Trump supporters in Albany. | AP Photo/Mike Groll Trump allies organize shadow campaign for New York delegates

ALBANY — Before voters even head to the polls next week, the Republicans running for president are gearing up for a quieter fight among party insiders over the selection of the actual delegates New York sends to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

The law only requires the state's delegates to vote for their assigned candidate on the first convention ballot, leaving them legally free to support whomever they wish if no candidate immediately captures the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination. This quirk has given the party establishment here (loathed by supporters of Donald Trump) a boost of relevance as all three major party candidates are expected for a fundraising dinner Thursday night for the Republican State Committee, whose members, and leaders, will select the delegates.

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“You’ve now got two battles here: the battle for voters on April 19th, and then the battle over delegates whenever those caucus meetings are held. The Trump campaign wants to make sure that what happened to them in Colorado doesn’t happen here,” said Brendan Quinn, a political consultant who was the party’s executive director in the late 1990s. “In the past, the delegates only cared about what party they were being invited to. Now, there will be people from each campaign hanging out in each hotel bar watching what’s going on.”

Trump is poised to very well in the first contest, clearing 50 percent in most statewide polls as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz hover around 20 percent. One recent survey suggested Kasich is starting to pull ahead into second.

The majority threshold is key: three delegates are at stake in each of the state’s 27 congressional districts and a candidate can take home all three if he wins 50 percent of the vote. If no one wins an outright majority, the leading candidate takes two delegates and the runner-up, provided he wins more than 20 percent of the vote, takes one.

Another 14 at-large delegates that will be selected by the full state committee and are likely to include Ed Cox, the party chairman, as well as Jennifer Saul Rich and Charles Joyce, New York’s representatives on the Republican National Committee. All are expected at Thursday night's dinner at the Hyatt adjacent to Grand Central Terminal.

The exact delegate selection hasn’t happened yet, and this year it will be the party, not the campaigns, that choose. That’s a change from previous years, when campaigns would often pick their own donors (or relatives) for a normally meaningless plum. Tensions in 2012 culminated in a barroom scuffle between Rob Cole, who was working for Mitt Romney’s campaign, and Onondaga County Republican Chairman Tom Dadey, who was passed over as a delegate.

Cox and the state committee last year adopted a system whereby the state committee people in each congressional district will vote for delegates at special caucus meetings in early May, said Jeff Buley, a longtime counsel to the State Committee.

Figuring out exactly who gets to vote where is far from straightforward. A male and female committee person is elected from each county within each State Assembly district, a quirk that balances the voting power of upstate areas where Assembly districts cross county lines and downstate areas where single counties have multiple representatives. Those committee people will then be split up by congressional district, Buley said, and their votes at the caucus will be weighted according to voter enrollment.

Committee people include everybody from little old ladies who stuff envelopes at party headquarters to the staffers of state and local officials, and the push to reach them has already begun.

Kasich has been the most explicit about his efforts here, spending two hours this week in closed-door sessions with state legislators. He’s also hired a team of veteran operatives, including Lynn Krogh, the political director for Rick Lazio’s 2010 gubernatorial effort, Otsego County Republican Chairman Vince Casale and Ryan Moses, a veteran of Gov. George Pataki’s administration.

Assemblyman Ed Ra, a Long Island Republican who met with Kasich at the tony Fort Orange Club, said he was not explicit about his request but his intent was clear.

“I think they’re trying to get to different elected officials because obviously their strategy isn’t a statewide one where they’re trying to win New York,” Ra said. “Trying to get to local elected officials makes sense for what his end game is.”

The Ohio governor was nonplussed about his efforts when asked by reporters, and coupled them with a localized pitch about electability — that Republicans would lose their thin majority in the State Senate if Trump or Cruz were the GOP nominee.

“Things are done inside the rules. It’s just the way that it works,” Kasich told reporters Monday, next to the State Capitol’s Million Dollar staircase. “You’ve got to go out and hunt delegates. That’s part of what this is about.”

Trump has been attacking his rivals for playing the inside game, after seeing Cruz outmaneuver him in states like South Carolina, Colorado and now Nebraska. During his recent upstate rallies, Trump has said party leaders should be “ashamed” for breaking with the spirit of rank-and-file voters.

Trump's home-state allies are working to prevent a similar situation here, said Nick Langworthy, chairman of the Erie County Republican Committee.

“How many county chairs will say, wow, I’ve got to pick my state senator? So where do they really stand? Does that jive with the candidates you’re working with? There’s going to be a lot of conflicting agendas,” he said. “There’s been a new emphasis placed on it within the Trump campaign, and there will be far more sophisticated efforts there shortly.

"Some of this stuff is going to be real bloody knuckles,” he said.

Langworthy is working closely with Carl Paladino, a Buffalo developer whose 2010 gubernatorial campaign was fueled by much the same populist, damn-them-all outrage that has propelled Trump to the front of the pack. Paladino’s helpers include Michael Caputo, a protégé of Trump adviser Roger Stone and John Haggerty, an operative from Queens who was imprisoned for misdirecting campaign contributions made by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Trump campaign is also in the process of hiring John Sweeney, a longtime operative, election lawyer and former congressman. Sweeney, a recovering alcoholic, lost his seat to now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2006 amid allegations of domestic violence.

Conflict is unlikely to occur in areas like Long Island or Western New York, where Trump has the support of both voters and party leaders, but rather in parts of the state where local leaders are backing other candidates.

That could include the Capital Region, where Cruz rallied at a Christian school last week and was introduced by Schenectady County Republican Chairman Mike Cuevas.

Cuevas has endorsed Cruz, and says that after decades of serving the GOP as a leader and election lawyer, he’s well-equipped to be a delegate.

“Delegates are still people,” Cuevas said, insisting his support of Cruz shouldn’t matter. “They’re all going to have their own individual preferences, so I don’t think it’s going to be the kind of beauty contest as it might have been in the past. I expect there to be a lot of thoughtful consideration on behalf of each of our state committee people when we convene.”