The GOP, it turns out, may be waxing nostalgic for the days of brokered conventions.
Imagine, a modern major political party brainstorming in December over the possibilities of a deal-making, smoke-filled, back-room scenario next summer in Cleveland. By all accounts, key Republican power brokers, including RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, met last week to hash out contingency plans should Donald Trump storm through the primaries and emerge a viable convention favorite.
He’s no longer a mere phenomenon, however embarrassing, and he’s no longer the longest of long shots, given the susceptibility of the GOP’s primary base to take-no-prisoners-to-make-America-great-again rhetoric. It’s no longer out of the question that there might actually be a need for a GOP stop-Trump cabal.
Convention floor-fight talk is normally the purview of the drama-courting media. In reality, there hasn’t been real uncertainty since Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976.
But this is the 2016 presidential race, a zero-sum, us-against-them, bluster-is-better election the likes of which we haven’t seen before. How serious is this? Imagine, the “Make-America-Great-Again” candidate has panicked the Republican establishment into preferring, if it comes to it, that party insiders call the nomination shots instead of voters.