GREENVILLE, South Carolina — The chairman of the local Republican Party here confirmed to local television that 2016 frontrunner billionaire Donald Trump’s concerns—and those of his closest competitor Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
97%
—with the Republican National Committee (RNC) allocation of debate audience tickets are well-placed.

Chad Groover, the chairman of the Greenville County Republican Party here, told WYFF—the local NBC News station—that party donors get tickets to the debate.

“You’ll have a good mix of people who are donors, people who are donors and workers, and people who are just workers,” Groover said, noting that he got “a couple of dozen” of tickets to hand out to the party’s faithful donors.

“I didn’t have hundreds of tickets. I had a couple of dozen tickets,” Groover said.

That means a significant proportion of his stack of approximately 24 tickets went to monied interests backing the GOP—not to actual voters in the upcoming election.

Sources close to the process who work for the RNC, but are not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed to Breitbart News throughout the evening on Saturday that that is standard operating procedure for the RNC and the party as a whole for all debates: Donors get tickets while voters have to watch on TV at home.

As such, the same appears to have been true party-wide. One well-placed source who works for one of the GOP presidential campaigns and was in attendance at the debate on Saturday evening here—but was not authorized to speak on record about the matter—told Breitbart News that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
37%
and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley were personally given scores of tickets to distribute. Both despise Trump and have said so publicly–Haley even using the platform of the official GOP response to the State of the Union to do so–and it would be no surprise if they did aim to stack the audience with anti-Trump sentiment.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said another source in the audience, someone who has attended several of the GOP debates. That source said the anti-Trump and anti-Cruz audience members—who were thoroughly cheering for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
79% and his mentor former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush when they made passionate cases for amnesty for illegal aliens, something entirely non-representative of South Carolina’s electorate—were behaving unlike any audience he’d ever seen in his lifetime of attending GOP presidential debates.

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Source: Matthew Boyle, http://www.breitbart.com