Welcome to Trail Mix, a fun but nutritious snack for your election news diet. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com.
This week, we dive into the Trump campaign’s strangely premature plans for a contested convention. Plus, a perennial Michigan candidate who can’t untag himself from photos with some of the recently convicted fake electors.
As the Trump campaign tells it, the 2024 Republican presidential primary is already over.
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Six months before the first ballots are cast, the former president and his team are riding high on a commanding lead in the polls—and more than enough bravado.
“We’re not going to lose Iowa,” Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s top two campaign advisers, said on a podcast in June. “Just not gonna happen. We’re just not. And we’re not going to lose New Hampshire. The data is where it needs to be.”
Behind the scenes, however, the Trump team is quietly planning for the most chaotic outcome of a bitter primary war: a fight on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next July.
According to five Republicans familiar with the discussions, Trump and his team are making a concerted push to ensure that the convention is packed with loyalists who could fortify their position, should another candidate win enough delegates during the primary to potentially maneuver for the nomination.
The effort includes calls from Trump and his advisers to senior party leadership in early primary states as well as in delegate-rich states later in the calendar, like California, Florida, and Michigan, asking for updates on the delegate selection process, pushing for the selection of MAGA loyalists, and generally emphasizing the importance of the process.
“I fully expect insider games in Milwaukee, same as all experienced convention hands,” a longtime Trump adviser told The Daily Beast.
In Trumpworld, a sense of paranoia abounds over the possibility his foes try to block his path back to the nomination. Their memories of the contested convention chatter from 2016 still linger, especially because the former president and his orbit remain convinced that the same forces that wanted to stop him then are the same ones backing rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis now.
“There’s gonna be a big fight on the floor with the Republican candidates,” one Republican familiar with the discussions told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to relay the sensitive conversations.
“Trump is already lobbying the people who are going to that convention to prepare for that. He’s saying, ‘You need to get ready, this is going to be our biggest battle,’” they said. “He is lining them up very much the same way he did for January 6. That’s going to be a mess.”
In planning for a contested convention, several Republicans said, Trump and his team might also be navigating his most serious political threat: his two existing criminal indictments and two others in the wings.
By locking up loyalists in delegate slates now, Trump’s team could be guarding against the possibility that any criminal trials, or even convictions, would prevent him from winning the nomination. The most acute threat would be any carve-outs in state party rules that could free delegates to vote for a non-indicted or convicted candidate, even if Trump cleans up in their state.
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
Ahead of the primary contests, each state party will choose the activists who serve as their delegates to the national convention in July 2024. While those delegates will technically be bound to candidates in numbers based on their state’s election results, campaigns have historically worked to fill state delegate slates with their own supporters.
If a candidate fails to reach the required delegate threshold to win the nomination, some of those delegates are released to vote however they want—letting the convention decide the party nominee.
For decades, party conventions played the decisive role in the primary process. But the two major parties reformed their rules to emphasize primary election results following the violent and chaotic 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
In 2016, as Trump steamrolled his way to the nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had amassed enough votes and courted enough delegates to raise the prospect of a floor fight where the GOP establishment could wrest the nomination away from Trump. But the chatter ultimately petered out.
Eight years later, Trump and his allies now constitute the GOP establishment. Currently, none of Trump’s challengers appear to have the resources, strategy, or appeal required to knock him off course—though DeSantis’ operation is stocked with veterans of the Cruz 2016 effort, which only adds to Trumpworld’s convention paranoia.
The DeSantis campaign had initially indicated it might try Cruz’s 2016 strategy of banking as many delegates as possible through the whole primary calendar, but that plan seems to be changing as the governor’s bid fails to gain traction. No other campaign has made any indication they are strategizing much beyond the early primary states.
Still, Trumpworld’s concerns about a contested convention seem to center on the Florida governor more than any other rival. A Trump-aligned consultant, confirming the contested convention buzz, said the DeSantis operation is “gonna do everything they can to make it to the convention,” but also tried to shed doubt on whether it will have enough cash to make it to Iowa.
The Trump team has kept close tabs on rule changes to the primary process in state parties across the country, as Reuters reported last month. Any changes that would divvy up delegates proportional to candidates’ vote shares in the primary—and not on a winner take all basis—are seen by MAGA loyalists as a red line, with concerns that a candidate like DeSantis could rack up delegates without winning a state outright.
“There’s a lot of funny business going on,” the Trumpworld consultant said. “The base is not gonna be happy if there’s any funny business.”
This time around, the Trump campaign is looking to come to the convention assured there will be no surprises.
Two Republicans who spoke to The Daily Beast for this story recalled recent Trump efforts to get more MAGA loyalists installed as national RNC committee members, who are automatic delegates to the convention. The former president’s team was especially interested to screen candidates based on how they might vote on a hypothetical second ballot at the 2024 convention, where they wouldn’t be bound by their states’ voting results.
Overall, the aggressive push from the former president and his top advisers has some Republicans spooked.
“If you’ve heard the tapes coming out of Georgia, he’s starting to do that with different people in the state,” a New Hampshire Republican familiar with the contested convention conversations told The Daily Beast, referring to Trump’s campaign to pressure state officials to overturn the 2020 election in his favor.
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
The context for Trump’s push now, of course, is quite different. But the reaction hasn’t been much better, the GOP source added. “Most people,” they said, “are staying quiet.”
Fake elector friends. Freshman Rep. John James (R-MI), who has seemingly run for or considered every major office in that battleground state, may be done with the Big Lie now that he’s settled into life as a mainstream, swing district GOP congressman.
But it ain’t done with him. Following the news this week that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel will criminally charge 16 Michiganders allegedly involved in a “fake elector” plot to overturn the 2020 election, James has stayed quiet, despite his prominent past role in amplifying bogus election fraud claims in the state.
It turns out that James’ ties to the fake electors are deeper than was clear at first. Facebook photos obtained by The Daily Beast show him posing for photos with two of the indicted fake electors, Kathy Berden and Meshawn Maddock, including one where they were all at a fundraiser together and another where James thanks Maddock for putting on an event for him.
A spokesperson for James, a top target of House Democrats in 2024, did not respond to a request for comment.
Lincoln notes. The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump group, made a $20,000 ad splash in New Hampshire to counter the centrist group No Labels’ town hall in the state this week that teased a third-party 2024 presidential bid, Trail Mix can report.
The 60-second ad, which ran heavily on local NPR affiliate radio station NHPR, name-dropped one of No Labels’ reported donors—the Texas billionaire and Clarence Thomas pal Harlan Crow—and argued that a third party bid would ensure a second Trump term.
In what could be an outlier or the start of an even more alarming trend for DeSantis, a new Kaplan poll had the Florida governor tied for second place with “anti-woke” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—at a measly 12 percent. Trump’s lead is over 30 points in this poll; he tops the field at 48 percent.
“As we move forward, it’s likely we’ll see the lower-tier candidates drop off,” pollster Doug Kaplan said in the Friday release, “and their voters will either return to Trump or rally behind rising stars like Ramaswamy or DeSantis.”
No Labels, No Plans, No Problem. Your humble Trail Mix author saw the No Labels show up close on Monday and reported it offered little in the way of substance despite its conspicuous talk of sober-minded solutions.
Biden bucks. While President Joe Biden has been easing into his reelection campaign with official stops boosting his infrastructure record, his campaign has quietly become a fundraising juggernaut, The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger reports.
Where’s the beef? The Senate GOP’s top recruit in Montana, Tim Sheehy, is leaning on his experience as a rancher in hopes of challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D). But The Daily Beast’s Sam Brodey found that Sheehy didn’t pay the basic livestock taxes required of every rancher in the state.
On DeRopes. The long-hinted DeSantis campaign shakeup is here: the governor plans to trim down his events, open up media access, and get closer to voters, NBC News’ Dasha Burns reports.
