North Texas Republicans expect the unexpected at Trump’s convention

Brian Bledsoe isn’t quite sure what to expect at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week.

A first-time delegate, the Grapevine man said he wanted the chance to serve and represent the Tea Party at the national level.

But with New York billionaire Donald Trump leading the show as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, no one really knows how this week geared to rally party faithful will go.

“I don’t know what to expect,” said Bledsoe, 36. “There’s talk about unbinding delegates and many other things.

“I definitely believe this is going to be anything but boring.”

He and the thousands of Republicans in Cleveland this week know this convention may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience in an already unusual election year that saw Trump emerge victorious from a field of 17 GOP candidates that included a Texas favorite, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

But some heading to the convention are disheartened.

“There’s great frustration,” said Bill Eastland, an Arlington delegate and former member of the state Republican Executive Committee. “We had conservative candidates this year running as Republicans, promising to reduce the size of government and fulfill the Goldwater/Reagan promise.

“It looked like this year we could finally do it,” the 68-year-old said. “Then Donald Trump came in and upset the apple cart. None of us trust Donald Trump to do anything he’s promising to do.”

Party officials have yet to fully embrace Trump; a number of former candidates have yet to endorse the presumptive presidential nominee.

And a number of high-profile politicians — from former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush to former GOP presidential nominee John McCain — have said they won’t attend this year’s convention.

Former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, will be among the absent as well.

“The likelihood of this year’s convention meeting the goals of a typical convention went out the window when Trump became the de facto nominee,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston. “He’s a polarizing figure within the party and outside of the party, so producing a consistent, persuadable, uniform message is going to be difficult.”

A calm convention?

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will lead the Texas delegation, since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott can’t attend because his legs and feet sustained severe burns while he was on vacation in Wyoming.

“I’m excited about the convention and looking forward to hearing from our nominee Donald Trump,” Patrick said. “I believe it’s going to be a terrific year for Republican candidates from the top of the ballot to the bottom, all across America.”

He is among the thousands of Republicans from across the country — including 155 from Texas — who are ready and willing to hear party leaders’ rallying cries this week.

Among them will be David Barton, an influential Aledo Christian conservative who was chairman of a Cruz presidential campaign PAC. This is his sixth time to serve as a national delegate.

The 68-year-old said he wanted to go to Ohio to make sure that the essence of the platform, which he has worked on for several conventions, remains the same.

“There was a lot of outside noise about reshaping the platform and taking it in a new direction … going after the issues of sexuality, marriage, morality,” said Barton, founder of Wallbuilders, a group dedicated to the idea that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation and should embrace those roots.

“We want to make sure the platform does not undergo substantial changes.”

Barton, one of two Texans who serve on the platform committee, is now less worried there will be efforts to alter the party platform.

“We thought for a good while that the battle would be at the Rules Committee, then the Credentials Committee, then the Platform Committee,” Barton said. “Now it looks like there’s not going to be a battle at all.

“I think it will be a fairly calm, unified convention.”

Team Trump

Bo French, a former Fort Worth legislative candidate, will be among the throngs of first-time delegates at the convention.

He said he wanted to go to learn more about what’s going on in the party.

“Given what’s going on in our country, we need to have people there who are going to fight for the principles we believe our party should stand for,” the 46-year-old said.

French voted for Cruz in the primary but said it’s not hard to support Trump in November.

“At the end of the day, I would rather the Republican be the president over the Democrat,” he said.

As turmoil continues to swirl about Trump, and whether grassroots voters will support him in November, French said that’s just a distraction Democrats and the media are embracing.

“It takes the focus off Hillary Clinton and the disaster she is,” French said. “These are distractions to take attention away from what we ought to be focusing on: Hillary Clinton knowingly lied to the country about Benghazi.

“Even though Trump is clearly going to be the nominee, we are still talking about the problems rather than trying to unify to put up the best front in the November election,” he said. “I love Ted Cruz and I wish he [had won]. But Donald Trump will be our nominee, and he will win on the first ballot.”

‘Hostile takeover’

But what if he doesn’t?

Eastland, a longtime local precinct chairman, supports changing party rules to unbind grassroots delegates so they can “vote their will” on the first nomination ballot at the convention, rather than be bound by their state’s popular vote.

That, he said, would make it easier to nominate a “movement conservative” candidate such as Cruz.

“If you allow the majority of delegates to vote their free will this year, I think an overwhelming majority would vote for Cruz,” he said. “We are just very nervous about what will happen with Donald Trump as our nominee.

“We could lose and lose badly.”

Bledsoe, who raised much of the money needed to attend the convention through a GoFundMe page, said he is officially a Cruz delegate.

And if there’s any chance to cast a vote for Cruz, he will.

“I’m going to vote Cruz as many times as I can,” he said. “I know people are trying to do what they can to let people vote their conscience. If that happens, this could be a new ballgame.”

Many know that’s likely just wishful thinking.

But delegates say a key part of the conversation, Eastland said, is making sure that the majority of the party remains part of the conservative movement.

“If it gets turned into a populist party, then the conservative movement has to go somewhere else and cannot remain in the Republican Party,” he said. “I think Donald Trump, if he’s elected, could throw out the modern conservatives and you would have a huge war and turmoil, which would be absolutely debilitating to the party.

“You lose elections when that’s going on,” Eastland said. “Donald Trump, without realizing what he’s doing, has achieved a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

This story was originally published July 16, 2016 at 2:28 PM with the headline "North Texas Republicans expect the unexpected at Trump’s convention."