Violent political rallies fuelled by a provocative leader, passionate protestors clashing with supporters and security, and now a warning that riots will break out if there is a mutiny within a major national party — this is the state of the Republican nomination race in the U.S. today.
With the relentless advance of the election juggernaut of Donald Trump, the controversial property mogul who is the Republican nomination frontrunner, the Party appears to be descending into a desperate effort to forestall his emergence as the ultimate candidate to lead this year’s fight for the Oval Office.
Mr. Trump, whose blunt-talking ways have offended a variety of minorities including Mexicans, Muslims and women, and whose renegade position on difficult policy issues have placed him at odds with the GOP establishment, is leading the primaries race, now down to three candidates from an initial competition of 17, by a significant margin.
As Mr. Trump has swept state after state in the primaries and caucuses, most recently causing a major upset to establishment favourite Florida Senator Marco Rubio after he stole the Senator’s home state, he has left only mainstream Republican in the race, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and one other outside-establishment candidate, Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
Now the GOP appears to be panicking at the prospect of registered Republicans across the nation siding with a man who may be unlikely to mount a serious challenge to the ultimate Democratic Party nominee, likely at this point to be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Following Mr. Trump’s latest victories on Tuesday this week, the GOP seems to have started toying with the idea of a dramatic action – substituting the “normal” party convention, the national conclave at which the nominee is formally selected, with a “contested” convention, a variant in which delegates of the Party from different states who are not officially pledged to a single candidate have the option to cast their vote for to a candidate other than the one who is leading the official race until that point.
Analysts concur that contested conventions are rare and “don't usually portend good things for a party in a general election in November,” and this is indicated by the fact that it was as far back as 1976, when Republicans last held a contested convention, in that case for erstwhile California Governor Ronald Reagan to prevent U.S. President Gerald Ford from receiving a majority of delegates before the convention.
However in that instance Mr. Ford was apparently “able to convince enough unbound delegates to support his campaign, securing his nomination on the first round of balloting [although ironically Mr. Ford] and his divided party went on to lose the White House that year to Democrat Jimmy Carter.”
With such precedent, contested conventions are usually regarded as chaotic, unpredictable processes, and depend primarily on a switch in overall voting margins away from one candidate, in this case Mr. Trump, towards a favourite of the party elites, which at this time could only be Mr. Kasich.
That switch would be achieved by the swinging votes of super-delegates, or as the GOP calls them, “unbound” delegates, who differ from the pledged delegates picked in primaries process as they are free agents within the Republican Party firmament who can cast their vote for any eligible candidate.
At the heart of the conundrum with contested conventions is the strength of voter numbers actually backing Mr. Trump: the stronger his lead over the other candidates on the day of the convention, the more controversial it would be for the super-delegates to throw their weight behind another candidate and disregard what is in some senses the will of the Republican majority.
The numbers appear to be strongly tilted towards Mr. Trump. To secure the nomination and entirely avoid the spectre of a contested convention Mr. Trump would have to win 1,237 delegates. Currently he has 673 delegates, Mr. Cruz follows with 411 delegates, and Mr. Kasich with 143 delegates. A total of 1,061 delegates are still up for grabs in the remaining primary races of the season.
According to the well-respected Five Thirty Eight statistical blog of the New York Times Mr. Trump has already won somewhere in the range of 106 per cent of the target number of delegates that he would need to secure the nomination.
On the flip side Mitt Romney, the defeated 2012 Republican nominee had won 56 per cent of the delegates by this point in the 2012 election cycle, went on to become the presumptive GOP nominee by April and secured a majority of delegates by late May.
In Mr. Trump’s case he has garnered around 44 per cent of the delegates thus far and if he continues at the same rate can be expected to enter the GOP convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18 with somewhere in the vicinity of 1,088 of the 2,472 total delegates, which is 149 shy of the critical 1,237 figure.
Be that as it may, if the GOP decides to embark on a game of brinkmanship to thwart a Trump nomination through a contested convention, the outcome may well be utter chaos, especially if Mr. Trump does not get a majority of delegates on the first ballot, and the convention then changes from “contested” to “brokered,” involving multiple balloting rounds.
Confusion is likely to mount at that point because as per the GOP convention rules nearly 75 per cent of the delegates, which is more than 1,800 of the 2,472, become instantly unbound with no obligation to vote for Mr. Trump even if he swept their state.
Election observers noted that in that situation, “A convention can have a mind of its own [and] delegations will be a hotbed of rumours, deals and rumoured deals [with the] nightmare scenario [of] a convention so fractured with so many false rumours spread so quickly and repeatedly... that no consensus can be reached.”
Whichever way such a scenario is sliced, it will reflect poorly on the GOP and its leadership and inevitably hobble its prospects in the presidential election, perhaps irrecoverably.
