Republicans get ready for a real convention
With back-to-back primaries and earlier delegate selection dates, there may be no candidate who has an early majority of convention delegate votes.
For the first time in more than five decades, when Republican delegates arrive in St. Paul next summer, they face the possibility of a brokered national convention with no presidential candidate able to muster a majority of the votes.Several GOP leaders who are attending sessions of the Republican National Committee in Minneapolis this week say it could happen, although most say it’s more likely the party will have settled on one candidate by then.
Nonetheless, some political analysts are salivating over the idea of an actual convention contest in 2008, rather than a coronation, as has happened in more recent years.
Two key factors are cited:
• There is no incumbent president or vice president running, thus no presumptive favorite.
• There are many early primaries, moved up by states wanting to play a larger role in the nomination process, and as a result, several presidential candidates could assemble a bloc of delegates before a consensus emerges.
That would set the stage for a convention in which no candidate has a majority going in.
“This year has the potential,” said Jack Meeks, a former Republican national committeeman from Minnesota. “There are going to be so many delegates elected on First Tuesday [in February], everybody will come out with a bunch of delegates , and they will fight away for the rest of delegates.”I could easily envision it,” said R. Craig Sautter, who has written three books on presidential convention history and has been a Democratic Party consultant. Both parties have strong fields, he says.
Mike Duncan, Republican National Committee chairman, said last Friday that he must prepare for a scenario in which no candidate shows up at the Xcel Energy Center on Sept. 1, 2008, with the nomination sewn up.
“I certainly think it’s possible, when you look at the numbers. We’ve got 53 percent, roughly, of the delegates who will be selected on or before February 5th,” he said. “You have three, perhaps four candidates who have the ability to get their message out because of being able to raise money, be organized, or they have a national forum or platform of some sort. And I think I have to prepare the convention as if it’s going to be a real old-fashioned convention.”
James Quinn, executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party, concurs. “I think the opportunity for it to happen is greater than for the last few decades,” he said.
However, Minnesota GOP chairman Ron Carey says he thinks the party will know who its nominee is when delegates meet in St. Paul.
“Personally, I find it highly doubtful that we won’t have some candidate pick up the momentum in the primaries and become the presumptive nominee,” he said.
Brian Sullivan, Minnesota’s Republican committeeman, also doubts he’ll see a brokered convention. “It’s hard to imagine that you have three strong candidates, equally divided after a couple of these contests,” he said. “That’s the scenario that would have to occur.”
But if the nomination is undecided by the convention’s outset, Sullivan said, the result could depend on which candidate is the second pick of most delegates.
James Bopp Jr., a Republican committeeman from Indiana, has endorsed Mitt Romney and believes Republicans could be coalescing around him after Super Tuesday.
He believes that Sen. John McCain’s campaign has collapsed but that support for Fred Thompson might grow if he can overcome early organizational problems, creating the possibility of a convention with no clear majority.
Duncan, the Republican committee chairman, said he has told state parties that he will enforce the penalty rule on when primaries will be held.
“If states go outside our window between February 5th and July 28th,” he said, “… they will lose at least half, and in some instances lose as much as 90 percent, of their delegate votes.”
One of those states is Florida, which has moved its primary to Jan. 29, making it the fifth state contest, along with South Carolina, after Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wyoming.
Florida will lose half of its delegates under the GOP penalty, but Jim Greer, state party chairman, said it’s OK with him “because Florida will play a dominant role in choosing the nominee.” He predicts that the candidate who wins Florida will develop the momentum for decisive wins on Feb. 5 and become the nominee.
Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote in a recent article that both parties could have brokered conventions. “It would be electrifying and exciting,” said Ornstein in an interview. He put the odds of it happening at 30 percent or less.
The compressed primary timetable “creates a real possibility that no one runs the table and the real possibility of ambiguous results,” he said.
California has a lot of delegates up for grabs on Feb. 5, but the results could be murky because it does not have a “winner take all” system, where a majority of state votes will determine who gets all the delegates, Ornstein said. In effect, there is a separate delegate primary in each of the state’s 52 congressional districts.
Steven Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said a GOP convention without a presumptive nominee is a “real possibility” and there could be trouble resolving a stalemate.
Party bosses from key states used to be able to deliver their delegations to one candidate. “Now we’re in a situation where virtually all of the delegates are dedicated to one candidate or the other,” Smith says. “They will end up going to the national convention, very impatient with the other candidates, wanting their candidate to stick to their guns and not throw in the towel. This is a process that is not geared toward brokerage.”
Stephen Roberts, a national committeeman from Iowa, believes that a GOP convention without a sure winner beforehand could be a big plus for the party, drawing more public attention than have recent more scripted conventions.
“The conventions have been, let’s face it, very boring,” Roberts said. “Perish the thought that somebody would have an original idea or raise a question on the floor.”
Randy Furst • 612-673-7382 Pat Doyle • 651-222-1210
© 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
