How a brokered convention could play out. (votes, Republican, president)

[howard555]

Here’s how a chaotic convention could happen.
Round 1: Chasing the Unbound
Trump suggested in a recent debate that the leading candidate should automatically receive the nomination. But to allow a candidate to be declared the nominee with only a plurality of delegates would require the unprecedented amendment of the existing rules.
Rather than a wholesale rewriting of the rules, the more likely scenario is that Trump will need to convince enough of the few unbound delegates there to support him. (The unbound delegates consists of those from five states that decided not to hold statewide votes, as well as 54 from Pennsylvania who were directly elected without declaring a presidential preference.) That approach is consistent with the existing rules—but it won’t be easy. In fact, it could lead to convention mayhem.
Trump would be in a tough spot: In the first presidential roll call vote at the convention, a rule in effect for the first time in 2016 automatically binds more than 90 percent of delegates to specific candidates based on those delegates’ statewide votes. That leaves only a very small pool of delegates that Trump could win over in order to reach a majority on the first ballot: 166 delegates who are already unbound, plus an unknown number whose state laws will unbind them if their candidate drops out by the time of the convention. (There are currently 12 of these delegates, but, importantly, that number will increase if one of the current candidates drops out. For example, should Marco Rubio drop out without winning any additional delegates, 152 delegates would be added to the unbound pool, nearly doubling the number available to Trump’s powers of persuasion to gain a first-ballot majority.)
As things stand now, however, Trump would need to win over a dauntingly high portion of the 166 unbound delegates—nearly 90 percent—in order to get the 149 delegates he would need to reach an overall majority. And many of these unbound delegates are likely to be supporters of candidates Trump has defeated, and could have a less-than-kind view of him.

Round 2: The Delegates Shake Loose
If Trump does not get a majority of delegates on the first ballot, the rules make his hunt for a majority even more difficult on the second ballot. At that point, nearly three-quarters of the delegates—more than 1,800 of the 2,472—become instantly unbound. They are free agents who can vote for any nominated candidate, with no obligation to Trump even if he won their particular state. The national convention has no authority to amend these binding rules because they are set by each state, and the deadline for states to change their rules has passed.


On the third and subsequent ballots, things would get really unpredictable. Not only would even more delegates become unbound; the current rules also do not require the candidate with the smallest number of votes to drop out, meaning the deadlock can last for endless ballots until a remaining candidate bends.
At that point, a convention can have a mind of its own. The delegations will be a hotbed of rumors, deals and rumored deals. The absolute nightmare scenario is a convention so fractured with so many false rumors spread so quickly and repeatedly—all the more so thanks to social media—that no consensus can be reached. That’s a multi-ballot convention that stretches days beyond the scheduled adjournment.
It is only in this remotest of all scenarios that someone who is not currently a candidate could burst onto the scene. The convention rules committee won’t vote on the criteria for throwing a new candidate’s name into the nomination contest until the convention is actually under way. The committee also has yet to determine whether it can reconvene during the convention in order to loosen the criteria for an outsider to put his or her name up for nomination.


The Path to Convention Chaos - POLITICO Magazine