With U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, winning the Wisconsin primary Tuesday over Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, the potential for a brokered convention for the Republican party is becoming more and more likely.
Howard Schweber, University of Wisconsin political science and legal studies professor, said he thinks the odds of a brokered convention happening this year are more than 50 percent.
“This is the Superbowl and the Final Four rolled into one,” Schweber said. “This is the greatest spectacle in politics.”
Defining “brokered convention”
A brokered convention, also referred to as an open convention, is what happens when no presidential candidate is able to secure enough votes to win the nomination by the time of the convention, which happens in July, Kenneth Mayer, UW political science professor, said.
If no candidate has enough delegates by July, anyone could become the Republican candidate — even those who haven’t been campaigning, Mayer said.
Instead of votes, candidates win the nomination for president by being awarded delegates, Schweber said. Each vote gets recorded indirectly by causing delegates to be pledged to a particular candidate. For example, since Cruz won the Wisconsin vote, he was awarded 36 delegates.
Donald Trump currently has 743 delegates, Cruz currently has 517 and Ohio Gov. John Kasich has 143. To win the nomination, 1,237 delegates are needed and there are only 882 delegates left, Mayer said.
The process
At the “first ballot,” delegates are required to vote for the candidate that they were pledged for, but if no candidate has 1,237 votes, the nomination is open to anyone, Schweber said. Before it comes to an open convention, delegates will try to come to some sort of agreement about who will win the nomination. But Schweber said this is unlikely this year because Cruz, Trump and Kasich supporters all dislike each other and are unlikely to come to an agreement.
Once it’s open, Mayer said there is a possibility the nomination could go to someone other than the two frontrunners, since many Republicans dislike both Cruz and Trump. Kasich could become the nominee, or any of the past candidates who dropped out of the race, Schweber said. Even someone like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan or former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Massachusetts, could get pulled in to become the nominee, Schweber added.
Schweber said the convention would be political chaos. He said delegates will likely be in a giant room yelling at each other, trying to win over support for a particular candidate. He said delegates will likely use the promise of the position of vice president as a bargaining chip.
Kasich talks beer, Bieber, sports to supporters at Madison bar
A ‘volatile’ system
Brokered conventions are incredibly rare events in politics. The last time there was even a possibility of an open convention was in 1976, but deals were made between delegates so former President Gerald Ford was awarded the nomination before an open convention occurred, Mayer said. The last time an open convention actually occurred was in 1952.
While this seems to take the vote away from the people, Scheweber said things happen this way because people choose to go along with the two-party system, which is not a law and is not a part of the Constitution. He said the American electoral system is more “volatile” than we tend to think because it has been accepted for so long.
“I hope every student watches this closely,” Scheweber said. “This is a rare political event and … we are going to learn a great deal about ourselves, our country and our political system by watching this year.”
