Can The GOP Survive A Contested Convention?

It’s looking more and more likely that no Republican candidate will have the 1,237 delegates necessary to win the nomination before the party convention. That means it will be a contested convention, with a second vote, and possibly more, as delegates switch their support from one candidate to another until there’s an eventual winner. It could get ugly, and rather than unite Republicans behind the most electable candidate, it could tear the party apart. The media have focused on the persona of the candidates, but party politics are more about building coalitions by bringing together groups with disparate interests in order to win the presidency than choosing a charismatic leader. In parliamentary democracies, ruling coalitions are formed within the legislature as a prime minister is selected. But in presidential democracies like the United States, the executive branch is independent of the Legislature and the coalitions are formed at party conventions. The two rival parties then face off in a general election, and the one with the strongest coalition (that is, the coalition that gets the most voters to the polls) rules the country for the next four years. Political coalitions are tricky to build and maintain. It’s not like a business, where, if you produce a good product and offer good service, customers will beat a path to your doorstep. Governments produce very little. Government policy is mostly about redistribution: if the government wants to deliver more benefits to one group, it has to raise taxes on another group to finance it; if it wants to confer rights and privileges on one group, it has to take rights and privileges away from another group. For example, affirmative action grants extra points to certain job applicants; if those points were granted to everyone, what would be the purpose? Large coalitions are politically inefficient. The larger a political coalition, the fewer people it has to exploit and the less it has to distribute among its members. Bernie Sanders has promised a lot of things to a lot of people and told them it will be paid for by the one-percenters. In theory, 99 percent of the population should be lined up to vote for Bernie and get their free stuff from the government. But his numbers don’t add up. If he were elected President, he would soon have an army of disappointed supporters. In a two-party system such as the one we have in the U.S., the rival coalitions tend to remain fairly equal in size, although the interest groups within these coalitions may evolve, change, or switch allegiance. Disgruntled interest groups in large coalitions are easy pickings for a smaller, rival coalition. For example, as the Democrats added pro-choice feminists, gays and lesbians to their coalition, Republicans were able to draw away socially conservative evangelical Christians. Something similar may be happening now with black voters who have been steadfast members of the Democrat coalition for nearly a century, but are starting to question what they have gotten in return for their loyalty in recent years. And now the Democrats want to bring Hispanics into their coalition. There is only so much to go around. The Republican Party has been doing great at the state level, but it has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study on how it could expand party membership (that is, increase the size of its coalition) to win the White House. The main conclusion was that the demographics of American are changing, and the GOP needs to reach out to minorities, especially Hispanics, who are now the largest ethnic minority in the U.S. That was the plan, and it seemed to many that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would be perfect to reach out to Hispanics. Then Donald Trump entered the race and the first thing he did was insult Hispanics; promise to deport all who are here illegally; and build a wall to keep them out. Trump may say he loves Hispanics and Hispanics love him, but as Dick Armey commented, “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.” Donald Trump is a businessman. He doesn’t understand compromise and political coalitions. He test-marketed his product on a segment of the population that loved it and his instinct is to produce more of it. When party leaders — what he calls “the establishment” — tell him he should promote unity, they mean he should broaden his coalition by appealing to more diverse interest groups. But what Trump understands by unity can be summed up like this: “OK, I’m the leader. Everybody line up behind me and do as I say.” Donald Trump could obtain the 1,237 votes needed for the nomination before the convention. If that happens, the likely result in the general election will be a landslide loss similar to those suffered by Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972. Both were staunch ideologues — Goldwater on the right and McGovern on the left — who failed to reach out and build a coalition. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was no less conservative than Goldwater, but he understood the importance of party unity and building a winning coalition. Should Donald Trump fail to win the nomination on the first round of voting, the chance is very slim that he will win it in subsequent rounds. The party regulars — the politicians Trump holds in such disdain — are going to be looking for someone who can put together a coalition to challenge the Democrats, whoever their candidate may be. The question then is whether Trump will claim the nomination was stolen from him, take his avid followers and make a third-party run. That would virtually guarantee a Democrat victory in November.