Is Ted Cruz Playing Dirty To Get Delegates?

A recent report on Fox News is saying that Republican candidate Ted Cruz is silently winning over delegates, and recently grabbed up more in Maine over the weekend.

The controversial Maine Tea Party Governor, Paul LePage, is reportedly calling foul on this because Ted Cruz apparently reneged on his promise that he would support a “unity-ticket” of delegates.

The “unity-ticket” referred to goes back to a promise made by Ted Cruz’s Political Director for the Northeast, David Sawyer, in March.

An article by CBS News explains this deal and why LePage feels they were “stabbed in the back.”

“The ‘unity ticket’ of candidates, which the Trump and Kasich campaigns agreed to, would have assured that delegate slots went to supporters of each candidate on a proportional basis–in other words, to correspond with the candidates’ levels of support in the Maine caucuses back in March. That would have allocated 12 to Ted Cruz, 9 to Trump, and 2 to Kasich.”

A recent write-up by the Inquisitr refers to Donald Trump’s willingness to avoid a contested convention, which Ted Cruz and John Kasich are trying to create, but also refer to Trump’s accusations against Ted Cruz for playing dirty.

WATCH: Trump supporter confronts @tedcruz over delegate process: https://t.co/1bYiZ9DuLA https://t.co/jkT4BVvwa2

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 26, 2016

CNN originally covered this story and from the start, alludes to the idea that Ted Cruz is somehow using the delegation selection process to his advantage, winning almost all delegates except for LePage, who is a delegate for Donald Trump.

That’s nineteen out of twenty, and LePage wasted no time to target Ted Cruz.

“Cruz’s Northeast political director David Sawyer lied to us and broke the deal. Sawyer stabbed us in the back, reneged on the unity slate and betrayed the people of Maine. As we have seen throughout the country, Cruz’s national campaign is run by greedy political hooligans.”

The Cruz campaign’s response to this is that they never formally agreed to a deal, which shows that this is more than just another incendiary outburst by the Governor, who has been known to be as “politically incorrect” as Trump.

The article referred to by the Inquisitr points to the similarities between Trump’s accusations against Ted Cruz over corruption with his delegates, when even the Trump camp has been accused of sending an aid to Delaware to force them to pledge to him.

Currently, media sources have been reporting that both Cruz and Kasich have decided to unite and plan out how they’re going to broker delegates along the way to the convention, before Donald Trump can take them all.

According to POLITICO, Cruz crushed Trump in his delegate reach, winning at least 65 of the 94 delegates, but Kentucky’s 25 have yet to reveal who they’re loyal to.

In this case, if Ted Cruz is able to get the loyalty of those delegates for the second ballot for a possible contested convention, the report states he could surpass Trump.

The report, however, also points out to readers that this may not even matter, since the first ballot of primaries and caucuses in states where Trump led because those delegates are required to vote based on the results of the election, in which case Donald Trump is leading 845 to Ted Cruz’s 559.

It also makes clear that the strategy Ted Cruz is using is perhaps not crooked, so much as something that no one really thought about, which is to focus on loyalists to cause trouble along the way.

In which case, it can serve him well to make Trump sweat a bit and potentially generate the illusion that Ted Cruz is there to take it from the front-runner in a party that doesn’t want Trump.

[Photo by Michael Conroy/AP Photo]