presentations with, depending on one’s perceptive, persuasive or cherry-picked polls.

Members of the RNC basked in the attention. One confided that while they were never going to support Trump, they definitely wouldn’t tell Trump's campaign that. It would prematurely ruin all the wooing.

“I think virtually every delegate here, every member of the committee has met with one or more of the candidates,” said Shawn Steel, an RNC member from California.

Cruz spent most of Wednesday afternoon hosting a series of small-group meetings, with 10 to 15 state chairmen and RNC members. Kasich came the same day, and both addressed RNC members that evening.

Trump himself didn’t show. (A fact that both the Cruz and Kasich camps seized upon. “There’s just no substitute for being there in person,” said Cuccinelli. “There just isn’t.”) But he sent many of his team’s political advisers, including newly installed campaign leaders Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley, newly hired adviser William McGinley, longtime adviser Alan Cobb, and top attorney Don McGahn.

RNC members received a private Trump briefing on Thursday evening led by Manafort, as waiters circulated with seafood platters of crab legs, shrimp cocktails and oysters.

The event amounted to an audition before a skeptical audience for his new campaign team, especially after Trump has blasted the GOP nominating process repeatedly as “rigged.” It also represented a coming-out party of sorts for Wiley, Trump’s new political director and a former RNC political director.

"Rick Wiley’s popular,” said Steel, the California committeeman. "He’s understood to be a serious addition to the Trump team."

With this crowd of GOP insiders, the key for all three candidates was not just selling themselves but their impact down ballot.

Cruz himself led the briefings for four separate groups of RNC members on Wednesday, presenting poll information on battleground states and answering member questions. Kasich boiled down his theme to a single line: “My message to the delegates: I can win.”

The electability pitches came amid a backdrop of deepening concern that a GOP contest that could drag through a contested convention is preventing the party from taking down its likely ultimate opponent.

"If we had a nominee by now, the story you’d be covering is how damaged a candidate Hillary Clinton is: Not putting away Bernie Sanders, her unfavorables are so high,” said Enid Mickelsen, an RNC member from Utah.

As for Hughes, the Massachusetts chair, she wasn’t fully satisfied with Cruz’s answer to her moderate-appeal question. “He made his pitch,” she said.

The next night, she was among those at the Trump briefing. “I really wanted a crab leg,” Hughes laughed. “I was pissed I didn’t get one.”

Like many of her colleagues, she plans to leave Florida uncommitted on a second ballot.