It is the holy grail of political geekery, wished-for every four years, and exceedingly rare: a contested political convention. In the past few decades, this has been mostly a fantasy, but this year, many in the GOP are taking that prospect very seriously. At a Washington, DC, dinner on Monday at which more than 20 Republican establishment figures gathered to talk fundraising and other party business, the topic arose toward the end of the evening, according to sources who attended the meeting, which was first reported by the Washington Post.
The math behind a deadlocked convention is simple: If three or more Republican candidates are still competitive in the presidential race beyond March 15, as seems increasingly possible, it will be difficult to avoid a situation in which no candidate accumulates over 50 percent of delegates, so multiple ballots could be needed to select the Republican nominee in Cleveland next summer. The working assumption is that one of those candidates will be Donald Trump—which has brought considerable focus to the establishment mind.
A brokered convention hasn’t occurred in American politics for more than sixty years. The last one was on the Democratic side, in 1952. Adlai Stevenson, then governor of Illinois, had no intention of being the nominee when he walked into the Chicago convention hall that year; he was drafted as a compromise candidate when two senators—one from Georgia, the other from Tennessee—failed to rally enough backers. It took three ballots before Stevenson stood behind the dais and, immediately after accepting the nomination, declared, “I should have preferred to hear those words uttered by a stronger, a wiser, a better man than myself.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that 1952 was also the first year political conventions were broadcast on television, beaming intra-party brawls into the living rooms of general election voters nationwide. The complex drama may have been an electoral drag: Stevenson was trounced by Republican Dwight Eisenhower that November. (The last time Republicans had a multi-ballot convention, in 1948, they too lost the general election).
In the years since, conventions have been, increasingly, scripted and stage-managed extravaganzas—less a venue for party business and more a pep rally for the nominee presumptive.
This year, the equation has been rewritten. Trump's persistent strength and sky-high negatives, coupled with the inability thus far of the mainstream Republicans to coalesce around a single candidate, and a series of rule changes that encouraged more states to award their delegates proportionally, make it easier than ever to imagine a contested-convention scenario. And given the GOP’s turmoil over the possibility of Trump-the-nominee, Cleveland could very well become the establishment’s last stand, a place where they can wield their influence—and where they actually may have an advantage.
“I think that the candidates are all aware of this and they’re all planning up to a certain level for it,” Vin Weber, a Jeb Bush ally and former adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, said in an interview conducted before he attended the Monday RNC dinner.
Like others in the party, Weber said it's too early in the race to predict a nomination stalemate, but admits that the state of the GOP race incentivizes campaigns to plan for a long and arduous delegate fight.
“I think the dynamics are being set up perfectly for it to happen for the first time in over a generation,” said Michael Steele, former head of the Republican National Committee. “Every candidate on the ballot will get a piece of something,” Steele continued, describing states that will vote before March 15. “It may not be a big piece, but it will be a piece and, accumulated over a six-week period, where we’ll have well over 50 percent of the delegates being chosen, you’ve written a recipe for a brokered convention.”
The reason a contested convention is possible this cycle isn’t only the dynamics of the field, with its problematic front-runner and several establishment contestants splitting votes. The GOP itself inadvertently cleared the way with a newly condensed GOP primary calendar, which could give candidates less time to break away from the pack, and new GOP rules that force every state (with the exception of South Carolina) voting before March 15 to award their delegates proportionally. In the end, more than 60 percent of states around the country will divide up their delegates between more than one presidential contender.
The new rules were drawn up following Mitt Romney’s protracted 2012 primary race, which party leaders believe damaged his chances in the general election. Wanting to give their 2016 standard-bearer an open, fair, but smoother, runway to the convention, the RNC shrunk its primary calendar by nearly two months, limited the number of Republican debates, and encouraged more states who want early primary dates to dole out their delegates proportionally, which gives lesser-known candidates a better shot at competing in the compressed nomination fight.
To some, the speculation about a contested convention is nothing more than a quadrennial daydream, given further fuel by Trump. “It's mathematically possible, it's just not very likely,” said John Sununu, an adviser of John Kasich’s campaign.
But campaigns are treating it as a real possibility. Mark Stephenson, former data chief for Scott Walker’s campaign, who had began mapping out the delegate calendar before Walker suspended his campaign in September, said other candidates are already looking for ways to pick up delegates in proportional states, congressional district by congressional district, without necessarily having to win the full statewide vote.
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