The Republican National Convention will be held in Cleveland, OH in mid July, and the question on many minds is whether or not someone will have secured enough delegates to win the nomination by that time.
Donald J. Drumpf is currently working with 743 delegates, Ted "Kevin from the Office" Cruz has 545, and John "The Little Engine that Could" Kasich has 143. There are 854 delegates still up for grabs so the math can work out for Cruz or Drumpf to reach the magic 1,237 delegates, but Kasich's only shot at the White House is a contested convention.
A contested convention would shift the Republican National Convention from more of a formality to the party's most pivotal point this election season. If no one can reach the minimum 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination, one will be chosen at the convention.
The process is pretty straight forward. The state delegates at the convention vote on who the nominee will be until someone hits 1,237. It gets a little tricky because there are bound and unbound delegates.
Bound delegates go to the convention and have to vote for the candidate they're pledged to. Unbound delegates can vote for whoever they want. So if the RNC chooses not to amend rule 40b, stating that a candidate must have won at least eight states to get nominated, any person on planet earth could theoretically become the nominee.
It could get even trickier if the delegate voting goes through multiple rounds. Remember, a candidate has to get the magic 1,237 delegates (the simplest majority out of the 2,472 total delegates). If someone doesn't win in the first round, it turns into a "brokered convention." The delegates then continue voting until someone reaches the threshold.
A brokered convention works through vote trading to get to an eventual nominee. This means that bound delegates become unbound, and they can vote for whoever they want. Essentially all hell breaks loose bringing on visions of sleazy politicians wheeling and dealing in smokey back rooms and complete pandemonium on the convention floor.
This hasn't happened to the Republican Party since 1948 when Thomas Dewey won the nomination after three rounds. A brokered convention shows the party involved is fractured, and the mending process to get to a nominee would likely be ugly. But if there's any time for an old school down and dirty contested convention, 2016 is certainly the year.
