Guam Votes Tonight In The Republican Primary And They’re Just As Mad At Washington As We Are

by Dennis Lennox, Injo.com March 11, 2016 (excerpt)

Eight thousand miles from Washington are American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Typically overlooked in presidential election, the three U.S. territories in the Pacific are front and center in the campaign for this year’s Republican Party nomination.

That’s because the territories are considered a state under GOP rules and thus have an equal say in the nomination, despite being unable to vote for president in November’s general election.

With every delegate mattering, the votes in Guam at 6 p.m. tonight (9 a.m. Saturday in Guam), the Northern Marianas Tuesday and American Samoa on March 22 will determine whether the campaign for the party’s nomination continues through spring and perhaps all the way to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

I know the importance of the territories because instead of taking to the hustings in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, I was island hopping across the territories and Hawaii — encountering typhoons and an epidemic of dengue fever — for Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign.

Along the way I courted Guam Gov. Eddie Calvo, who not only endorsed Cruz but also pledged all of Guam’s convention delegates to him. I spoke to chambers of commerce and Rotary clubs, met village mayors, went to churches, brought back the concerns of citizens and ensured Cruz conveyed his condolences on the death of N.M.I. Gov. Eloy Inos before even President Barack Obama did so. I also became the first GOP presidential campaign surrogate to ever visit American Samoa’s capital of Pago Pago, the only U.S. soil south of the equator.

I learned many of the voters in the territories have the same underlying frustration and distrust of Washington as voters in the states, the big difference being voters in the states have full representation. That isn’t the case in the territories, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.

read … Guam Votes Tonight 

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