Republican Sen. [crscore]Marco Rubio[/crscore] won the District of Columbia Republican caucuses Saturday, and will apparently split the 19 delegates up for grabs with Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
An unusually high number of Republicans turned out to vote in the closed convention Saturday, in many cases waiting for two or three hours to cast their vote. Because it’s a small community in D.C. — just 26,000 registered GOP voters in a city of close to 700,000 — their votes also carried an disproportionate amount of weight. And in this unusual primary season 19 delegates could actually mean the difference between Donald Trump winning the nomination and a contested convention.
Rubio won 37 percent of the vote, followed by Kasich with 36 percent, Trump with about 14 percent and Republican Sen. [crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore] with 12 percent, reported The Associated Press. Since no candidate won a majority of the vote, the delegates will be awarded proportionally between Rubio and Kasich. Trump and Cruz won’t win any delegates, because they failed to reach the required threshold of 15 percent of the vote.
Kasich and Rubio are both banking on winning their home states of Ohio and Florida, respectively, in a momentous block of primary votes Tuesday.
“I like [Kasich’s] style,” a voter named Kerry told The Daily Caller News Foundation. He decided to vote for Kasich on the way to the convention and thinks he can win the nomination, but told TheDCNF he’d happily vote for Trump in November.
D.C. voters also elected the delegates who will represent them at the Republican National Convention in July. If no candidate has won a majority of the delegates by that time, the delegates will have the chance to decide the nominee by a series of ballots in a contested convention.
Voters lined up around the block at the Lowes Madison Hotel downtown beginning at 10 a.m. and casting the last votes just after 7 p.m., although the polls technically closed at 4 p.m., because of the unusually high turnout.
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