Former President Trump’s campaign has made strategic, surgical efforts to change obscure Republican Party rules throughout the country, including California. This has created a chance for the GOP’s frontrunner to win the nomination quickly.

Their work is ongoing: In addition to California, state Republican parties in Nevada and Michigan have recently overhauled their rules with a clear bias towards Trump. They are still working on it: Along with California, the state Republican parties of Nevada and Michigan recently restructured their rules to clearly favor Trump.

Ben Ginsberg is a Republican attorney who has represented presidential campaigns for George W. Bush, including during the 2000 Florida recount, and Mitt Romney.

Ginsberg said that the Trump campaign changed the rules in part “because they knew what they did and in part, because everyone else was asleep at the wheel.”

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Dan Lee, professor of political science at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, warned that these changes may discourage campaigning and reduce voter participation.

There’s a lot of uncertainty and not much campaigning has been going on in Nevada. Lee stated that he believed that this was due to the uncertainty.

Trump’s success in the campaign is due to his aggressive courting state GOP leaders. Former presidents have headlined fundraising events that raised millions for state parties. When he was President, he wooed the leaders of these parties at the White House. Since leaving office, he has hosted them at his Mar-a-Lago Resort in Florida.

“It is an advantage that no one else will have,” said Clayton Henson. He was a member of Trump’s campaign’s team and worked in the White House’s Political Affairs Department during the tenure of the former president.

The Trump campaign has focused its rule changes on ensuring that he gains from the important delegates awarded at each state’s caucus and primary.

The outcome of presidential campaigns is determined in the end by the delegates selected in each state. There are different rules in each state, Washington D.C. and the U.S. Territories that determine how delegates will be awarded to candidates. Each state will send delegates next summer to the Republican National Convention, which will be held in Milwaukee. The party will then choose its nominee.

Ginsberg stated that the way in which delegate-selection regulations are written every four years by each state can have a big impact on individual candidates, and how many delegates those candidates receive.

Trump’s success at changing the rules in advance of 2024 is a complete turnaround from his first campaign for president, he said. “The Trump campaign of 2016 was five guys in a pirate boat who didn’t have the organization to really work the rule.”

Henson stated that the Trump 2024 campaign began working on the delegate allocation rules in November. They were looking for modifications which would be beneficial to both the state parties and the campaign.

Henson explained that parties are eager to be more prominent in the primaries, and this is why they’re implementing more rules like winner-takes-all… or early caucuses. “This amounts to a set of rules that favors the frontrunner and allocates delegates quickly.”

Josh Putnam is a political scientist and FrontloadingHQ’s president who focuses on presidential nomination processes. He says that the work began in earnest in the early 2000s. In 2019, changes were made to 30 states and territory. The rules were changed to eliminate proportional allocation of delegates, which allows multiple candidates in a given state to win delegates, and instead use winner-takes-all. In some states, the delegates are awarded according to the results of caucuses held by GOP activists who remain loyal Trump supporters, and not based on official state primaries.

He wrote in March that “the Trump team was unusually proactive in nudging states parties towards changes for 2020 which 1) made it easier to Trump to gobble up delegate as the nomination process progressed through the calendar contests, and 2) made the multiple candidates win delegates much more difficult.”

Opinion polls indicate that in 2024, the former president has a clear lead over his rivals for the GOP nomination. In a survey conducted by UC Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times earlier this month, Trump received the support of 55% of California Republican voters compared to 16% of his main challenger, Florida Governor. Ron DeSantis. If Trump maintains that level of support during California’s primary in March, he’ll win all 169 of the delegates in the state — the most in the country and 14% of the delegates needed to win the GOP nod.

DeSantis supporters said they were focused on courting voters, rather than trying modify state party protocol.

Ken Cuccinelli is the founder of Never Back Down, a super PAC that supports DeSantis. He said: “The effort we spend on delegate rules is virtually zero.” It’s only one/10000th of what we are doing. “But talking to voters, is a large part of what we are doing.”

He said that the Trump campaign has focused on the delegate rules, because they recognize that DeSantis poses the greatest threat to the former President’s presidential candidacy.

“He knows his opponent — Ron DeSantis. This is a two person race. “They’ve spent tens and millions of dollars to attack DeSantis,” said Cuccinelli. “DeSantis has the highest favorables of the race.” They’re doing it because they want to play the delegate rules. We don’t do that. We’re just playing defense, and we’re certainly not trying to manipulate the rules. We’re just trying to prevent them from being rigged.

DeSantis super PAC reduced its efforts in California, Nevada, and other states due to the decisions made to alter the delegate allocation process. The supporters of the group had already knocked at about 130,000 Californian doors.

This was a major factor in our decision. “We started door-knocking in California with the expectation that rules would be consistent,” Cuccinelli stated.

He said that they wouldn’t have begun their campaign in the state had they known that the state GOP was going to change its rules to reward campaigns that are on the airwaves. “We answered many questions one-onone, and we met with a large number of voters.”

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