Randy Evans delivered the keynote address at the Seventh District Georgia Republican Party dinner last Friday night before taking the gavel on Saturday in the Sixth District. Randy first described the four scenarios delegates might face in Cleveland this year: a presumptive nominee, a brokered convention, a contested convention, and an open convention. Then he discusses the scheduling problems that might face organizers of the convention. Following is a partial transcript.
Randy Evans: Number one there is a brokered convention, there is an open convention, there is a contested convention and there’s a presumptive nominee. Those are the four possibilities that exist, they’re completely different possibilities.
A presumptive nominee will mean that one candidate has twelve hundred and thirty seven legally bound delegates before the convention gavel begins.
So that’s the only way that somebody locks up the nomination before the convention, and that’s the only way we avoid the other three options.
Option number two is that, let’s say at the end of, remember the California primary is June 7th. So, California comes and goes, we have a front runner who is, let’s say, one hundred and thirty seven delegates short, in other words they get to eleven hundred bound delegates, but short of twelve hundred thirty seven.
And that nominee goes over to another candidate, say John Kasich, and he says, “You know John, you’ve got a hundred and seventy two delegates and I’m a hundred and thirty seven delegates short, you’d make a great running mate. In fact, I think you’d be a great running mate.” And they agree that one will pick the other for the VP if the other one provides their delegates for to put them over the top, at twelve thirty seven.
That would be what we call a brokered convention, get it? You brokered a deal. So when you hear them say brokered convention, that’s the way you have a brokered convention.
The third option is everybody says, “I agree we should have a brokered deal, but I think I should be the top pick” and so no deal gets done.
And so what then happens is we get to the convention and what we would have are two candidates currently eligible under the rules for nomination and to receive a vote. To be eligible under the current rules, a candidate has to receive the demonstrated support of the majority of the delegates in eight states. Currently there are only two candidates that can meet that threshold, that is Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
If that rule stays in effect, which is Rule 40(b), then what you will have is what’s called a contested convention. Why is it contested? Because the options are limited.
Now here’s the tricky part, the media, every time they say this, say, “Well if it ends up just being Cruz or Trump, it’s got to be one or the other.” Right? Because whoever gets the most votes, they win, right? Wrong. The winning candidate has to get affirmatively twelve hundred thirty seven delegates.
So if Trump gets delegates and Cruz gets delegates but neither one gets twelve thirty seven, because you have a whole group that says, “I’m going to vote for Marco Rubio, I’m going to vote for John Kasich, I’m going to vote for Mickey Mouse.” Those all operate as no votes to the front runner.
Because the threshold is you must get to twelve thirty seven. It isn’t that you have to win the majority of the delegates cast at the convention.
And so when everybody always talks about the idea that you have to win the majority of the delegates, no you do not. You have to win twelve hundred and thirty seven delegates. You have to win twelve hundred and thirty seven delegates because the rules say you have to win more than half of the votes entitled to be cast, not the votes that are actually cast.
So when you see or hear people say that, now you know the real deal, it’s got to be twelve thirty seven.
Now the fourth option is an open convention, where we go through the first ballot and nobody gets twelve thirty seven because a lot of people vote for Kasich or someone else. Those votes don’t count towards his tally because he’s not a nominated candidate. But what do they do? They deprive someone else of being able to get to twelve thirty seven.
So it’s basically any vote voted other then for one of the two, is an effort to then do what? Go to the second ballot.
What happens on the second ballot? Seventy eight percent of the delegates get released. They can now vote for whoever they want to vote for.
What happens on the third ballot? Virtually all of the remainder get released.
So what happens if you go one ballot, two ballots or three ballots and nobody ever gets to twelve thirty seven? Well that’s happened eight times in history, we know that. Depending on how you count the civil war period, it’s arguably ten , but we can agree it’s happened eight times in history, in terms of U.S. history. So, what happens then?
Well what happens then is you get a motion to do what? Suspend the rules. And the motion to suspend the rule then permits what? Nominations to start all over again.
Now, the biggest problem with this whole process is how long do we have to do it in? Four days. Because at the end of the fourth day, Cinderella and her carriage turn into a pumpkin, because the convention hall suddenly is not ours anymore. They have to start getting ready for the next event during the following week or something.
Everybody loses the convention, everybody loses their hotel rooms, we all go home. That’s happened once before where a convention could not meet it’s destiny, that was in 1860, the democrats met in Charleston, they recessed and had to reconvene in Baltimore.
But when you reconvene, what happens? No delegates are bound. So, you can see that on the rule’s committee we have a few little things kind of like up in the air.
Now, the one other issue that I just want to share with you that’s unresolved, that we will, may take up in the RNC Spring Meeting next week, is Senator Rubio has said, “I am not releasing my delegates.”
Now except for Louisiana and Oklahoma, which address that by state law, which basically says if you suspend your campaign, your delegates are released, there is no law, so we don’t even know what would happen to the remainder of the hundred and seventy four Rubio delegates if we take those two out.
And if you add those together with the Kasich delegates with the, remember there are states like Pennsylvania, in Pennsylvania fifty four delegates are unbound by a matter of law. You add all those up and they don’t vote for one of the front runners, then we don’t get to a nominee at twelve thirty seven.
Now, when are we supposed to start voting for President at the convention? Day one? No. What do we do on day one? We adopt the credentials report and we adopt the rules.
What do we do on day two? We listen to speeches. We hear videos.
What do we do on day three? We finally get around to starting to vote. Now if you just start voting on day three and you don’t make it on the first ballot, how are you going to be done by day four? Because, remember how long it takes us to call the roll.
Remember the, “this is the great state of Alaska, the home of the fisheries from which we can see Russia on the coast” speeches. Right?
So what the question then becomes for us is do we have to change the order of the Convention, do we need to move balloting up, what are the rules going to be? So you can see, there’s a lot more at stake here. And we’ve got passions that run deep.
Now I want to, my last point and then I’m going to take any questions anybody wants and then I won’t keep you too long. Everybody comes to me and they go, “Well, there’s these folks that say, I’m never going to vote for Donald Trump, I’m never going to vote for Ted Cruz, I’m never going to vote for John Kasich, I’m never going to vote for whoever.”
And I look back to the last gubernatorial primary, the run off between Nathan Deal and Karen Handel. And I will tell you that was about as nasty and vicious of a runoff as I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been some brouhahas.
But at the end of the day, when Georgians looked up and saw the other option was Roy Barnes, those wounds started to heal.
And when we wake up and see that it’s either Uncle Bernie or you can’t see my server Hilary, I tend to think some of those things will start to take care of themselves because at the end it will be a ticket.
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