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Donald Trump Will Now Have More Influence Over Republican Convention Planning

by Nick Castele

Donald Trump will begin having more influence over the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, now that he’s the last GOP candidate left in the race for president. 

Organizers have been planning for some time for a contested convention, in which candidates would have competed for delegates’ votes through multiple ballots on the floor of Quicken Loans Arena. Now that Ted Cruz and John Kasich have suspended their campaigns, that’s all changed.

“So what is going to begin happening is we will start reaching out to the Trump campaign,” said Dave O’Neil, the deputy press secretary with the RNC’s Committee on Arrangements.

O’Neil said these conversations with the Trump campaign begin “almost immediately.”

“We go to them and we sort of look for a little bit of additional input. What would they like to see done, maybe they want this changed a little bit, or maybe they want this changed a little bit, ” he said. “And we try to make those changes happen over the course of the next ten weeks here.”

Just what the apparent Republican nominee will recommend—that isn’t quite clear yet. 

Trump told the New York Times this week the event would be “informative,” “smart” and “different,” saying, “The last Republican convention was extraordinarily boring.”

Nick Castele was a senior reporter covering politics and government for Ideastream Public Media. He worked as a reporter for Ideastream from 2012-2022.