Last Friday, during an onstage conversation at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2016 gathering, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus told Fox News host Sean Hannity that it’s “highly, highly unlikely” that the GOP convention in July will last longer than one ballot. He placed the odds of a first-ballot nomination at “85, 90 percent.” On Sunday, after Donald Trump won only 53 of the 155 delegates at stake in Saturday’s four contests, a senior Republican official, told me that he thinks the chances for a multi-ballot convention are more like 60%. Even if Trump wins the winner-take-all Florida and Ohio primaries on March 15 and thereby forces Marco Rubio and John Kasich from the race, said this official, who insisted on anonymity because party officials are “paranoid” about appearing to take sides, there is about a 25% chance of a “contested convention.” (“Contested,” not “brokered,” is the right word, he added, because “there are no brokers anymore.”) What is the basis for this analysis? First is that as of today only 906 (or 37%) of the 2,472 delegates to
Subscribe Today
Our subscribers have first access to individual race pages for each House, Senate and Governors race, which will include race ratings (each race is rated on a seven-point scale) and a narrative analysis pertaining to that race.