The news network reported Friday morning that Carson said he would consider leaving the party if a potential candidate deal between Republican leaders becomes reality.
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I will make one prediction about the presidential election cycle of 2016: If the Republicans have a brokered convention, especially if Donald Trump is still in the hunt, we will see wall-to-wall day and night TV coverage.
Republicans followed suit and since then every presidential candidate has been nominated by winning the majority of delegate votes in the primaries.
Of course, it’s obvious that he was talking about Donald Trump, who is now leading most polls.
“Several longtime power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative”, according to sources who spoke anonymously to the Posts’s Robert Costa, who also reported that advisors and allies of two Trump rivals were at the dinner. “I won’t stand for it”, said Carson, who added that if the plot is accurate, “I assure you, Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party”.
Other candidates have been asked about their loyalty to the pledge in recent days as they repudiate Trump’s proposal to ban entry to the U.S.to all foreign Muslims. “But I certainly don’t want to be a part of corruption”, he said.
The RNC made all candidates sign a pledge early on that they would support whoever the eventual Republican nominee turns out to be, but Trump has continued his independent run talk by putting the burden on the GOP to uphold its end of the deal.
To win the presidential nomination, a candidate must secure votes from a majority of the 2,471 delegates and win eight states.
Republican insiders have reportedly settled on a strategy to prevent current front-runner Donald Trump from becoming their nominee.
One official at the dinner meeting said the discussion of a brokered convention only came up briefly and that it was not about Trump.
While unlikely, the possibility of a brokered convention is a common topic of conversation for political operatives examining the turbulent 2016 election season. “If the powerful try to manipulate it, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next summer may be the last convention”. In that free-for-all scenario, delegates committed to an individual candidate are “released” to support someone else, and campaigns must work – and negotiate – to earn them in successive rounds of balloting.
The last convention where the nomination was even in question was in 1976, when Ronald Reagan mounted an unsuccessful challenge against the Establishment-backed Gerald Ford.
Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, estimates that an independent candidate would need approximately 579,000 signatures total to get on the ballot in all 50 states.
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According to the Post’s article, top GOP leaders were discussing an “anti-Trump” effort, if Trump continues to lead the race after early primary contests.
