Is a Contested Convention Inevitable?

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Before the 2016 presidential primaries and caucuses began, I figured — like probably everyone else did — that, even though there were 17 candidates for the Republican nomination, the voters would settle on one fairly early in the process.

If anyone had asked me if we would know the identity of the nominee by mid–April, I would have responded in the affirmative. After all, that is the way it almost always works out.

All the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees in my lifetime have been nominated on the first ballot. Whatever their faults may have been, candidates have won or lost the general election entirely on their own. The number of ballots it took to nominate them has never been a factor in the general election.

But the topic of a contested convention — sometimes called a "brokered" convention although that really is a label that belongs to another time in American political history — began to circulate rather early in that process this year — and even though we are in mid–April and the Republican field is down to three active candidates, we still do not know who the nominee will be.

The front–runner, businessman Donald Trump, has been busily shooting himself in the foot. He lost the Wisconsin primary to his top rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, last week, and now he is limping into his home state primary, New York, where polls show him comfortably ahead.

Once Trump wins New York next week, as appears inevitable — although I guess I should be more careful about proclaiming something inevitable, given what we have already seen in this year's presidential campaign on both sides — I believe Cruz will be mathematically eliminated from securing enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third wheel in the campaign, is already mathematically eliminated.

But that won't mean that Trump is on Easy Street. Cruz and Kasich aren't the only ones who have delegates committed to them. So does Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who withdrew from the race when he lost his home state's primary a month ago. Rubio has 171 delegates who will be committed to him through the first ballot.

Trump needs to secure more than 51% of the delegates that are available in the primaries that will be held in the next two months to barely win a majority. That is certainly achievable. It is fortunate for Trump that most states do not award delegates on a purely proportional basis.

Trump having enough delegates to win on the first ballot is certainly more likely than Cruz capturing 90% of the remaining delegates (and that assumes that Trump won't win most of the delegates in New York). Talk about an impossible dream. And, as I said, Kasich isn't in the running for a first–ballot nomination.

But Cruz and Kasich could prevent Trump from having enough delegates to claim the nomination on the first ballot when everyone goes to Cleveland this summer. That could so easily happen.

American voters are a funny bunch sometimes. It often happens that, when one candidate appears to be on the verge of clinching a presidential nomination, the voters in the party start voting for someone else. Most of the time, that has happened in the Democratic Party. The front–runner eventually prevails, but not before the voters flex their contrarian muscles and throw a good scare into the presumptive nominee — as if to remind him (or her — Bernie Sanders seems to be throwing a good scare into Hillary Clinton's campaign) who's really in charge.

Or, at least, who is supposed to be in charge.

In the case of a contested convention, it appears that no one will be in charge. That is the part that seems to worry people the most. There will be chaos, we are told. Delegates will be fighting in the aisles.

Actually, the biggest concern seems to be that a multi–ballot convention will doom the nominee in the general election.

But I conducted a very random and extremely unscientific survey, and nearly everyone with whom I spoke said multiple ballots at the convention would not disqualify the nominee from becoming president.

Of course, I suppose that depends on what the voters see playing out on their TV screens during the convention. If they see riots in the streets, that could certainly influence their votes.

A contested convention would be a new thing for just about everyone. The last time the Republicans needed more than one ballot to choose their nominee was in 1948, nearly 70 years ago. That convention produced the second nomination of New York Gov. Tom Dewey, who went on to lose to President Truman in the upset of which people still speak.

The Democrats' most recent contested convention was in 1952. That one produced Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson as the nominee. He went on to lose the election to popular war hero General Dwight Eisenhower.

Now, at this point, you may be wondering if a contested convention has ever produced a nominee who went on to win the presidency. The answer to that is yes.

Woodrow Wilson (1912) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932) were both the products of contested conventions. FDR only needed four ballots. Wilson needed nearly four dozen.

Four Democratic presidents in the 19th century — James K. Polk in 1844, Franklin Pierce in 1852, James Buchanan in 1856 and Grover Cleveland in 1884 — needed more than one ballot to win their nominations.

In fact, until Harry Truman won the 1948 nomination on the first ballot and went on to win the November election, every eventual Democratic president for more than a century needed multiple ballots the first time he was nominated.

But eventual failure has been a more frequent outcome. Including the 1952 convention, 10 Democratic nominees who needed more than one ballot have gone on to lose the presidency. Thus, by nearly a 2–to–1 margin, nominees from brokered Democratic conventions have lost in the general election.

Multiple–ballot conventions have been less frequent for Republicans. They have had only 10, but their success ratio has been better. Half of those contested conventions produced the eventual winner, starting with Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

My guess is that, barring violence in the streets of Cleveland, a contested convention would be a ratings magnet. A contested convention would give viewers a rare civics lesson, an opportunity to see real wheeling and dealing on the convention floor, which would be sure to produce some surprises the next time the roll of the states was called. As I mentioned, Cruz and Kasich might well join forces to stop Trump. Cruz might well tell Kasich that, in exchange for his delegates' support, he would offer Kasich the vice presidency.

In that case, Trump might try to join forces with Rubio — and make a similar offer to him for his delegates.

And, although the two leaders deny that anything like it will happen, a compromise candidate might emerge if the balloting goes beyond a second or third ballot.

Theoretically, anything could happen in a contested convention.

Palin's Pronouncement

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As hesitant as I am to give Sarah Palin credit for, well, anything, I actually do feel compelled to give her some credit for her observation that a brokered convention would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Folks who perpetuate the idea that it would be bad for the Republican Party, she said, have "an agenda" — which, admittedly, sounds a lot like her usual conspiracy theory talk defaming everyone in the media or the party establishment — but suspend your disbelief and/or skepticism for a few minutes, OK?

While I won't rule out the possibility that Palin is playing the rest of us for a bunch of suckers and laying the groundwork for a "Draft Palin" movement in Tampa later this year, I will concede that she makes a valid point or two, especially when you consider recent electoral history.

Four years ago, the Democrats' nominating process dragged into the summer, and the pundits said it would mortally wound the nominee.

And, I suppose, it could have if 2008 had been an ordinary political year. But it wasn't.

You couldn't tell that right after the conventions. In the first half of September, the Democrats were struggling in the polls, and there was talk that Barack Obama had made a tactical error in choosing Joe Biden to be his running mate. Some Democrats openly fretted that Hillary Clinton should have been the running mate.

Seemed like business as usual — perhaps all those months of infighting really had taken their toll.

But then the economy imploded, and voters became determined to change directions. In the last six weeks of that campaign, the tide turned irreversibly to the Democrats. If Obama had needed two ballots or more to win the nomination in August, it probably wouldn't have mattered by Election Day 2008.

From the vantage point of 2012 (and in the eventual long–term context of history), the outcome of the 2008 election might look inevitable, but it was hardly certain at the time.

Anyway, Palin's assertion challenged the (pardon the pun) conventional wisdom that conventions do not serve the same purpose in the TV age that they did in the first 150 years of the republic's existence.

In the last half century, conventions have been about making the best possible use of the free air time the parties received. Organizers of modern conventions want things to be decided outside the view of the cameras. They want their primetime coverage to present a picture of a united, harmonious party to the national audience, enthusiastic about its nominees and its platform and ready to do battle in the general election campaign.

They don't want their conventions to be discussions about important issues that engage the viewers instead of entertaining them, and they don't want prolonged battles for the nomination. They want bands and balloons and cheering delegates. Perhaps they are fearful that if a convention goes past the first ballot — and previously committed delegates are free to vote in any way that they please — that is an invitation to chaos.

But that is not necessarily so.

Democrats have been holding presidential nominating conventions since 1832. Republicans have been holding such conventions since 1856. Originally, parties made important decisions at their conventions. They nominated their candidates for president and vice president, that's true, but they also defined who they were and what they stood for in their platforms.

In a nation that was still growing, still emerging and constantly facing new challenges, that was important. It helped Americans decide which directions they wanted to take, what kind of country they wanted to have. It was the essence of democracy.

The platform–building process is still important today, but the debates (such as they are) take place weeks before the convention — under the watchful eyes of the presumptive nominee's staff.

And their overwhelming concern is how it will look on television.

Before television came along, few Americans saw what went on at a party's convention, and most read about it through the media filter. It didn't matter to them if the acceptance speeches were delivered before 10 p.m. or at 3 in the morning — or if it took several ballots to decide on a presidential nominee.

The modern assumption is that a multi–ballot convention will be a negative. But Palin says it doesn't have to be, and I agree with her on that.

A convention in which viewers do not know the outcome could generate a lot of interest, and I think that would tend to attract viewers, kind of like an athletic contest between evenly matched teams.

No organizer wants to see something like what unfolded in the streets of Chicago in 1968, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the image the country sees. Instead, it could see a group of Americans calmly and rationally discussing the pros and cons of issues that affect their countrymen and the candidates who propose to lead them.

In the past, multi–ballot conventions have sometimes produced compromise nominees, and that is one possible scenario. No one really knows what to expect, in no small part because neither party has had a multi–ballot convention since 1952, when TV was still in its infancy.

The Republicans' most recent experiences with multi–ballot conventions — in 1948, when the GOP needed three ballots to settle on Tom Dewey for the second straight election, and in 1940, when the Republicans picked Wendell Willkie after six ballots — weren't especially good.

Dewey was defeated by Harry Truman (Mitt Romney has been compared to Dewey), and Willkie lost to FDR (Newt Gingrich has suggested that this year's convention might resemble the one in 1940).

But in the pre–television days, open conventions were known to produce Republican nominees who won sometimes — Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James Garfield in 1880, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and Warren Harding in 1920 — so it is not unprecedented.

Likewise, multi–ballot conventions produced some winners on the Democratic side — James Polk in 1844, Franklin Pierce in 1852, James Buchanan in 1856, Grover Cleveland in 1884, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and FDR in 1932.

Don't misunderstand. There is no guarantee that an open convention will produce a winner. Nine multi–ballot Democratic conventions produced losers as did three other Republican ones (in addition to the two previously mentioned).

And you can add political scientist and historian to the lengthy (and still growing) list of things that Palin is not.

But this much is certain. Both the winners and the losers of the last 14 presidential elections were nominated in one ballot

Could a multi–ballot nominee fare any worse?