California Delegation Team Members Hit with Norovirus in Sandusky

The California delegates can’t catch a break with this one. Already peeved about their Sandusky accommodations (see earlier story below), the group is now dealing with norovirus — aka the “winter vomiting bug.” Eleven planners for the delegates are being tested and are confined to their rooms at Kalahari, according to WKYC’s Phil Trexler.

For us downtown, the RNC weirdness suddenly doesn’t seem so frustrating.

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Originally published May 2:

We’ve all known that various attendees of the Republican National Convention will be placed at odd locations — some may choose to rent out Jeffrey Dahmer’s home in Bath, for example, but others don’t have much of a say in the matter. Like California Republicans.

The CA GOP leadership is pissed about their Sandusky accommodations — 66 miles away from the fun in downtown Cleveland. 

“We’re pretty bitter about that,” Harmeet Dhillon, vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, tells CNN. “It sucks to be California, we’re like the ugly stepchild. They need us for our cash and our donors, they don’t need us for anything else.”

And, yeah, it’s quite likely that California will “vote blue” in November, so it’s not like the Republican Party in that state is gonna do much to help out Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or whomever. Past RNCs have elicited much the same treatment for the California GOP; in Tampa in 2012, for instance, party members had to take an hour-and-a-half bus ride — including transfers! — to get back to their hotels, according to Sue Caro, the former chairwoman of the Alameda County Republican Party. And that trip was only half of the distance of the Cleveland-to-Sandusky circuit.

The upshot? Valravn is right up the road.

CNN exits its story with an amusing anecdote:

Matt Shupe, a California Republican operative, is staying with Matt Shupe, a Cleveland Democrat.

California’s Shupe, who works for Chavez, Dhillon and other Republicans, said he looked up every other Matt Shupe he could find when he joined Facebook 10 years ago. He kept in touch off and on with Cleveland Matt Shupe and his wife over the years.

“When all this kinda happened I said, ‘Hey, I know someone in Cleveland,'” California Shupe said. “So I started talking to him and his wife and they said I can come and stay with them.”

Cleveland Shupe’s law office is right next to the convention site, so California Shupe is going to carpool with him.

“His law office is literally in the business park where the convention is happening,” California Shupe said. “So I’m going to go crash with Matt Shupe and he’s gonna let me carpool into the convention with him.”

This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2016.