With Carly Fiorina Pick, Cruz Dominates California GOP Convention Schedule

In choosing former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has achieved a small but significant scheduling coup: he will now dominate the whole second day of the California Republican Convention this weekend.

Fiorina was already scheduled to give the convention’s final address, on Saturday evening. Cruz is scheduled to speak during the day. That will give the Cruz-Fiorina ticket a full day to make their case to California’s Republican voters.

Frontrunner Donald Trump is scheduled to address the convention first on Friday, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich, running a distant third, is scheduled to deliver a speech on Friday evening.

Unlike other state parties, the California Republican Party does not select its delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) at its state meeting. Rather, each candidate presents the party with a slate of delegates and alternates, who will attend the RNC in Cleveland in July if their campaign wins the congressional district they are assigned to represent.

However, the convention will be crucial in setting the tone for the decisive five-week primary. Trump will arrive with several recent primary victories in hand, but Cruz hopes that selecting Fiorina — who hails from the Golden State, and ran for Senate there in 2010 — will help him build momentum.

As of this writing, neither Trump nor Kasich seems to be prepared to announce a vice presidential pick in the near future. If they did so, it is unlikely the California convention would be able to schedule additional time for their running mates. Fiorina was scheduled to address the meeting long before this week’s events.

As drama builds on the Republican side, Democrats are starting to feel a sense of inevitability about Hillary Clinton’s progress against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). On Wednesday, the Sanders campaign reportedly began laying off field staff.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new e-book, Leadership Secrets of the Kings and Prophets: What the Bible’s Struggles Teach Us About Today, is on sale through Amazon Kindle Direct. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.