Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., rejected Donald Trump’s complaints that the GOP presidential process is “rigged,” noting that the rules of the nominating process require a would-be nominee to win a majority of the delegates.
“So there are some candidates suggesting that it’s somehow tricky to simply follow the rules of the convention,” McConnell told a Kentucky news outlet over the weekend. “We’re going to follow the rules of the convention. When a nominee gets to [a majority], he will actually be the candidate.
“If he doesn’t, there will be a second ballot and about 60 percent of the delegates who are bound on the first ballot will be free to do what they want on the second ballot,” he added. “And I’m increasingly optimistic that there actually may be a second ballot.”
McConnell’s comments make clear that he wants Trump, the current delegate leader, to fall short of clinching the nomination, which could lead to several rounds of voting to find a nominee. He reiterated his refusal to endorse Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the presidential primaries, however, and raised the possibility that a candidate could launch a bid from the convention floor.
Republican National Convention delegates, if the race goes to a second ballot, will be looking for a strong general election candidate, he suggested.
“And those are arguments for Ted Cruz to make, for Donald Trump to make, for John Kasich to make, or, anyone else,” McConnell said. “Anyone could be nominated, but if you’ve been out there working on it all year — if you’re Trump, or Cruz, or Kasich, you’re going to argue that it ought to be one of us because we went out there and worked hard.”
An early fight in the RNC Rules Committee will set the standards for who can be considered at the convention. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told delegates not to consider nominating him at the convention.
“So let me speak directly to the delegates on this,” Ryan said last week. “If no candidate has a majority on the first ballot, I believe you should only choose a person who has actually taken part in the primary.”
The prospect of a “fresh-face” entrant to the GOP fight has comforted some Republicans and alarmed Cruz, whose political team has done an effective job of winning delegates, even in states where he lost, who will back him on the second ballot.
“Any time you hear someone talking about a brokered convention, it is the Washington establishment in a fevered frenzy,” Cruz said at CPAC in March. “And so they’ve seized on this master plan: We go to the brokered convention and the D.C. power-brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the Washington establishment. If that were to happen, we will have a manifest revolt on our hands all across this country.”
McConnell rejected that theory, and said the final outcome is in the hands of the delegates at the convention. “This notion that there is some group of people in Washington who can handpick somebody and deliver it, is not true,” he said, before adding that he hopes to be a delegate in his own right.
“I hope I will be a delegate — I think I will be, from Kentucky — and on the second ballot, I’ll be able to do whatever I want to,” McConnell said.
