Before next year’s presidential election, the Republicans and Democrats will hold national conventions to nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates.
For decades, the conventions have been preordained coronations with overwrought speeches and stupid hats.
But, next year is different. More and more, GOP party leaders are thinking that when the first gavel comes down, the nominee will not be known.
Technically, the delegates to the modern convention go already pledged to a candidate, but only on the first ballot. If there is no clear winner on that first tally, delegates are free to vote for whomever.
And candidates are free to swap their support in exchange for goodies to come. For instance, a candidate with a following, but not many delegates, a Rand Paul, for instance, could offer to deliver his delegate votes to another candidate in exchange for a promise of being nominated to something like secretary of the treasury.
Or, as The Washington Post speculated, party leaders could turn against a leading nominee such as Donald Trump because they fear he would be unelectable in a general election.
Brokered conventions are the happy dreams of political reporters and columnists; brokered conventions would turn the festival of scripted sound bites that are today’s national conventions into actual news events. For those same reasons, politicians despise even the thought of anything except the orderly procession of the ordained.
In an interview last week, Fritz Rohlfing, Hawaii’s GOP state chairman, said a brokered convention “may just be the way we roll.”
“It is a possibility, but then there are the semantics of it,” Rohlfing said. “Is that a brokered convention? I think it is just politics.”
Hawaii Democrats and Republicans hold their own presidential primaries next March.
Already, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Donald Trump have paid their $5,000 nomination fee and submitted the needed paperwork to be on the Hawaii GOP ballot. Democrats have not yet started accepting nominations.
In 2008, the Democratic caucus was a spirited battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, drawing 37,000 Democratic voters to the night meetings. But then in 2012, just 1,350 bothered to cast a ballot for the foregone conclusion of nominating Obama. The caucus excitement in 2012 belonged to the GOP, which proved that holding its first presidential caucus was a success because it attracted more than 10,000 voters, with Mitt Romney winning 44 percent.
Rohlfing said many of the GOP presidential candidates are popular in Hawaii, but so far no one is racing ahead.
“There is no natural front-runner, like when Romney was considered to be ahead,” Rohlfing said.
With many high-profile, but not unifying candidates, Rohlfing said, it increases the chances for a convention of some uncertainty when the national GOP meets July 18 in Cleveland, Ohio. The Democrats’ meet starts July 25 in Philadelphia.
How Hawaii goes, Rohlfing said, is “anybody’s guess” because with no visible local campaigning as of yet, “it is wide open.”
Despite former Vice President Richard Cheney’s 2004 Halloween night campaign appearance at the Hawaii Convention Center, the national scrimmage for Hawaii’s four electoral votes has been less than “a spare no expense” battle. But with dreams of a brokered convention in the offing, who knows what will make a GOP candidate a winner in 2016.
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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
