Republicans are having trouble taking on Trump not only because they welcomed his support in the past and not only because they have often embraced (in a less colorful and direct way) numerous themes he is accenting, but also because they have delivered next to nothing to their loyal white working-class supporters.
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In light of this, Chief strategist and communications director of the RNC Sean Spicer clarified the context of the situation, according to CNN. The RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential loss that stressed the demographic importance of not offending Latinos, women, and young people had become the conventional wisdom.
Donald Trump waves as he leaves the stage after speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on December 10, 2015.
Delegates are committed to vote for the candidate they were selected to support on the first ballot. They are now talking of a “brokered convention”, a complicated exercise where the party decides there is no clear victor in the primaries and “releases” delegates who have been mandated to vote candidates the grassroots voter has preferred. And Ryan does not think that Trump represents what the Republican Party stands for. He threatened to bolt the party altogether.
But since President Obama’s election, the Republican leadership has been happily complicit with a brand of politics that the prophet Hosea warned against roughly 2,800 years ago: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.
The statement from Carson comes after the Washington Post reported that a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Monday was dominated by discussions of Donald Trump heading into the convention with a significant number of delegates. “If this was the beginning of a plant to subvert the will of the voters and replace it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party”, he continued.
The possibility of a brokered convention is one that the GOP still needs to consider, no matter how unlikely. Democrats decided choosing delegates through state primaries would be more representative of the choice of voters than having it done in the political backroom deals of the convention. In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent, and was able to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states by mobilizing thousands of volunteers.
Brokered conventions in the modern era are quite rare because the nominees are generally decided on well in advance through the state primaries.
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. This makes it easier for candidates who lose to amass delegates anyway and have a say at the convention.
Because that initial ballot delivered Ford the nomination, the 1976 convention is not technically considered to have been “brokered”.
Third-party candidates might poll well early in the campaign.
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Among Republicans without college degrees, Trump had 46 percent to 12 percent for Cruz, 11 percent for Carson and 8 percent for Rubio.
