I'll believe it when I see it.
Several top Republicans tell The Associated Press the party has started preparing for a contested convention as the outcome of a primary season in which no GOP candidate for president wins enough delegates to secure the party's nomination.
This worry has been going around for a while now. To be sure, it's perhaps a more likely possibility than in previous years simply because of the enormous number of candidates—but only a handful of those candidates have any legitimate business in the race at this point. We can count hangers-on (like the pouting Rand Paul) out within weeks, most likely. Ben Carson's campaign counts itself lucky each time a day ends and nobody important has jumped ship. Jeb Bush has the momentum of spilled pudding. At this point, only Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are fighting it out for a position as top lunatic, with Marco Rubio trailing behind them as an establishment-backed pity candidate, and the odds of both Trump and Cruz making it through Super Tuesday and beyond without campaign-ending gaffes seem remote.
Everyone else is a no-show. There's not going to be a Rick Santorum surge or a Jim Gilmore rally, and nobody is going to suddenly start coalescing around Chris Christie. A contested convention would be the result of multiple strong candidates each nabbing just enough delegates to deny the others a win. In this case, we have multiple very weak candidates who aren't likely to be a factor, led by a pair of highly polarizing nutcases who still have to navigate the minefield of their own mouths for months.
Still, a contested convention could happen. So it falls on Reince Priebus to prepare for the possibility of a Donald Trump/Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio monster truck rally on the convention floor.
“You obviously prepare for any scenario,” Priebus said. Priebus has been reaching out privately to members of the RNC, as well as seasoned Republican Party hands for months to discuss how to address the threat of a contested convention.
Meanwhile, other insiders are grumping that Priebus and his changes to the primary calendar are what led to this scenario.
A contested convention won’t likely come to pass, but it warms my heart to think of all the Republican insiders having to plan how they'd possibly wrangle such a thing.