There is a book called the Rules of the Republican Party.  It’s a short book, barely 15,000 words long, yet it dictates the entire process by which Republicans pick their president. The book divides neatly into three parts.

The first part (Rules #1-12) serves as the Constitution of the Republican National Committee. The RNC is a group of Republican leaders who work year-round to elect Republicans to office.

The second part of the rulebook (Rules #13-25) describes, in broad terms, how the Republican primary system works.  As you remember from previous posts, the purpose of the Republican primary process is not to pick a presidential nominee. The purpose of the primary process is to select several thousand elected officers of the Republican Party, called delegates, whose job is to represent their state party at a giant meeting of all fifty state parties.  This meeting is called a national convention, and it is held exactly once every four years — always in a presidential election year.  The delegates, chosen by the voters to represent them, then choose the Republican nominee for president. Rules #13-25 determine how many delegates each state gets to send to the convention, establishes the overall schedule for the primary system, and mandates punishments for states that break the rules. It’s basically the Constitution of the Republican primary process.

The third part of the Republican rulebook (Rules #26-42) is the shortest and least detailed. It governs procedure for the national convention itself.  It describes how voting happens, how state delegations can propose changes, who can speak and when and for how long, and, ultimately, what it takes to become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. This part of the rulebook serves as a kind of Constitution for the national convention.

Every four years, just after the start of the national convention, the rulebook expires. The convention delegates must then revise it (or renew it without changes). Until the delegates have officially approved rules for the next four years, the convention is unable to take up any other business, like the party platform or the presidential nomination. This makes sense: the party would be unable to operate after the convention — or even finish the current convention — without rules to govern it throughout.

Not only is a national convention required to revise the rules, but, traditionally, only a national convention can revise the rules. The RNC can’t normally* mess around with the rules between conventions: the delegates have one shot, every four years, to get it right.

Because the party depends on good, solid rules at every level in order to function, and because it has to get those rules right the first time, the process involves a great deal of intricate deliberation over the course of several months. Even in an “easy” convention year, with nobody but nerds like me paying attention, rules negotiations are as tense as they are arcane. This year… God only knows. Let’s walk through the rules-revision process together.

Flip open your Rulebook to page 9.  (Note that we are using the most recent revised version of the rulebook, from August 2014, which is not the version actually passed by the 2012 national convention; there are several minor differences.  Additionally, I thought the 2014 rulebook on the GOP website was ugly, so I reformatted it to look like the 2012 rulebook.)  Under Rule #10(a)(1) — and don’t freak about about that nerdy-looking parenthetical notation, it just makes it easier to find the right paragraph! — you’ll find this instruction:

There shall be a Standing Committee on Rules of the Republican National Committee, composed of one (1) member of the Republican National Committee from each state, to review and propose recommendations with respect to The Rules of the Republican Party.

Simple enough. There’s a bit more detail, but we don’t need it.  The Standing Committee on Rules is the first piece of the puzzle. There are 56 members of the Standing Committee on Rules, one for every state (plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the four territories). They are elected very indirectly; according to Rule #1(a), each state party gets three RNC members, who are usually chosen by some kind of state party election or state convention. Those three people then get to “elect” one of themselves to be the state’s representative on the Standing Committee. (There are other Standing Committees, like the Standing Committee on the Call, but, in this post, we only care about the Standing Committee on Rules.)

The Standing Committee’s job is normally very boring. It handles rules disputes between conventions.  Between 2012 and 2014, it was also allowed (very unusually) to recommend changes to the rules, although it could not actually make any without supermajority support on the RNC.  When primary season heats up, their job gets more exciting: under Rule #17(e), the Standing Committee has the authority to punish state parties for holding primaries that violate the rules.  For example, in 2008 and 2012, when Florida held its winner-take-all primary very early (in violation of an earlier version of Rule #16(c)), the Standing Committee on Rules recognized the rules violation, voted on it, and applied the penalty: Florida lost half its delegates.

But the Standing Committee’s most important job comes late in the primary season, at the Spring Meeting of the RNC. This year, it’s happening on the week of April 17th — just a few days from now. At this final meeting of the Standing Committee before the convention begins, they issue a set of recommended changes to the current rules. That’s all: recommendations. Those recommendations are then passed to the next piece of our puzzle: the Convention Committee on Rules.

The “Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business” is established by Rule #41(a):

There shall be four (4) convention committees; the convention committees on the Platform, Credentials, Rules and Order of Business, and Permanent Organization of the convention…. The Delegates elected or selected to the convention from each state… shall elect from the delegation a delegation chairman and their members of the convention committees on the Platform, Credentials, Rules and Order of Business, and Permanent Organization of the convention, consisting of one (1) man and one (1) woman for each committee.

So, unlike the members of the Standing Committee, the members of the Convention Committee aren’t elected or appointed by RNC members, and thus aren’t (necessarily) insiders. Every state (and territory) gets two Convention Committee members, for a total of 112 members, and the only restriction is that each state must elect both a man and a woman — an affirmative action rule that is weirdly common in the Republican Party, given the GOP’s official opposition to affirmative action — who must both be national delegates from that state, and who must be elected to the Convention Committee by the other national delegates from that state.

So who gets picked for the Convention Committee from each state depends a lot on how that state chooses delegates, a diverse process we discussed last time. In states like Hawaii, where the national delegates are picked by the winning candidates, the Convention Committee members will probably be consummate insiders, like all of Hawaii’s delegates. But in states like Alabama, where national delegates are elected directly on the ballot by primary voters possessed of a strong anti-establishment sentiment, the Convention Committee members are likely to be anything but insiders.  Indeed, since I started writing this post, it looks like Alabama’s delegation announced its Convention Committee members: a little-known state legislator named Ed Henry and a kind-looking woman named Laura Payne, who appears to have no online presence beyond her mostly-private pro-Trump Facebook page (both are Trump supporters; please do not harass them). About as outsider as you can get!

The Convention Committee’s job is as simple as it is contentious: they need to review the recommendations made by the Standing Committee, then either approve them, reject them, or revise them.  In effect, all the months the Standing Committee spends debating various rules changes boil down to a single document that is then used as a starting point by the Convention Committee, which is free to chuck all the work of the Standing Committee out the window and start fresh if it wants.  The Convention Committee must be given a copy of the Standing Committee’s recommendations by June 18th, 2016 (as stated in Rule #41(d)). The Convention Committee then meets just a few days before the convention, and keeps at it until it produces the “Report of the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business” — an agreed-upon package of rules changes and renewals that is approved by majority vote of the Convention Committee.

In rare cases, the Convention Committee is deeply divided, and produces two reports instead of one: the “majority report,” supported by the majority of the committee, and a “minority report,” supported by at least 25% of the committee (Rule #34).

So does the Report of the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business become the new Republican rulebook? Nope! They’re just a recommendation, too!  The Convention itself still has to weigh in!

The convention actually opens on July 18, 2016. At that time, the Standing Committee and the Convention Committee will both have made their recommendations, but the 2014 Rulebook will still be in place for the start of the convention. (Rule #42 says so.)

The start of the convention follows an Order of Business determined by the RNC itself.  (Rule #26 says so.)  Those of you who, like me, find that level of direct control by the GOP Establishment alarming will be pleased to know that Rule #27 goes on to say that the convention can’t do anything important until the real Rules and Order of Business, proposed by the Convention Committee, have been officially debated and either approved or revised.  So these opening actions of the convention, orchestrated by the RNC, are going to be the least exciting parts of the convention: going by the 2012 Order of Business, we can expect to see the Pledge of Allegiance, the official reading of the 2016 Call to Convention, a memorial to all the Republican officials who died since 2012, and the election (by the convention, not the RNC) of temporary officers to handle said pledges and prayers and readings and speeches. It’s not the RNC doesn’t want to control the process more; it’s just that they mostly can’t.

Meanwhile, in the background, the Convention Committee on Credentials is going to be resolving any disputes about the validity of certain delegates. This is the real action during the start of the convention. Every once in a while, a state party just completely fractures, or even cheats, and two different delegations from a state show up at the national convention, each group claiming to be the “true” delegation from their state.  This happened in Maine in 2012, and it’s happening today in the Virgin Islands.  These disputes are resolved mainly prior to the convention by the Standing Committee on Contests (Rules #23-24), but the Convention Committee on Credentials is the final court of appeals (Rule #25(b)), and this is when it does its work (Rule #25(a)). Contests are a complex and messy business, which we will avoid in the interest of brevity (ha!)… and because it doesn’t look, at this point, like there are going to be any unusually exciting contests this year. Mr. Trump may throw a temper tantrum about how badly he got out-dealed in Colorado and Louisiana, but he has no case under the rules for an actual contest, so this will be irrelevant. The convention will not hinge on credentials the way it will hinge on the rules.

Finally, when all delegates have signed in and all contests are finally resolved, the boring parts are over! The Convention Committee on Credentials is able to announce an official list of who is an actual delegate to the 2016 convention (the “report of the Convention Committee on Credentials”). According to Rule #27, this must be the first non-boring thing to happen at the convention. The convention delegates who weren’t being contested (also known as the “temporary roll;” see Rule #22) now vote on the Credentials Committee report. If they approve that list, the list becomes the “permanent roll” of the convention, and delegates on the permanent roll are officially allowed to be on the convention floor and cast official votes.  Yay!  Four paragraphs since the convention opened and all we’ve done is establish who the delegates are!

But now that we know the delegates, the convention can get to the good stuff. Most likely right after the permanent roll is approved, the convention will elect permanent officers to manage the rest of the convention: a chairman (traditionally the highest-ranked Republican in the House of Representatives; in 2016, that would be Speaker Paul Ryan), a Secretary, a Parliamentarian, a Sergeant-at-Arms, and their respective deputies.

Once that’s done, the convention can finally get to the rules. The report of the Convention Committee on Rules is either read from the podium or distributed to the delegates (both reports, if there is a minority report). Then there’s an up-or-down vote on whether to approve the majority report as-is. As far as I know, the report has always (officially, at least) been approved without modification.

But if the convention delegates don’t like what the Convention Committee on Rules has recommended — which could easily happen, in this year’s closely divided convention — the vote could easily fail, and then we’re in for a classic rules floor fight. Another possibility is that some factions with substantial support will propose changes just before the majority report comes up for a vote — setting up a rules fight that would be only slightly less messy.

I’ve been in a couple of floor fights over rules (at the local/state level), and I’ve witnessed a couple others. Floor fights about rules are generally quite fair, because every faction can offer its own proposals (“let’s use the minority report,” “let’s keep the majority report, but tweak Rule #40(b),” “let’s throw the whole thing out and use this document my state delegates wrote instead,” etc. etc. etc.), everyone gets to debate the pros and cons of every motion, and, in the end, everyone gets their say by a free, fair vote. Eventually, a rules document is approved that has the support of a majority of the convention.

But it takes ages, because being fair to two thousand individual delegates takes time. My first rules fight was at a district convention that was supposed to run from 9 AM to Noon. There were perhaps two hundred people in the convention hall when the battle broke out. We finished the rules fight some time after 3PM, as I recall; the business of the convention, which remained contentious throughout, did not conclude until 11-something PM. It was thrilling, but exhausting, and very expensive for our hosts.  (A bit like this post!)

Once the 2016 convention has adopted, by majority vote, new rules, that is the moment when you can finally throw out your 2014 rulebook.  At that moment, the 2016 rulebook, whatever it says, comes into effect.  The work of the Standing Committee and the Convention Committee on Rules may or may not be reflected in that new rulebook; it all depends on the 2,427 delegates, who can either accept the Committees’ recommendations or throw them out.

The bottom line is that the delegates themselves get the final vote (really, the only vote) on the rules that govern them — not the RNC, not any arcane Convention Committee, and not any presidential candidate. Those outside entities do get to advise the delegates and make recommendations, but the delegates decide, on the convention floor, by majority vote of 1,237, and no candidate bindings or other restrictions apply to any of them.  The delegates are free to vote however they think best.  This gives the delegates immense power, even if they are bound to a particular candidate, and is a major reason why delegate loyalties, and not delegate bindings, are what ultimately decide the result of a convention.  The rules they adopt could simply be a few tweaks to the old rules. Or the new rulebook could be a page-one rewrite, with no resemblance to the old. We’ll all find out in Cleveland.

Only after the delegates have agreed to new rules are they able to begin working on the real meat of the convention: the creation of the party platform and the nomination of presidential and vice presidential candidates. Those processes will be governed by the new rules, whatever they turn out to be.

In the next part of this series, we’ll discuss why, despite all this — and despite the fervent wishes of the Wall Street Journal editorial page — the new rules will most likely be exactly the same as the old ones.

FOOTNOTES

*There is an exception to the “traditional” rule that only a convention can amend the rules: from 2012-2014, the RNC was permitted, under Rule #12 (passed at the 2012 national convention) to change the rules on its own, by a three-quarters supermajority vote. This highly unusual provision expired on September 30, 2014.

So there will be 2,427 delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But who are they? What will they do? What can they do?

Bound or Unbound?

As we discussed in our last post, most Republican delegates are bound, which means they are required to vote for a specific candidate at the convention, regardless of their personal feelings, at least up to a certain point. Some Republican delegates are unbound,* which means they can vote for whichever candidate they prefer, at any time. There will be approximately 170 officially unbound delegates at the convention (from Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, and several U.S. territorial possessions like Guam), plus 60-90** bound delegates who became unbound when their candidates dropped out. (Only a few states allow this.)

This means the convention will have around 230 unbound delegates and 2,242 bound delegates. (1,237 delegates is enough to form a majority.)

Who Will The Bound Delegates Be Bound To?†

The binding of the delegates is the great question of the primaries, to which the Associated Press and the Election Wizards devote nearly all their energies, and the primaries aren’t over yet. As of today, 754 are bound to Donald Trump, 465 to Ted Cruz, 112 remain bound to Marco Rubio, 144 to John Kasich, 111 are unbound, and 10 remain bound to other minor candidates (Bush, Carson, Fiorina, and Paul).

By the time the convention rolls around, there are four likely scenarios. Bear these four scenarios in mind, because we’ll be coming back to them in future posts. The first three scenarios are (more or less) taken from FiveThirtyEight; the last is based on Kasich dropping out.

Trump Barely Clinches – Trump wins enough delegates in the remaining states to have a majority of the delegates bound to him on the first ballot. This is known as “clinching,” and it requires 1,237 bound delegates. Trump just barely gets there, but he gets there. (This is Trump’s best likely scenario; it is widely considered unlikely he will clinch by a wide margin.)

Trump Barely Misses – Trump doesn’t clinch, but he has enough delegates to put him in striking distance of a win, as long as he can rally just a handful of unbound delegates to him.

Trump Plurality – Trump can’t get within close range of clinching, but goes into the convention with a plurality of delegates.

Kasich Drops Out – Kasich drops out (before Wisconsin) and Cruz (finally) is able to consolidate the non-Trump vote behind him.  Trump still sweeps most of the Northeast, but Cruz makes up ground elsewhere (including a decisive win in California) and they enter the convention with Trump closer to Cruz than to clinching.

Here are some approximate delegate totals for each scenario, based on the map as it stands today (23 March 2016):

Teaser for later: most people think that, if Trump “clinches” with 1,237 delegates or more, there is no way to prevent him from winning the nomination. As we’ll discuss in later entries of this series, this is false. The delegates can still nominate someone else by amending Convention Rule 40, although doing so would no doubt carry a significant political cost. But, like I said, we’ll come to that later. Let’s get back to our delegates.

Who Will the Bound Delegates be Loyal To?

Delegates can be bound to vote for a candidate even if they don’t personally support that candidate. It happens all the time, actually. In 2012, a number of insurgent Ron Paul supporters in various states managed to get themselves elected as state delegates in states Mitt Romney had won. These supporters were bound to vote for Romney, but were actually loyal to Paul. It doesn’t have to be insurgents, either: in 2000, Michigan voted for insurgent John McCain in the primary, but its delegates were a bunch of long-standing Republican establishment officials who had backed George W. Bush. They were bound to McCain but loyal to Bush. John Yob calls these disloyal delegates “Supporters In Name Only,” or SINOs.

Normally, SINOs don’t matter. The vast, vast majority of bound delegates are also loyal to their candidate, and the frontrunner candidate has such a vast, vast lead that a few — or even a few hundred! — SINOs couldn’t make even a tiny difference if they tried.

But, at a close or contested convention, it is ultimately delegate loyalties, not delegate bindings, that will determine the outcome.

Problem: it is not easy to determine the loyalties of the delegates, because of the way delegates are elected.

How Are the Delegates Elected?

In some states, bound delegates are selected directly by the presidential candidates they’re bound to. This is not actually a very good system, in my opinion, but it does make analysis very simple: those delegates are essentially guaranteed to be loyal to their bound candidates.  (I am told that the Democratic Party does this in every state.) The total number of delegates elected this way is 455 — most from California and New York. (I show the details at the very bottom of this page, in the footnotes.)

In some other states, bound delegates are elected directly on primary ballots with endorsement by the candidates. This leads to some pretty crazy ballots, plus virtually-guaranteed delegate loyalty. This is a better system than direct candidate selection, if you insist on having a primary. 252 delegates are elected this way.

In most states, however, Republican national delegates are still chosen through the old system of local caucuses and state conventions. 1503 bound delegates are chosen this way, plus 121 unbound delegates.  Under this system, as you’ll recall from the previous post in this series, party stalwarts gather locally, work out the local platform, endorse local candidates, and elect their best people to represent them at a state (or congressional district) convention, and then those higher-level conventions elect their best people to be national delegates. The binding primary system invented in 1972 hasn’t actually swept away this system or the national delegates it selects; it’s just taken away the delegates’ freedom to vote for the candidate of their choice, as they are nearly all bound to one candidate or another.

State Conventions: Where SINOs are Born

So the majority of national delegates are picked at state-level conventions. Who, specifically gets elected at those conventions?

Since national delegates haven’t had any real effect on the nominating process for decades (since Reagan/Ford in 1976), state parties, over two generations, have formed the habit of electing people national delegates as a way of saying “thanks” to the most loyal Republicans. Party officers, who work hard behind the scenes to keep things running with very little public thanks, often get the nod. So do the party’s elected officials (the governor, an ex-senator, and so forth). Occasionally, a smaller convention will give a spot to one of their their beloved volunteers — you know, like that 65-year-old woman who’s brought campaign lit and plates of cookies to every door-to-door in her congressional district since the battle against Mondale, and who says in her speech this has always been her dream but it’s probably her last chance because she’s getting up in years. Everyone in that room has enjoyed her famous peanut-butter cookies for decades, so of course they vote for her.

The delegates’ first-choice candidate doesn’t usually matter all that much: the winner of the primary is always someone broadly acceptable to party loyalists, even if not their first choice, so when Gretchen the Santorum supporter gets bound to vote for Romney, she doesn’t mind all that much… and, even if she does, what can she do about it? It’s not as if there’s an organized opposition to the presumptive nominee — at least, not one with any chance of winning. Not in a normal year.

This isn’t to say that the delegate election process is without tension: there are always more people who want to be delegates than there are slots, there’s always a lot of behind-the-scenes politicking to get on “the slate” (all the moreso because the candidates are all behind-the-scenes politicos themselves), and, above all, there’s the great ideological tension between the two wings of the Republican Party: the Establishment and the Conservatives. Ever since the Goldwater/Rockefeller battle of 1964, Establishment and Conservative Republicans have vied for total control of the party, and their tug-of-war has gone back and forth down the decades: the Establishment won with Ford in 1976 (who beat Reagan), but the Conservatives won with Reagan in 1980 (who beat Bush). The Establishment won in both 2008 and 2012 (McCain and Romney, respectively, and Romney’s supporters in particular put in place some rules designed to crack down on the grassroots), but Conservatives were optimistic about 2016 and began coordinating their efforts early this year, in hopes of a takeover.

Mr. Donald J. Trump blows all that away. In a convention system that pits Conservatives and Establishmentarians (of varying intensity) against one another, Trump is a figure despised by both wings of the Republican loyalists, because he is awful. Establishmentarians loathe him because he is unelectable and because his economic and immigration policies do not sufficiently benefit rich people. Conservatives abominate him because he’s not a conservative and does not even seem likely to cooperate with conservatives the way the Establishment often does. Trump is popular with a broad swath of the Republican electorate… but, by all indications, his support is lowest — and that is very low indeed — among precisely the Republican loyalists who elect the actual delegates.

This sets us up for a 2016 convention with an unprecedented number of supporters-in-name-only. Establishment and Conservative Republicans across the country will continue to have their battles for control of the party, of course, and it’s hard to say (especially now) what will happen in those battles… but, whoever wins, Trump loses. Conservatives are far more inclined to support Cruz than Trump; Establishment types prefer Kasich to Trump. For Trump to win a lot of loyal delegates, either the state parties would have to roll over and hand over their coveted bound delegate slots to Trump supporters who have not “earned” their place through years of volunteerism — and state parties never surrender their delegate slots unless forced to by a Ron Paul-style floor fight‡ — or Trump would need to discover a whole lot more support among party activists than either the evidence or the candidate’s own attitude toward activists would suggest.

South Carolina is a perfect example. South Carolina binds delegates based on a winner-take-all-by-district allocation model. Because of a deeply divided anti-Trump vote, Trump won all 50 of South Carolina’s delegates on February 20 with just 33% of the popular vote. However, according to Sasha Issenberg (I have not been able to verify this in state party rules), the only people who are eligible to become or vote for South Carolina national delegates are delegates to the 2015 state convention — a convention that was held weeks before Trump even entered the presidential race. This virtually guarantees that the South Carolina delegation to Cleveland, while bound to Trump on the first ballot, will be either conservatives of the Nikki Haley-style or establishmentarians of the Lindsey Graham-style — both of whom are fiercely opposed to Donald Trump. That’s 50 Trump supporters-in-name-only… in just one state.

Multiply this across the country and, even without pulling out a spreadsheet and doing lots of counting, it’s very easy to imagine Donald Trump coming into the convention with 1,200 bound delegates (just shy of a majority) but only 800 or so loyal delegates (far short of a majority).  The other 400 Trump delegates would be SINOs, bound to Trump but loyal to others.

(Literally as I put this article through final proofreading, Politico published this piece on the “shadow primary” for delegates, with a special focus on South Dakota, where the fight for SINOs is already in the open.)

But What Can a SINO Do?

“Well, who cares?” you might ask.  As long as a Trump SINO casts the required vote for Trump, as required by oath, it makes no difference to Trump whether his delegate is loyal or not: all Trump needs is the right number of votes, loyal or not, and he wins the nomination. Heck, even if a Trump SINO breaks his or her oath and votes for another candidate while still bound to Trump, there is a rule in the Republican Party that the faithless vote must be ignored and counted for the original bound candidate instead. (That’s RNC Rule 16(a)(2) for you rules nerds out there.) So there is literally nothing a Trump SINO can do to change his or her bound vote: it will be counted for Trump whether the delegate cooperates or not.

Thing is, in most states, binding doesn’t last forever.  If, after the first formal vote for a presidential nominee at the national convention (known as a “ballot”), there is no immediate winner, most states release all their delegates to vote their conscience. Nearly all of the rest release their delegates by the third ballot. (Eight states, representing 301 delegates, bind their delegates beyond the third ballot, though with some caveats.) So if Trump doesn’t “clinch” his bound majority and win on the first ballot (and, again, we’ll discuss later how even a bound majority might not win him the first ballot), the second ballot will see 1,503 delegates suddenly voting their loyalty, instead of their binding. If all those delegates are loyal to their bound candidate, that has no impact.  But if the convention has a few hundred Supporters-in-Name-Only, their change from binding-based to loyalty-based voting could swing the convention from a Trump-led convention to a Cruz-led convention, or even a complete free-for-all, without skipping a beat.

There are simply no precedents for a situation like this: the last time a Republican convention went to a second ballot was in 1948, more than twenty years before bound delegates (and, thus, SINO delegates) were even invented. But it seems that the odds of second-ballot SINO-driven chaos breaking out this year are now almost even money.

Beyond the obvious effects on a second or third ballot, about which the entire commentariat is breathlessly speculating, SINOs could have another huge impact on a convention: while bound delegates are required to vote for their candidates in nominating ballots, that is all they’re required to do. In nearly^§ all states, delegates are free to vote their conscience on any other measure, including rules changes that could dramatically change the terrain of the convention floor fight. This is a major point we’ll be coming back to, because the few who are talking about it aren’t doing a great job explaining it to a lay audience.

So, Seriously: Who Will the Delegates be Loyal To?

The truth is, we have no idea, and no way of determining, how many SINOs there are — and which candidates they’re truly loyal to — until the possible second ballot at this year’s national convention actually happens.

So far, this article has discussed the idea of Trump SINOs (bound to Trump but loyal to others), both because Trump SINOs would be the most consequential at a close convention where Trump enters with a lead in the bound delegate count, and because it seems likely Trump will have a lot more SINOs than the other candidates. But there will no doubt be at least some Cruz SINOs (bound to Cruz but loyal to others) and Rubio SINOs and probably even some Kasich SINOs. Indeed, there is evidence that Cruz SINOs who are actually loyal to Kasich are already organizing. The Cruz campaign openly advertises that it is working hard to win the loyalties of delegates bound to both Trump and Rubio. It’s even possible that Trump himself has a more organized delegate-selection operation than he lets on (I have seen and heard evidence for this on the ground in Minnesota, but only anecdotally), and Trump will end up controlling the loyalties of a good bunch of delegates bound to other candidates. Nearly two-thirds of national delegates are elected by a caucus/convention system, and every active campaign is going to be fighting for the loyalties of every single one, bound or not.

Unfortunately, there isn’t going to be a big ledger at the end of the primary season where all the delegates faithfully mark down their loyalties, the way delegates must mark down their bindings. We’re going to hear a lot of rumors and a lot of guesses… but we aren’t going to know until the convention which campaigns were most successful getting SINOs loyal to them elected to other candidates’ bound delegate slots.  We are fumbling in the dark.

If I may offer my guesses, though: Cruz is the candidate of the conservative branch of the party, and has been for quite some time now. He is also, by far, the best organized, most data-driven candidate in terms of get-out-the-vote efforts and delegate accumulation. In any normal establishment-vs.-conservatives year, the relative disarray of the establishment field compared to previous years plus the conservatives’ clear organizational edge would, in my opinion, give the edge to conservatives generally and to Cruz specifically. Conservatives have way less money, which means they tend to lose primaries, but they make up a lot of ground in conventions, where their numbers and high levels of activism give them power. (Indeed, that was precisely the fight Cruz was gearing up for pre-Trump.) With Trump disrupting the race and the establishment now slowly rallying to Cruz as a last-ditch effort against Trump, and Cruz now fighting on the friendly terrain of state conventions, I would be pretty surprised if Cruz didn’t clean up in conventions across the country, controlling not only the loyalties of most of his bound delegates, but a large chunk of Trump’s and plenty of Rubio’s and Kasich’s as well.

Cruz will not hold on to the loyalties of all his bound delegates, but I suspect he will be losing them more to Kasich than to Trump. Trump may win plenty of delegate loyalties in the Southern states, where he did well and many party appartchiks warmed to him, but it’s difficult to see how he wins his share of delegate loyalties in the Northeast, where the blue-collar base (which is expected to propel him to sweeping wins) has little representation in the upper echelons of the state parties. Kasich is much more suitable to the bigwigs of the Acela Corridor. And it is nearly impossible to see Trump getting any loyal delegates out of, say, my home state of Minnesota, even though 8 of our delegation will be bound to him, because this part of the country is simply very hostile to Trump’s brand of politics — and very open to the Cruz brand of conservatism. (I mean, hey, Santorum won our state’s popular vote last time.)

It is, of course, possible that Trump will surprise me and sweep up a whole lot of state delegations with an insurgent guerrilla delegate-accumulation campaign, along the lines of what Ron Paul’s insurgency did in several states in 2012. Many in the Minnesota state party infrastructure were caught totally off-guard by the number of Paulites elected by precincts to the BPOU conventions (a Minnesota thing; don’t ask), and Paul supporters were able to seize majority control of enough BPOU conventions to ensure that the state convention was also majority Ron Paul. Despite fitting neither the establishment nor conservative mold, and despite finishing third in the Minnesota caucus straw poll, Paul left the state convention with 33 loyal delegates out of 40 awarded statewide — including all of the delegates elected at the state convention.

However, Paul’s campaign actively and publicly pursued a delegate-accumulation campaign from the get-go, spending heavily in caucus states where he could maximize his advantage, training his supporters (me included) throughout the country to win specific convention contests based on their specific local rules, and depending on the passionate, sustained engagement of his mostly-youthful base. I see some evidence of that in the Trump campaign — organized speeches, precinct captains, specific instructions to supporters to get elected as delegates — but it’s only enough evidence at this point to make me nervous, not enough to persuade me that Trump actually has a functional delegate insurgency planned. (And, worth remembering: despite running the most effective insurgency in history, Paul still only “won” a handful of state delegations. Five, as I recall.)

But, like I said, I’m just guessing. The campaigns, with millions of dollars to spend and the phone numbers and home addresses of every single state-level delegate in the country, may be able to construct a reasonably complete picture of who’s being elected to each delegate slot in Cleveland and where their loyalties lie before the national convention begins.  We won’t.

Now that you know all about the delegates who will carry out the convention (and also know what we don’t know about them), we can get down into the nitty-gritty of convention procedure… and how the chaos of a closely-fought convention might play out. Stay tuned for Conventional Chaos, Part III: The Republican Rulebook!

FOOTNOTES

*Democrats often compare Republican unbound delegates to Democratic “superdelegates,” but the analogy is a bad one.  While they have similar powers, “superdelegates” are a deliberate addition to the process by the national Democratic party, designed to block undesirable candidates. Republicans unbound delegates exist for no special purpose: they are simply a historical artifact from a handful of states that never updated to primaries from their old caucus systems. There are way fewer of them, they are geographically concentrated in just a few places, and their numbers are unpredictable.

**By my count, there are already 60 delegates who have gone from bound to unbound. (55 from Rubio, 2 from Carson, 3 from Bush, from NH, AR, GA, MN, DC, and WY).  If Kasich drops out (which would make stopping Trump much, much easier), we can expect another 20 or so delegates to join the unbound pool (9 from the District of Columbia, 2 from Maine, plus several more in upcoming contests).

†I mean, “To Whom Will the Delegates be Bound?” but I’m pretty sure there’s a web-readability rule against using “whom” in headers.

‡Gosh darn it, I wish Jeff Johnson were Minnesota’s governor today. I was at this speech. Heck of a speech.

§There are a handful of states — namely Arizona and, arguably, Alaska and Georgia — where delegates selected by convention must nevertheless pledge to make their “best effort,” or equivalent, to support the candidate to which they are bound in all matters, not just the nomination vote. In theory, this prevents delegates from these states acting against their candidate’s interests during rules fights. True, these pledges are nearly impossible to enforce as a practical matter, but many delegates are honorable people who will not (and should not) betray their oaths. Most states, however, merely bind their delegates to a single vote, not to a broad “best effort” standard.

DELEGATE ELECTION DETAILS

Presidential candidates either directly select or get effective sign-off on their delegates in CA (172), CT (28), HA (19), ID (32), NH (23), OH (66), WI (42), and in the congressional districts of NY (81). They also select half the at-large delegates in TN (16). Total 479.

However, in each of these states (except, obviously, New York’s congressional districts), the National Committeeman, National Committeewoman, and State Party Chairman take up three delegate slots, bypassing the candidate selection process with three consummate insiders. This amounts to 24 delegates, and reduces the total to 455.

Delegates are directly elected by voters, with endorsements by the candidates, in AL (50), RI (19), WV (34), Puerto Rico (23), and the congressional districts of MD (24), LA (18), IL (54), and TN (27). TN also elects half its at-large delegates the same way (15). Total 264. Again, in each of the 4 states that directly elect delegates at-large, 3 slots are occupied by party officials, who bypass the direct election. That peels away 12 of the 264 to the “Other” category. Total 252.

In states where delegates are selected by convention, party officials are chosen at the same time by the same people as the national delegates themselves, often based partly on their support for the appropriate candidates, so party officials aren’t really “bypassing” the delegate election process the way they are in the other states. Delegates are chosen, unbound, in conventions in American Samoa (9), Guam (9), the Virgin Islands (surprise: 9), CO (37), ND (28), and WY (29). They are chosen, bound, in all other states and territories (1503), with two exceptions:

New Jersey (51, minus 3 RNC officials) directly elects its delegates, but they are not endorsed by the different candidates. Rather, the state party is entitled to endorse a single slate, which then typically wins. In most states, I’d say this party control over the process favors Cruz or perhaps Kasich. In New Jersey, however, with Gov. Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump and the general shambles of a party they have (“sad!” as Trump would say), I expect it will work to the benefit of Mr. Trump, and he will get all these delegates.

Pennsylvania’s congressional districts (54) directly elect their delegates, but they are not endorsed by anyone. All delegates officially run uncommitted. This means that candidates will need to be highly organized to communicate the “loyal” delegate slates to their various supporters. The state is naturally Trump in the rural areas, naturally Kasich in the cities, and yet Cruz’s deep organization gives him a decided advantage in this race. I’ve no idea what will happen there, and would love some insight from native Pennsylvanians.

In Florida, I should note, candidates get to submit recommended delegate slates to the state party, but the state party has final approval. It is unclear how willing the state party would be to overturn candidate instructions, though — often, in these matters, custom matters as much as rules.

UPDATE 24 March 2016: Accounted for RNC “bypass” in delegate selection process.

This is the same conventional wisdom I have railed against time and time and time again in recent weeks, and, normally, I would let this one pass, but Alberta (unlike most pundits panicking about March 15th), has actually done some delegate math, which he lays out in his article.  This lends his piece the appearance of mathematical rigor.

However, while Mr. Alberta is to be commended for going through the actual delegate math, as so many other pundits have failed to do, his ultimate conclusions are based on grossly inaccurate assumptions about how Sen. Cruz would perform in head-to-head races against Mr. Trump.  These assumptions defy all available polling data, and lead Mr. Alberta to believe that Cruz would lose most contests with Trump in a head-to-head race.  Yes, it is obviously true, as Mr. Alberta contends, that, if a candidate loses most of the head-to-head races, he is not going to win a primary season — nor would he deserve to, since that would prove him to be the less popular candidate. But there is no good reason to be so terribly pessimistic about Cruz’s chances in head-to-head races with Trump.  On the contrary, Cruz is likely to win most races (and most delegates) once his rivals (Sen. Rubio and Sen. Kasich) have been eliminated from the race.

We can see this from the exit polling data in Michigan and Mississippi, in two ways:

(1) The obvious way: in Michigan, a demographically middling blueish-purple state where Trump won by 12 points (36% – 24%), polling shows that Trump would lose to Cruz in a head-to-head contest by 13 points (54% – 41%).  That’s not even close, and shows, in effect, a 25-point swing in Cruz’s favor if Rubio and Kasich drop out of the race. Trump currently leads almost everywhere, but nowhere does he lead by more than 15 points.  It would be a Trump-loving state indeed where Cruz would even be capable of losing with that kind of national lead on Trump.

(2) The precise way: FiveThirtyEight combined exit polls from Michigan and Missouri to determine exactly how Rubio and Kasich’s voters would behave if both dropped out, making the primary a head-to-head between Cruz and Trump.  They determined that 25% of Rubio’s voters would stay home, 60% would vote for Cruz, and 15% for Trump.  45% of Kasich’s voters would stay home, 37% would vote for Cruz, and 18% for Trump.  (You may recognize these numbers from the recent De Civ post, “How Much is Rubio Helping Trump?“.)

We can take these numbers and compute likely results in various states.  For example, FiveThirtyEight’s current weighted polling average in Wisconsin (which Mr. Alberta calls “prime terrain” for Trump) shows Mr. Trump with 30% of the vote, Rubio with 20%, Cruz with 19%, and Kasich with 8%.  (23% are either undecided or support candidates who have now dropped out.)  If Rubio and Kasich then drop out, according to the Michigan exit polls, Trump ends up with 37% of the remaining vote, and Cruz gets 38% — Cruz wins Wisconsin. That’s without counting the undecideds, who typically favor the non-Trump candidate (which is why Trump keeps underperforming his final poll numbers, even in states where he wins).  “Prime terrain” for Trump?  With respect, Mr. Alberta, the data do not support you.

This is broadly supported at the national level, as well, for those who go in for national polls.  The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which pushed undecideds toward one candidate or another and sampled only likely voters, had Trump at 30%, Cruz at 27%, Rubio at 20%, and Kasich at 22%.  Redistribute those votes as above, and Cruz has a 54% – 46% lead over Mr. Trump.

So let’s dispel once and for all with this myth that Trump is a national leader if Rubio and Kasich drop out.  On the contrary, Rubio and Kasich dropping out makes Cruz the national leader — and is the only plausible path to making anyone but Trump the national leader.  What about Alberta’s claim that the individual states coming up tend to favor Trump?

For the most part, Alberta’s claims here are based simply on wild assumptions.  Trump would be “heavily favored” to win in Arizona because “the Republican base is highly animated by immigration and border security.”  (The state that keeps re-electing pro-amnesty Sen. John McCain?  Seriously?)  This defies Cruz’s regional performance in most Western states so far, and ignores the polling data, which shows a close race once Rubio and Kasich are out (though Cruz’s win would still depend on get-out-the-vote efforts and undecideds in the state’s closed primary).  New York’s closed primary “could actually help Trump,” even though Trump has consistently and dramatically undershot his final poll numbers in closed primaries so far, because “Democrats in his home state won’t be able to show up and vote against him.”  (The white working-class Democrats of upstate New York represent one of Mr. Trump’s strongest potential voter areas, so locking them out could not be better news for Mr. Cruz.)

Nebraska, says Mr. Alberta, “could be a tossup,” for no particular reason, which is pretty shocking given that Cruz has beaten and usually dominated Trump in every nearby state that has voted so far (Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Idaho).  In California, “Trump could could be expected to win more than half, and probably closer to two-thirds” of congressional districts, because… actually, Mr. Alberta doesn’t give a reason.  Again, though, his conclusion stands in stark defiance of the only available polling data, a January 2016 Field Poll which showed Cruz leading Trump even before Cruz’s polling surge and before the field began to consolidate.  The Field Poll is extremely bearish on Trump’s chances in California for a wide variety of reasons, all of them still applicable today.

There are only two areas where I agree with Mr. Alberta’s analysis: Cruz is likely to do relatively poorly in the Northeast, where Trump has done very well so far (which tells you most everything you need to know about why the Republican party in the Northeast has failed), so his projection of “at least 100 delegates” on April 26th seems about right to me.  Also, Cruz may split the vote with Trump in the Pacific Northwest, where there is precious little polling data so far and demographics do not clearly favor either candidate (Cruz’s libertarian streak likely favors him there, while his evangelical streak hurts him.  Trump is likely the opposite.)

Everywhere else, Mr. Alberta does good delegate math, but based on extremely pessimistic assumptions about Cruz’s performance head-to-head with Trump.  This leads him to conclude, in error, that Trump is highly likely to win the race if Trump wins both Ohio and Florida. (Since there is no path plausible to stopping Trump with Kasich and Rubio in the race — at least, none I’m aware of — Mr. Alberta appears to concede the entire nomination to Trump through his aggressive naysaying on Cruz.)  His analysis is inaccurate, and should be disregarded in toto.

In reality, there is a good case to be made that the optimal strategy for stopping Trump involves Trump winning both Ohio and Florida, which would force the field to consolidate around Cruz.  Nate Silver thinks that’s plausibly the best anti-Trump strategy (a “close call”), and I believe it outright. The much bigger risk is posed by the possibility that Rubio and/or Kasich will cling to their doomed candidacies a second past March 16th, which would give Trump every opportunity to sweep across the remaining backloaded winner-take-all and winner-take-most states to win the nomination.  The faster the field consolidates, the clearer the path to stopping Trump.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a fairly popular post, “Trump’s Delegate Lead Is Overstated.” The post is as true now as it was then; political insiders continue to make poor predictions about the race, because they are not willing to learn the intricate delegate rules that govern it. (To be fair, who but a nerd like me would want to figure out, for example, what Illinois’s “loophole” primary is and how it differs from Pennsylvania’s loophole primary?) So people keep saying that Trump is doing much better than he, in fact, is. Trump is doing well and must be considered the frontrunner, but he is by no means the prohibitive leader, and his nomination is only inevitable if the party decides to accept it as inevitable.  (This won’t change until — at the earliest — April 26th, when much of the Northeast votes.)

Based on these poor predictions, pundits and even some Republican political figures are making all sorts of bad strategic decisions. For example, the widespread but false belief that Trump is guaranteed to win the nomination if he wins Florida and/or Ohio has led the Republican establishment to keep Rubio and Kasich in the race in an unlikely effort to deny Trump delegates in both states. (Sean Davis dismantles this strategy in a recent piece at The Federalist.) On the contrary, the optimal strategy for stopping Trump is to rapidly consolidate the field behind a single candidate who can defeat Trump head-to-head. Three weeks ago, I believed that candidate would be Sen. Marco Rubio, a man I greatly admire. However, intervening votes have proved me wrong: mathematically, the only plausible non-Trump competitor is now Sen. Ted Cruz. The longer Rubio and Gov. Kasich stay in the race, the more likely Trump wins the nomination instead.  This is but one example of incorrect party strategy based on unrealistically gloomy assessments of Trump’s current situation.

This post is De Civitate‘s poor-man’s delegate tracker, designed to counter those assessments. It will be updated after each primary election, so bookmark it and stay tuned. This delegate tracker doesn’t have any of Politico‘s fancy-pants graphics or FiveThirtyEight‘s sophisticated demographic projections or The Green Papers’ astonishing depth and update speed. But De Civ will tell you two things nobody else can:

1. How Trump would be doing in a field that never consolidates behind a single candidate, splitting the vote evenly between Cruz and Rubio, thus allowing Trump to win pluralities in every state. This is the “nightmare scenario” which I walked through with commentary back in my original post. It eventually allows Trump to “clinch” the nomination on the final day of primaries (June 7th).
2. How the actual results compare to that “nightmare scenario.”

If you are cheering against Trump, you want to see the “Progress to Brokered Convention” stat reach 100%.  Once that happens, the worst that could happen is a brokered convention where Trump is unlikely to win.  (It might still be possible for another candidate to clinch instead, though this becomes more difficult every day.)  On the other hand, if Trump reaches 100% on “Progress to Trump Clinch,” then it’s all over, and Trump wins.

This tracker is not pretty, but, if you ever need reassurance that the mainstream media is overstating Trump’s lead (still), come here for a breath of fresh air and a little sigh of relief. If De Civitate is panicking, then it’s time to panic… and not before. We — unlike, say, Ben Ginsberg* — have done the math.

Skip To: May 3 | April 26 | April 19 | April 6 | March 22 | March 15 | March 12 | March 8 | March 6 | March 1

May 3rd
1970 delegates allocated so far (82% of total)

Comment: Reader, I feel I owe you an apology. Months ago, I promised I would tell you when it was time to panic, and I believed that moment would come with a loss in Indiana. I even had a draft of this comment written, in case of a Trump victory. (The draft simply said: “PANIC!”) Perhaps you intuited this from last week’s discussion of Indiana, or from my very grim post yesterday. I believed that, after an Indiana defeat, the Stop-Trump efforts would have perhaps a 1-in-20 chance at beating Trump later on (and I was already working on the articles explaining those paths).

But Indiana turned out worse than the I expected, and worse than even the worst polls forecast.  Trump did not eke out a narrow win by pulling 40% of the vote against a divided field, which is what our Nightmare Scenario suggested; Trump won a solid majority in a largely “Evangelical” state, with demographics that should have been quite unfriendly to him, and crushed his nearest competitor by almost 20 points. It was far worse than the Nightmare Scenario, and it took us from “we have a fighting chance to stop Trump” to “there is no path forward at all” in a matter of minutes.  The first early returns came in, then the race was called, then Cruz suspended his campaign.  It happened so fast I never even had a chance to tell you to “PANIC!” until it was too late.

I’ve been gearing up for months to blame Kasich for this, but Trump’s victory was so complete that I can’t blame Kasich; his presence in the race made little difference. For whatever reason — and I hope to explore this further soon — the Republican Party rallied behind Donald J. Trump.

Over the coming days, now that Trump is winning outright majorities, you can expect his delegate count to rapidly reach and overtake the Nightmare Scenario we’ve been discussing throughout. Just doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, he should end up with between 1400 and 1500 bound delegates going into the convention. You can track that against the Nightmare Scenario, if it pleases you, here.

(FUN FACT: The odds of a brokered convention stopping Trump are still higher than Bernie Sanders’ odds of beating Hillary. That’s how bad the Sanders situation is right now.)

This concludes the De Civitate Poor Man’s Stop-Trump Delegate Tracker. It’s been fun, guys. You may now awaken to the nightmare world of 2016 America.

April 26th
1970 delegates allocated so far (80% of total)

Comment: I told you so: April 26th allowed Trump to make up the ground he lost in Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Colorado… and then some. He has almost, but not quite, caught up with the Nightmare Scenario. The only part of my prediction that wasn’t borne out was that Kasich would drop out after so humiliating a loss.

This brings Trump into a dead heat with the anti-Trumps: Trump is 80% of the way to clinching, and the anti-Trumps are 80% of the way to forcing a brokered convention. Because of the demographics of the remaining ten races, I give Trump the clear edge here — he is officially more likely to win the nomination than lose it — but he is by no means inevitable.

Yet. As I’ve been saying for weeks now, It All Comes Down To Indiana.

April 19th
1798 delegates allocated so far (72% of total)

Comment: Trump had a good night in New York, winning nearly 60% of the vote. (P.S. These results prove Ted Cruz was right: “New York values” are, indeed, terrible.) However, I expected Trump to sweep New York, as I noted two weeks ago, so the fact that he only won 90 delegates made April 19th a fairly good night in my book. (The fact that Kasich could be driven out of the race by this and a string of impending defeats was sauce for the goose.)

Actually, just go reread what I wrote in the April 6th entry. It predicted a good night for Trump in New York (and next week in the rest of the Northeast), and explains why it isn’t time to panic. We are, as you can see by the counts, still a bit off from the “nightmare scenario.”

The time to panic is on May 2nd, if Kasich is still in the race the night before the pivotal Indiana primary and splitting the anti-Trump vote.  That could easily hand Trump the nomination.

April 6th
1666 delegates allocated so far (67% of total)

Comment: Wisconsin, your country thanks you.

On Tuesday, millions of Wisconsinites, especially in the Milwaukee suburbs, rallied behind a candidate who is not necessarily all that popular in the suburbs — Sen. Ted Cruz — in order to stop the catastrophic candidacy of Mr. Donald Trump. The result: instead of the rout I expected, in which Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Cruz would evenly divide the anti-Trump vote and allow Trump to sweep up plurality victories across the state, Sen. Cruz came out firmly on top. Because Wisconsin votes winner-take-all by district (like most states in the second half of the primary season), Cruz was able to win 36 delegates to Mr. Trump’s 6 with only 48% of the popular vote. This was not considered likely a few weeks ago, and it makes Trump’s delegate math quite a bit more difficult. Notice that the actual results are now the mirror image of the Nightmare Scenario: in reality, we’re 73% of the way to a brokered convention, while, in the Nightmare Scenario, we were 73% of the way to a Trump clinch. That’s thanks to Wisconsin.

However, it’s not time to celebrate just yet: as Nate Silver observes today, Trump only needs to get to about 40% of the vote in a three-way contest to come out with large delegate majorities, and, as Nate Cohn pointed out a few weeks ago, Trump is poised to break 40% in a large number of upcoming states, where he has far more “natural” supporters than he had in Wisconsin. Many of the commentators who were treating Trump as inevitable a few weeks ago are now claiming that a contested convention is “almost certain.” Hogwash. I said they were being foolishly pessimistic in March, but that’s no excuse for becoming unjustifiably optimistic in April.

In reality, the stop-Trump delegate margin is razor-thin, and, if Kasich divides the anti-Trump vote in Indiana (May 3rd), Montana (June 7th), and all-important California (June 7th), Trump could still pretty easily walk into the convention with 1250 bound delegates — enough to clinch on the first ballot with no help from unbound delegates. Of course, if voters in those states follow Wisconsin’s lead and rally behind the single viable anti-Trump candidate, Sen. Cruz, we won’t have so much to worry about.

For the next few weeks, we don’t have too much to look forward to, but we also don’t have much to worry about. We are heading into the final Northeast primaries. Kasich’s entire justification for staying in the race is his appeal in the Northeast, with its 200-or-so bound delegates. Polls say he doesn’t have enough appeal to actually win, but he does have enough appeal to prevent Cruz from getting traction. Thus, I expect Trump to win virtually all the delegates in those primaries; so do most analysts. This wouldn’t be all that bad, either, as long as it drives Kasich definitively out of the race before the pivotal (and very competitive) Indiana contest on May 3rd. In fact, because the entire Northeastern bloc, combined, delivers only a few more bound delegates than California does on its own, a crushing Trump win in the Northeast (which would give Trump about 200 delegates but drive Kasich from the race) is probably better for the stop-Trump campaign than a narrow Kasich upset (which would hold Trump to about 100 delegates but allow Kasich to stay in the race to do much more delegate damage later on).

So it’ll be a while before we have a chance for another Wisconsin. Use the time to thank a Wisconsinite for their great work on Tuesday, and I’ll see you on April 19th, when New York votes and, quite possibly, awards every single one of its 95 delegates to Trump.

Colorado elects delegates April 8th.  They are officially unbound, but preliminary signs are good for Cruz taking the vast majority, and perhaps all of them.  Meanwhile, there are a couple other minor behind-the-scene shifts in the delegate count, most notably with Alaska un-re-allocating Marco Rubio’s delegates, which I’m not sure has ever happened before anywhere.

March 22nd

1596 delegates allocated so far (65% of total)

Comment: Kasich didn’t manage to ruin the night for anyone, so I am happy.  Trump won Arizona’s 58 delegates, which turned out to be inevitable given Arizona’s long early-voting window (Kasich actually lost Arizona to Rubio, which is pretty funny since Rubio dropped out a week ago), but Cruz came back with a massive win in Utah to secure all 40 of its delegates.  (Utah is normally proportional, but switches to winner-take-all if a candidate gets 50%.)  Thus, the night finished more-or-less even, and Trump missed his delegate targets. There are no more delegate-awarding contests until Wisconsin on April 5th, so the question of the next two weeks becomes: how fast can Kasich be driven out of the race after his disastrous showing tonight?

There were some minor delegate reallocations this week, particularly in Alaska; I have updated the counter accordingly (except for the Virgin Islands, because that race is still a mess).

March 15th
1480 delegates allocated so far (60% of total)

Comment: The good news is, while he made up some ground tonight, Trump missed his targets here by a significant margin.  60% of the delegates have been awarded, and yet Trump is only a little over halfway to clinching… while his opponents are nearly two-thirds of the way to forcing a brokered convention.  Meanwhile, the four-man race we’ve been suffering through lately finally shrank to a three-man race, with Rubio knocked out after a defeat in Florida.

The bad news is, because Kasich won in Ohio, we still have a three-man race. As the nightmare scenario shows, a three-man race will eventually hand Trump enough delegates to clinch a majority — even if he only wins 35-40% of the popular vote (a consistent trend that has continued tonight). Indeed, tonight’s results saw Trump win literally dozens of delegates outside Ohio that he would not have won except for the Kasich/Rubio spoiler effect. That trend will continue and accelerate now that we are in the winner-take-all portion of the GOP primary calendar.

Fortunately, the candidates have bought themselves a little breathing room with their defeats of Trump earlier this month.  Whereas the original “nightmare scenario” predicted that Trump became unbeatable if it was still a three-man race on April 25th, I now project that Trump’s nomination can still be blocked as long as someone drops out by May 2nd.

However, it would not be an easy path, by that late date, and it could easily fail. Gov. Kasich has literally no path to victory; it is impossible for him to achieve 1,237 delegates given that there are only 992 delegates left on the calendar, and it is almost impossible to foresee how he might plausibly reach the Rule 40(b) threshold even to have his name entered into nomination on the convention floor.  Every second Gov. Kasich remains in makes it more difficult to stop Trump; he should drop out immediately.  Preferably before his delusional campaign hands Trump another 74 delegates on March 22nd, one week from today.

March 12th
1114 delegates allocated so far (45% of total)

Comment: Not a ton of delegates awarded tonight, but, of those awarded, Trump got only 1.  Others got 47.  That’s a good night by any standard.

This is a long comment, because we are now two days away from March 15th.  March 15th is almost certain to be a bad night for #StopTrump.  Trump will very likely make up much of the ground he has lost in recent weeks, and it is entirely possible he will make up all of it.  Worse, much of the chattering class (as I have griped) is still insisting that the whole race hinges on Trump losing Ohio and/or Florida and their combined 166 delegates.  If he wins, they say, it’s all over.  So if he does win them both — still very much a possibility — there will be an overwhelming urge to panic and/or surrender to Trump.

But remember this: just to make his benchmarks for the “nightmare scenario” — just to make them, not exceed them — Trump needs to get to 769 delegates.  Ohio and Florida only get him to 630.  Sacrificing them may actually be best, since the biggest threat to the #StopTrump movement right now is the possibility that Kasich and Rubio will stay in the race, preventing vital consolidation.  Losing Florida and Ohio knocks them both out of the race, definitively. In my mind, that’s worth the 166 delegates it costs.

North Carolina is also voting on March 15th, but its delegates are allocated proportionally, so, even if Trump wins there, he won’t be able to get too many of its 72 delegates — not less than 20 and not more than 35.

Missouri and Illinois are also on the line Tuesday.  They use more complex allocation formulae than Ohio and Florida (which are simple winner-take-all states), but the plurality winner in each will win most and possibly all of their 121 delegates.  If Trump wins those plus Ohio and Florida, it puts him right back on track for the Nightmare Scenario. That would be very unfortunate.

It would not be the end of the world.  That’s right: thanks largely to the buffer the other candidates have steadily built up over the past several weeks, Trump can sweep all six elections on Tuesday (I didn’t mention the Northern Marianas Islands, which allocate 9 delegates, winner-take-all) and still be stopped by a rival candidate in May or June, as long as the field consolidates behind that candidate quickly after March 15th and that candidate starts consistently beating Trump, even by narrow margins, in most (not all) states.  Still, I would love to see somebody other than Trump win large delegate hauls in Missouri or Illinois; it would make the math a great deal easier.

Note that I allocated all of Wyoming’s delegates to “other” when they held precinct caucuses on March 1st.  I am reallocating them as they are bound to particular candidates.  (Cruz won 9 of 11 tonight, with 14-17 more very likely to fall into his camp at the state convention.)  I am also treating Guam’s officially-unbound-but-pledged-to-Cruz delegate as a Cruz delegate.

March 8th
1086 delegates allocated so far (43% of total)

Comment: At first blush, this was an awful night.  The crowded three-way battle to be the anti-Trump was a bloodbath in Trump’s favor.  Trump won 13 more delegates than he would have won without Rubio in the race… and it would have been worse in states with slightly larger delegations.   Rubio. Out. Now.

Meanwhile, even as it became clear that this race must become a two-way battle and must be led by Ted Cruz, Kasich continued to be so much of a spoiler that the “other” category is now threatening to overtake Rubio!

But take a longer look at the results, and they are not so awful after all. Cruz won Idaho outright, Trump was held to an average 35% of the vote (instead of the 40% expected by the Nightmare Scenario), and nothing could have made it clearer that other candidates must drop out and rally to Cruz. The brokered-convention camp grew its lead over Trump by a percentage point, and even reached the halfway point on its overall goal of denying Trump a nomination “clinch.”   More padding would be nice, with March 15th’s winner-take-all romp coming up, but every step to keep Trump off his targets helps.

March 6th
913 delegates allocated so far (37% of total)

Comment: What a wonderful weekend. Cruz took Trump to the woodshed and gave the stop-Trump coalition a very considerable buffer. It is vital to build up as large a buffer as possible before March 15th, when Trump is likely to make a large comeback if the field has not yet consolidated. Cruz did yeoman’s work on that buffer, though his rivals prevented him, in some cases, from building an even bigger lead.

It was an unspeakably bad weekend for Rubio, though, who is now running well behind even the worst-case numbers proposed by this “nightmare scenario.”  This is thanks mainly to Kasich, who took many of Rubio’s would-be delegates despite having no viable path of his own. Rubio’s campaign is now on life support.

March 1st (Super Tuesday)
757 delegates allocated so far (31% of total)

Comment: Super Tuesday could have gone better, certainly, as Trump broke 40% in several states and nearly broke 50% in Massachusetts — which explains why Republicans never win there — but losing four states, including the delegate pinata of Texas, measurably slowed his progress.

If 1,236 delegates are won by candidates not named Donald J. Trump, then there will be a brokered convention, where Trump seems unlikely to prevail.  On Super Tuesday, those delegates leapt out to an early lead, 27%-34%.

*NOTE: The rest of that article is quite good, and very helpful to understanding the convention process.  I mean, of course it is; it’s Ben Ginsberg, who practically is the convention. However, the second paragraph is just parroted conventional wisdom, and it’s wrong.

In this post, we’re going to explain how Republicans pick a president. But first, we need to explain the old process, because the modern process seems completely insane, wasteful, and incomprehensible… until you know where it came from. So, here is how Republican presidential nominees were picked from the party’s founding in 1856 until the liberal-progressive reforms of 1972:

First, you got together with your neighbors of the same political party in a gathering called a “caucus.” At the caucus, you would help elect a few of your wisest, most charismatic, most trustworthy neighbors as state delegates. Those delegates would then be sent to the state convention, where state delegates from all over the state would gather, each representing the Republicans of their own towns and districts.*

At the state convention, state delegates would discuss party business, finances, and policy, and would hold internal elections to decide who would get to run as the Republican candidate in major races (like for governor). Finally, in presidential election years, the state convention would elect its wisest and savviest (typically its top political office-holders in the state) as national delegates to attend the national convention.

At the national convention, a national party platform was set and a presidential and vice-presidential candidate were officially chosen. At the start of a national convention, you often had no idea who was going to win. Delegates often showed up undecided (this was a time when you might literally have never seen or heard any of the candidates speak before, though you would probably have read some of their speeches in the newspapers), and engaged in fierce debate, which often lasted several days, punctuated by an official vote every few hours to see where people stood. (A bit like a papal conclave.) As it became clear that this candidate or that one was non-viable, delegates would change their minds, shift their votes to more viable candidates, form alliances, make deals, spread lies and gossip, and — ultimately — the delegates would elect a single presidential candidate.

There was one consistent rule that was always followed in the Republican party, which guided everything else about the convention: to be the official presidential nominee, you couldn’t just win the most votes on a convention ballot. You had to win an outright majority of the votes. Otherwise, you’d keep voting until someone reached 50%+1. (The Democrats set the bar even higher: until 1936, they required two-thirds of the delegates to agree on a single nominee.) It was a pretty good process: this system nominated Abe Lincoln (after four ballots), Calvin Coolidge (one ballot), Dwight Eisenhower (two ballots), Barry Goldwater (one ballot), and F.D.R. on the Democratic side (four ballots)… often after electoral “floor fights” between different party factions represented at the convention, which had to be resolved with compromises.

However, in the 1970s, the Democrats became fed up with the way the process gave “party bosses” a lot of influence, since they were often elected as delegates and they were often the ones who ended up in “smoke-filled rooms” during deadlocked nomination fights making compromises and cutting “back-room deals” in order to get consensus on a single nominee. This frustration came to a head in 1968, when the Democratic party nominated pro-Vietnam Hubert Humphrey instead of anti-Vietnam Eugene McCarthy… despite the fact that primary polls (which were not binding in any way) showed 80% of the Democratic Party wanted an anti-Vietnam presidential candidate. There were violent protests surrounding the 1968 convention, largely as a result. To avoid future embarrassments, in 1972, a Democratic committee of liberal-progressives led by George McGovern gutted the 150-year-old caucus system in favor of a new innovation: binding presidential primaries. The national convention still happens, and delegates are still elected by the states, but there is also a direct presidential primary in each state. The delegates from each state are required to vote for a certain candidate based on the results of those presidential primaries. These bound delegates must swear an oath to vote for a specified candidate, and can face serious sanctions if they violate that oath.

For some reason, which I’ve never really understood, the Republicans decided to copy these Democratic reforms, even though they were put together by avowed liberal-progressives to increase direct democracy and decrease republicanism in the presidential election process — which is sort of the opposite of what the Republican party is theoretically about. So, during the ’70s, the Republicans mostly dismantled their caucus system and replaced it with a primary system very similar to the one used by the Democrats.**

That brings us up to date.

Ever since the “McGovern reforms” of the 1970s, the Republican nominee for president has been chosen, effectively, not by debate and discussion and compromise among well-qualified elected national delegates, but by direct popular elections. Because the results of those elections are known months in advance of the national convention, the process of negotiation also plays out months in advance of the election: candidates withdraw when they realize that they aren’t going to win. Soon, the party coalesces around a single candidate. By the time the convention rolls around, that candidate has won so many primary elections unopposed that well over half the national delegates are bound to vote for him. He is guaranteed to win on the first ballot. There are no more floor fights, because the outcome is known from the beginning.

Thus, modern national conventions have gone from being the most interesting events in American politics, where anything can happen, to the most boring — simple rote coronations. They inevitably play out like this:

1. During the primary season, the Republican party holds a series of state primary elections, where roughly 2,500 delegates to the national convention are selected and bound to a candidate.
2. By the end of the primary season, one candidate gains sufficient momentum to “clinch” the nomination (more than half the delegates are bound to support the candidate, making opposition pointless), and so all other candidates withdraw.
3. The Republican National Committee — a permanent organization that schedules the quadrennial conventions and manages the party between conventions — meets just before the convention and draws up a series of rules changes and platform alterations through various committees.
4. When the convention starts, the delegates gather in the convention hall. They are officially certified as delegates by the Committee on Credentials and given a voting card.
5. The delegates then vote (by simple majority, in a series of voice votes) to rubber-stamp everything the RNC decided in Step #3.
6. When it comes time to nominate the presidential candidate, there is only one candidate left who meets the nomination requirements. Officially, there is supposed to be a formal vote, but, with only one candidate left, this can be (and usually is) dispensed with: rather than doing a tedious vote, all the delegates simply clap for the presumptive nominee, in a beautiful show of consensus and unity.
7. The chairman of the convention bangs a gavel and declares, for the first time, that Candidate X is now the official presidential nominee of the Republican Party in Year Y. This is the legally binding moment at which the candidate becomes the Republican Party nominee, with all that entails.
8. Finally, the climactic moment: the nominee gives his acceptance speech.

This is all supposed to be perfectly choreographed to make the event look good on television: everyone smiling, dissenters silenced or marginalized. (Republicans, it must be said, will merely cheat you. If you’re unlucky enough to be a dissenting delegate at the Democratic convention, you may get beat up, have a death threat phoned in against you, and be ejected from the convention, which is what they did to my mother in NYC ’92.) Everything about the convention is designed so the delegates just have to spend three days clapping, smiling, and making the party look good to reporters. The presidential nomination process, especially, needs to be finished exactly at 8 PM so the networks can most conveniently cover the acceptance speech. The people who run the Republican Party — the oft-reviled Establishment — generally want conventions to work this way, because they think it makes the “party brand” more “marketable” and helps the “healing process” after a sometimes-bruising primary battle while providing “earned media” to the nominee with his prime-time acceptance speech.

It almost always works out the way the Establishment wants. After all, the Establishment also designed the primary process to create maximum leverage for winning candidates. Moreover, by its very nature, the primary system helps ensure that (even more than the old caucus system), every delegate elected to the national convention is a consummate political insider, with very few rebels who might try to do something crazy, like radically reform the RNC or the party platform. The Establishment is thus able to control the entire process, from beginning to end, with little risk of resistance or even any surprises.

However, the core idea of the national convention is still there: it is still a gathering of elected delegates representing all the states and territories of the Union. It is still the technically the delegates, and not the primary voters, who select the next president of the United States. And it is still the rule that, to be nominated as the Republican candidate for President of the United States, it’s not enough to have the most votes. You have to have the votes of a majority of the convention delegates. If the Republican delegates meet at a national convention, have a presidential ballot, and nobody gets 50%+1 of the votes, then they’ll have to vote again, and keep on voting until somebody wins… just like the wild conventions of old. Since the McGovern reforms were instituted in the ’70s, though, this has never actually happened.

But: in 2016, a year with multiple candidates in the field, splitting the votes more or less evenly, where seemingly no candidate is on track to having a majority of the delegates bound to them before the convention, where both frontrunners (Donald Trump and Ted Cruz) are widely loathed by the party Establishment (which, as mentioned, has considerable control over the convention process), it is possible for the process to break down. Multiple candidates stay in the race. No one enters the convention with a “clinching” majority. The delegates refuse to rubber-stamp the RNC’s new rules. At that point, the modern Establishment script goes off the rails, and we start a real-live, old-school, floor-fightin’ national convention, with multiple votes, multiple factions, compromises, smoke-filled deal-making rooms, impassioned debates, dark horses, and more — all aired live, for the first time in history, on national television.

You can see why us political types start to salivate at the very idea.

So that’s the view from 10,000 feet on the Republican presidential nominating process. In our next post, we’ll drill down into the nitty-gritty of the current convention process, and start talking about how it might be manipulated by various interested parties in a closely-fought convention floor fight.

*This is a tad simplified, because the details varied across dozens of states over the course of 116 years. In particular, there was often an intermediate step between the local caucus and the state convention, called a district convention, which handled local party finances, chose local party candidates, and selected state delegates for the state convention.

**Three states (CO, WY, ND) still hold traditional unbound caucuses, and a few states (IA, ME, and MN most prominently) hold a bastardized version of the traditional caucus where delegate elections and a half-hearted presidential primary are combined in a single meeting.