Mich. GOP big-wig Yob loses bizarre battle for Virg. Islands delegates

UPDATE: On Tuesday afternoon, a member of the Virgin Islands GOP certification committee issued a statement that disputed the disqualification of John Yob and other VI delegates to the Republican national convention. Yob posted the remarks of James Oliver on Twitter, which asserted that the VI delegation cannot be certified until all disputes are addressed by a subcommittee.

Former Rand Paul national political director John Yob, a fairly slippery character in Michigan Republican politics for years, has lost his bid to pull off a coup in the U.S. Virgin Islands and control “uncommitted” delegates that could tip the scales at a contested GOP national convention.

In the process, it appears that the Virgin Islands received a quick lesson in the bloody battles that preoccupy the Michigan Republican Party. In fact, one islands official alleged in the middle of this fight that a prominent Yob ally was a felon and a Nazi. Oh boy.

Tensions escalated from there as a Yob website, ConventionChaos.com, outlined his plans to upend the politics of the VI’s three main islands, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News.

But an announcement issued earlier today by a VI party officials said that Yob, his wife, and other Virgin Islands delegates elected at the March 10 caucus were declared ineligible.

After the Grand Rapids political consultant had written a book, “Chaos,” in which he fantasized about  the myriad political opportunities that would be presented to “free agents” at a brokered convention in Cleveland this summer, Yob showed up at a St. John elections office in January and declared that he and his wife, Erica, would run as delegates in the VI caucus process. Another couple, political allies that followed the same path, also declared their candidacies.

Initially, officials quickly disqualified Yob and his wife, Erica, because they had established residence on the islands just a week earlier, far short of the requirements. Though he was accused of election fraud, Yob protested the ruling and his plan yielded a slate of uncommitted delegates at the caucus that were apparently loyal to him, not to a presidential candidate. Somehow, Yob emerged as the top vote-getter at the VI caucus.

Newcomer becomes top vote-getter

To be clear, despite a big turnout by VI standards, Yob snared just 131 votes. One party official said Yob’s surprising performance could be attributed to unusual ground game tactics, by VI standards, as he reportedly threw cocktail parties and sent solicitous letters to Republican activists to curry favor.

Because of convoluted national GOP rules with far-reaching implications, plus the prospect that presidential frontrunner Donald Trump could come up just short of the 1,237 national delegates needed to clinch the nomination, the minuscule VI delegation might play an important part on the national convention floor.

Yob

What’s intriguing for Michigan political observers is that, thousands of miles away from the Great Lakes State, two prominent GOP operatives – Yob and former state Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis – were working at odds behind the scenes to control the nomination contests in territories such as American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the VI.

In recent weeks, the contest produced head-to-head warfare, with Yob setting his sights on delegates and supposedly a plan to insert a new VI party chairman to his liking. Anuzis currently has somewhat of a hold on the party in the islands, including the GOP executive director.

Anuzis, as a senior adviser to Ted Cruz, and Yob – the two are bitter political enemies – both realized that current GOP convention rules placed an extraordinary amount of weight on the delegate outcomes in these tiny territories. A rule leftover from 2012 says that a candidate must post wins in eight states – or territories – to have his name placed in nomination at the convention.  That’s a major hurdle.

Convention manipulations ahead

With a stop-Trump movement in full motion, Yob told Politico last week that the nomination process will not become clear until the July 18-21 convention. “The Rules Committee that is elected by the convention delegates will ultimately clarify,” said Yob, who in the past has worked for Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Rick Santorum before siding in 2016 with Paul last summer.

Last week, a maverick GOP activist, attorney Curly Haugland, stepped up to claim that convention delegates selecting a nominee in Cleveland are not bound by their state’s primary/caucus outcome. He will introduce proposed changes before the convention Rules Committee to assert that the practice of binding delegates to statewide votes is improper and unenforceable.

With the Cruz campaign desperately trying to derail the Trump campaign, Haugland’s legal theories, considered eccentric in the past, now enjoy a degree of deference from Anuzis.

Anuzis

“Ironically, it’s the establishment that might find Curly’s interpretation of greatest value,” said Anuzis, who started out the campaign season as Cruz’s Michigan campaign chair. “It might be the majority that now thinks that his position might be the most valuable one.”

Meanwhile, Yob claims that his family has visited VI for several years and happened to move there permanently just as his prediction of convention chaos began to play out. Yet, the residency rule is not what crushed his plans, it was an obscure rule that says:

“Under rule 11 of the Rules of the Virgin Islands Republican Party GOP National Convention Caucus, elected delegates had five days to “confirm, in writing, that he or she accepts election” and that they are “willing and able” to attend the 2016 Republican National Convention to be held in Cleveland, Ohio.”

The Yob slate’s failure to meet that 5-day rule led VI party Chairman John Canegata to determine that alternate delegates had prevailed, resulting in two delegates for ex-candidate Marco Rubio, two uncommitted, and one each for Cruz and Trump.

Despite all this haggling and strategizing over a minimal slice of the nomination pie, the reality is that some veteran GOP rules experts now say that the 2012 rule requiring an eight-state/territory threshold could very likely be altered or eliminated by the Rules Committee in Cleveland.

That could make the Virgin Islands Republicans, and the relentless efforts to woo them, irrelevant.

At a minimum there is this fact — the islands residents do not qualify to vote in the November general election.