Iowa GOP chair: Party will back nominee — even if Trump wins

MUSCATINE - The chairman of the state Republican Party on Monday night said he is working to dispel rumors of a brokered GOP convention, saying there is no benefit in attempting to undermine any candidate.

The delegates awarded through state caucuses and primaries, he said, will reflect the votes of people in those states, chairman Jeff Kaufmann of Wilton said.

'If you want to know how we're going to vote, how I'm going to vote, when we go to convention, we mirror exactly what our caucuses do,” he told local Republicans at River's Edge Gallery.

Kaufmann encouraged Republicans to rally behind the party's nominee, whoever that may be.

'All of these four gentleman that are left all have their pros and cons,” Kaufmann said. 'But if you take number four, whoever that person is, ... they will be multiple times better than Hillary Clinton.”

Kaufmann told the Muscatine Journal that the Republican Party would back Donald Trump, if Trump wins the nomination.

'Mr. Trump is exercising his First Amendment rights, and shame on anybody that wants to take them away from him,” Kaufmann said of Chicago protests that stopped a Trump rally over the weekend. 'If folks want to just get up out of their homes because they just do not like that message and protest, go for it, and if we need to enlarge the area for them to stand in, we'll do that.

'But that's not what this is about,” he said. 'This is about moveon.org trying to make points, and both sides have the right for their First Amendment rights, and they don't have the right to shut down the event, any more than Donald Trump has the right to tell them they can't stand outside the event.”

Kaufmann said his party's focus on individual rights will be the Democrats' downfall.

'We're going to pull the rug out from under them,” he said. 'We are breaking glass ceilings, we break diversity ceilings. And not once, not one time in the thousands of people I have talked to, not once have I heard a single Republican comment on the ethnicity of our candidates. Republicans are colorblind, Republicans are genderblind.”