I guess the title says it all.
Will we have Huckabee with the southern delegates, McCain and Romney splitting mainstream America, and Guiliani with the large states (Cali, NY, FL) and wheeling and dealing at the convention for the first time in years?
I doubt it. Every four years we wonder if it’s going to happen and it never does. Someone will emerge on top and the others will drop their swords and salute.
There will never be a brokered convention again. We nominate candidates in primaries, not conventions. Campaigning is inordinately expensive, and trailing candidates will find it impossible to raise funds, campaign, and win delegates in the later primaries.
I could see it, but it’s way too soon to say. McCain didn’t win by a landslide, and it remains to be seen whether he’ll keep that momentum. Giuliani, of course, is relying entirely on later states.
I think we can all safely predict that this will happen based on the results of primary elections in 2 of our 50 states.
Don’t discount the fact that a full 64 of the 2,380 Republican delegates have been selected.
Super Tuesday might be split three ways - I don’t see Romney winning anything important and Michigan alone won’t help him - but about half the states vote after that, and people do recalibrate their choices if they see their former favorite is out of it. So I think those voters will gravitate to the one or two big ST winners, and somebody will win outright. The most ‘brokered’ outcome would have those two winners sharing a ticket, which I think is a reasonable guess if it’s McCain and Huckabee.
I don’t know if this is accurate. The Democrats still have Superdelegates. This means they can have a brokers convention. It could even happen this year. It would appear accurate to say their will never be another brokered Republican convention under current rules.
Superdelegates: Superdelegate - Wikipedia
The Republicans have superdelegates (or as they call them, “automatic delegates”) now, too. Besides, you don’t need superdelegates to have a brokered convention. You just need enough candidates winning primaries that nobody has a majority of delegates by the time of the convention. If you have three or four evenly matched candidates and no front runner emerges during the primaries, it could easily happen.
Superdelegates make a brokered convention less likely, not more. As politicians, they have a vested interest in backing winners and in seeing the nominating contest resolved early, and they gravitate toward front-runners even more so than primary-chosen delegates.
Case in point: 1984. This was the one time in my life when there might plausibly have been a brokered convention, because Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were fairly evenly matched in the primaries, and Jesse Jackson was able to maintain a low-budget campaign and win about 15% of the delegates even with no possibility of ultimate victory. (Most candidates can’t do this.) However, the Dems had added super-delegates, for the first time, in 1984, and the supers overwhelmingly backed the front-runner Mondale and ensured him a first-ballot nomination.
The ultimate indication of how seriously party professionals take the possibility of a brokered convention is the dates for which the conventions have been scheduled–August 25 for the Democrats and September 1 for the Republicans. If the leaders who scheduled the conventions thought there was even one chance in a hundred that the conventions would have real decisions to make, they would schedule them for earlier in the summer.
Freddy’s fearless predictions for 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024: