The chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association sees the odds favoring Donald Trump’s winning the GOP presidential nomination on the first-ballot, even if the billionaire businessman marches into the GOP convention in Cleveland as many as 100 delegates short of a majority.
Randy Evans, who is also a member of the Republican National Committee’s Rules Committee, made the prediction based on 10 scenarios he ran for possible outcomes. He found the scenarios showing only a slight chance the July nominating event in Cleveland will turn into that rarest of birds, a brokered convention, with candidates and power brokers negotiating with delegates behind the scenes.
Trump supporters fear a convention “high-jacking” by the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan-Jeb Bush “power elite” in the party, even if grassroots voters have made clear they want Mr. Trump. The “Never Trump” forces have all but announced they are out to “rig” the outcome to give the nomination to Ohio Gov. John Kasich or House Speaker Paul Ryan or some other establishment-acceptable candidate.
With only 10 winner-takes-all contests in the states and territories and 46 others that distribute delegates in proportion to the candidates’ share of the vote in a primary or caucus, “the ability to get a majority of delegates in any one state or throughout the process is very challenging until the race gets down to just two candidates,” Mr. Evans argued. “With that said, I continue to believe it is much more likely that there will be a presumptive nominee, even if one candidate ends up just short of the 1,237 delegates.”
But some leading Republicans have said they will never vote for Mr. Trump in a general election and will prefer a risky move for a third-party run
Other Republicans call such a course wishful thinking that would virtually guarantee a Democratic presidency for the next four years.
“As a lawyer, especially one that commissioned a project that collected all the rules, requirements and deadlines for candidates to get on the ballot, I can tell you that the chances of a ground-up start of an independent or new third party challenge are virtually zero,” he said. “Too many deadlines are imminent and if a candidate started tomorrow, it would be virtually impossible to meet the deadlines that exist. The only real possibility would be if a candidate with substantial donor support hijacked an existing third party and used it as the vehicle for getting on the ballot.”
Otherwise, according to Mr. Evans, “no candidate could get on enough ballots to have a realistic chance of winning the required 270 Electoral Votes” in November.
Of 10 war-gaming scenarios Mr. Evans said he ran, only two showed him getting to the 1,237 majority required. number prior to the Convention.
Once the race dwindles to two real candidates, Mr. Trump “could win in many proportional states 100 percent of the delegates with only 51 percent of the vote,” according to Mr. Evans, who found it the more likely scenarios putting Mr. Trump 75 and 100 delegates short.
If that happens, Mr. Evans expects Mr. Trump would still win on the first ballot because candidates like Marco Rubio and others who suspended their campaigns automatically made their delegates unbound and enough of them will go to Mr. Trump.
As the gap creeps beyond 100 delegates, however, “the challenge gets exponentially more difficult given how deep the conviction against him is among some institutional power brokers to his nomination,” said Mr. Evans.
Jim Ellis, a delegate-allocation expert and former political adviser the then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, said he basically agrees with Mr. Evans assessment.
“I would put the chances about two in 10 that Trump can reach the 1,237,” said Mr. Ellis. “I do think the most likely ending is Trump not getting the 1,237 through the last five GOP primaries on June 7 but being able to win over enough unbound delegates to put him over the top.”
Nor does Mr. Evans see the convention changing its rules to stop Mr. Trump.
“There is no appetite to rig the convention,” he said, adding he foresees no “significant rules changes.”
Some anti-Trump Republicans think the best way to get to a brokered convention is for Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz to stay in the contest to divide up the available delegates. Others argue a Trump-Cruz one-on-one is the best formula for stopping Mr. Trump.
“The big key for me is whether Ted Cruz and John Kasich will start to work together to deny Trump the majority,” Mr. Ellis said. “If they do, then he could be in some trouble. But, the betting is they won’t and I agree with that assessment.”
As for a worst-case scenario, he said that would follow only if no candidate is close to the 1,237 and organized groups decide to filibuster the process.
The GOP has the convention hall and hotel rooms for a week and if the convention runs over because it cant agree on a nominee, “then real logistical issues start to develop including the real risk of losing a quorum as folks leave, hotel rooms run out, and the Convention hall has to be used for other purposes.”
• Ralph Z. Hallow can be reached at rhallow@gmail.com.
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