Whether Donald Trump emerges from the Republican convention as the GOP presidential nominee is an open question at the moment. I happen to believe that he will; but it is theoretically possible that he will not—and we might well see a brokered convention, or a fractured convention, in Cleveland next week.
The possibility of a contested convention was first raised when Trump appeared to be winning the primary season, and especially among Trump supporters, the mere mention of it was greeted with incredulity and horror. But the fact is that, until comparatively recently, brokered conventions were the rule, not the exception, in American politics. And you could argue, as I have elsewhere, that both parties have benefited historically from brokered conventions.
Of course, the main reason a brokered convention seems outlandish is ignorance, not experience: We haven’t had one in nearly a half-century. After the debacle of 1968, the Democrats concluded that presidential nominees ought to be selected not by party professionals, officeholders, and what journalists like to call “bosses,” but by voters—indeed, in the many states with “open” primaries, even by voters of the opposite party. And the Republicans followed suit. This trend has effectively obliterated the influence of politicians in the political process, and the metastatic growth of televised debates has allowed journalists to fill the remaining power vacuum. Since the 1970s, national conventions have not been climactic struggles among candidates—featuring battles over platforms, passionate floor fights, and frantic brokering—but extended infomercials for pre-selected winners.
Whether the evolution of the process has been good or bad, of course, is a matter of opinion. But the old system did yield candidates such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the open chaos, conflict, and rancor of historic conventions would now be regarded as fatal evidence of disunity or incompetence.
In 1912, for example, when former president Theodore Roosevelt tried to wrest the Republican nomination from his anointed successor William Howard Taft, passions were so intense at the convention that, when Roosevelt ultimately lost, he led his indignant delegates out of the arena and into a new party. In 1952, when General Eisenhower successfully challenged the front-runner Senator Robert Taft, Senator Everett Dirksen’s speech for Taft not only pointedly condemned the previous Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey—”You led us down the road to defeat”—but very nearly inspired a riot on the convention floor. (You can watch it on YouTube.)
This is not to suggest that contested conventions invariably yield happy results in November—TR lost, Ike won—but that the notion of a party convention as exclusively an exercise in public relations is profoundly mistaken. Brokered conventions are good theater and good politics. Republicans, take note: Wendell Willkie’s insurgent candidacy in 1940, Barry Goldwater’s truculent speech at the 1960 convention, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976, all pointed the way to their party’s future.
