Karl Rove did not help matters this week when he suggested that Republicans should perhaps nominate “a fresh face” at their convention. A quintessential “Establishment” figure suggesting the party pick a candidate not in the White House race fuels speculation and conspiracy theories amid this virulent season of campaign fever.
Still, it’s important to understand what a contested convention would mean, because it seems more likely each day.
It is wrong to believe that Rove and other power players could just pick their own nominee. It would, rather, fall to nearly 2,500 delegates from all over America. Some would have been chosen by the various presidential campaigns and ratified by voters; some by state or local party officials and ratified by voters; a few by party conventions without a vote; and some directly chosen by voters. One of these delegates will, for example, be Trump’s campaign manager, assuming recent charges of battery against him do not prevent him from attending.
Some of Donald Trump’s backers say he should be handed the nomination if he wins a mere plurality of delegates. But there is no reason why the rules as they stand should be changed for Trump’s benefit, especially given his recent efforts to bully and disunite the party.
There are rules in nominating conventions, the most important of which is that no one without a majority of delegates’ support is entitled to the nomination. A plurality is just a large minority.
Trump has received about 37 percent of votes cast so far in GOP primaries and caucuses. Polling and state-level results suggest Trump is not uniting the party around himself as past candidates have by this far into the process. He might yet fix that. But if this trend continues until June, the convention floor fight will reflect it, just as it will reflect Trump’s successes in the states he has won.
If no candidate has a majority, most convention delegates will become unbound from their candidate after the first ballot. (Some, such as the 99 delegates from Florida, must support their pledged candidate through three ballots.) At that point, they can judge for themselves how best to break the deadlock. Given that most are loyal to one campaign or another, they will almost certainly choose one of the three candidates still in the race. But the only theoretical limit on whom they can support will be the rules they adopt themselves upon their arrival in Cleveland.
Once unbound, delegates will surely take into account the expected consequences of nominating Trump, with his unfavorable ratings near 70 percent, and the fact that he has redefined GOP politics with incitements to violence, tabloid sleaze and attacks on rivals’ wives.
The important thing now is to vote for a candidate other than Trump; Sen. Ted Cruz is by far the more plausible of the two remaining non-Trump candidates. He has scant chance of winning a majority, but he has every chance of winning enough delegates to deflate Trump’s bogus claims to be already the voters’ choice.
The secondary reason to vote this way is to make sure a contested convention remains a possibility and the party can choose someone other than the man who has tried to hijack it and trashed it’s principles, largely because he hasn’t bothered to understand what they are.
The process of beating Trump resumes with Saturday’s selection of unpledged delegates at the North Dakota state convention, and then moves on to Tuesday’s primary election in Wisconsin.
If fans of Marco Rubio and John Kasich unite behind Cruz in Wisconsin, allowing him to deprive Trump of delegates there (he is the only one who can at this point), then there is a strong chance Trump will fall short of his delegate majority in the contests that follow. That will allow the elected delegates to choose someone who unites the whole party as well as possible, and who can carry the Republican banner into November.
