The odds of a contested convention on the Republican side are
exceptionally good as the risk of no candidate receiving the requisite number
of delegates rose slightly after Tuesday’s vote despite Donald Trump’s
win.
There are a great many people now jumping deep into the rules
of how each and every individual delegate is chosen and to whom each delegate may
or may not be loyal on multiple ballots. Let us save you the suspense. If the
Republican Party is willing to be perceived as overturning the will of the
voters then they will absolutely be able to steal the convention from Donald
Trump. This is regardless of what the rules say or even how many ballots are
cast. Unlike Democratic rules that are uniform across the contests Republican
rules change state to state in lots of ways.
Florida is winner-take-all, and Texas is not. But the state and national parties who set those
rules could still change them. Texas could become retroactively winner-take-all (helping Cruz), and Florida could be
made proportional (helping Trump’s opponents). This might seem like an unfair
changing of the rules in the middle of the game, and it would be. But it would
be very hard for a court to find it illegal. The initial rules were relatively
arbitrary to begin with. The whole system is a complete mess, not designed to
handle the strain it is confronting. Such a system can be relatively easily
manipulated by those who built it in the first place. Whether there is the will to do the
manipulating is an entirely different question. But the manipulating can be
done in so many ways that being able to name them all may be an interesting
parlor game for some but is ultimately irrelevant. In the end the Convention’s fate will come
down to a willingness to flout the rules not the ability to do so.
The Scorecard
The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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