GOP chairman pushes back against delegate process complaints
The tweet by Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus comes after GOP front-runner Donald Trump bashed the delegate selection process.
Why two of Donald Trump’s children won’t get to vote for him
Donald Trump likes to boast about bringing new voters to the polls. But there’s two who won’t be showing up -- and they’re his children.
Trump confirmed that Ivanka, 34, and Eric, 32, missed a registration deadline.
“They didn’t register in time,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” during a call-in Monday. “So they feel very, very guilty.”
Trump said the deadline was a year in advance. It was actually March 25 for new voters and October for voters who want to change party registration. (The primary is closed, meaning only Republicans can vote on the GOP side.)
Both children are registered to vote, but not enrolled in a party, according to ABC News, citing state election records.
Trump is still ahead in polls in his home state of New York, which is set to hold its primary April 19. But every vote matters, especially the ones from the people Trump often brings up on stage during primary-night speeches.
“No more allowance,” Trump joked, after one of the hosts prompted him.
‘We need an outsider like Trump,’ says this two-time Obama voter
On the vacant, sun-blasted streets southwest of the Strip, Joe Cervantes sees an America on the decline.
Sporting a fedora and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt as he walks his chow chow, the 67-year-old retired car salesman grumbled when he passes a neighbor’s house with weeds in the rocks. Three cars with no license plates are parked outside.
Foreigners bought the place in foreclosure and didn’t care who they rented to, he said. Next door to him, he added, low-income renters tore up the place so badly the tile floors needed to be replaced.
At a house around the corner, he said, he’s noticed a man always outside talking on his cellphone in a foreign language; Cervantes said he wonders whether he should call the police.
For Cervantes, life in these sand-blown suburbs has come to look like much that has gone wrong with the rest of the country.
The homes are cheap and falling apart, he said, because “illegals” did the work and contractors were able to bribe the building inspectors.
Foreclosures swept through the neighborhood, he said, and he almost lost his own home in the Great Recession because politicians stopped protecting the interests of regular Americans.
He blames the same politicians for letting his factory job back in Wisconsin go to Mexico in 1982.
The way Cervantes sees it, the government is a high-stakes card game at which he and most Americans never get a seat.
He voted for President Obama but has twice been disappointed. This election, the name he is betting on is emblazoned in gold on the Vegas skyline: Trump.
Trump’s donations don’t come from his own wallet, report says
As he campaigns, Donald Trump touts his personal generosity, frequently saying that he given $102 million to charity in recent years.
But none of that has been in the form of cash directly from Trump, a Washington Post investigation found. Trump stopped giving money to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in 2009, according to the report. Groups received donations in the form of free plane rides or rounds of golf instead, it said.
Trump does make donations himself but doesn’t share details publicly, an executive of the Trump Organization said.
“We want to keep them quiet,” Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, told the Post. “He doesn’t want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”
Trump: The delegate process is a ‘crooked deal’
Donald Trump on Monday expressed outrage at the Republican primary process after he lost 34 delegates in Colorado to rival Ted Cruz over the weekend, labeling the party nominating contest “undemocratic.”
Trump said delegate votes overrode voters’ opinions. Colorado Republicans canceled their caucuses after a national party rule change required that delegates support the winner of those contests, and instead chose delegates at their state convention over the weekend.
“It’s a crooked deal,” Trump said on “Fox and Friends.” “...I’ve got millions more votes — millions, not just a couple — millions more votes than Cruz.”
But Trump’s logic ignores that the nominating process is not an open governmental election; it is an internal affair, subject to the rules of the Republican Party. The system has tripped up Trump of late, as Cruz, who has been strategizing for months over how to win delegates, scooped up several in states where Trump won popular support.
Cruz trails Trump in the delegate count, 743-545. GOP candidates need a total of 1,237 delegate votes to secure the party’s nomination for president.
Delegate math doesn’t add up for Bernie Sanders in California
Reformers can kill all the fun. There’s no better example than the California battle shaping up between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Because of past do-gooders, neither candidate can really run up a big score in the June 7 presidential primary.
Most significantly, it will be virtually impossible for Sanders to catch Clinton in the delegate race, even if he achieves a stunning upset.
California will send 546 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the last week in July. That will be by far the largest state bloc and 23% of the total needed to nominate the party’s presidential candidate.
After exchanging harsh words last week, Clinton and Sanders get back on message
For the Democratic presidential candidates, Sunday served as a metaphor for the 2016 race in its entirety and the raucous April 19 New York primary contest in particular.
Hillary Clinton traversed the middle-class Jamaica area of Queens to visit three African American churches. She is leaning heavily on that traditional pillar of power in the Democratic Party as she seeks another victory in the state where she won two Senate races and the 2008 presidential primary.
Over and over, she touted her support for President Obama and her marriage to and partnership with another president, Bill Clinton, suggesting that she is an extension of two administrations hugely popular among Democrats.