Unbound Republican delegates could decide Trump nomination

[Geee]

The Hill:

The possibility of a contested convention has put the spotlight on the unbound delegates who could determine the Republican presidential nominee.

 

Several unbound delegates told The Hill they’ve beginning to feel the pressure, now that party leaders are talking about a convention scenario that could prevent Donald Trump from winning the nomination.

 

"I’ve received hundreds of emails and I’m getting phone calls from people telling me who they think should be president and why," said Steve House, the chairman of the Republican Party in Colorado and an unbound delegate.

Under Republican Party rules, delegates from states that hold presidential primaries must be bound by those results. Those delegates must back their candidate for at least the first ballot at the GOP convention in Cleveland in July.

 

But many delegates — potentially close to 200 — are not bound by those rules.

 

A handful of states and territories — Colorado and North Dakota among them — chose not to hold a vote at all, which means most of their delegates will arrive at the convention free to cast their ballot for any candidate.

 

And in some states, the delegates who were bound to candidates no longer in the race — such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — are unbound as well.

[Geee]

History suggests brokered convention will doom Donald Trump

 

If Donald Trump finds himself in a contested convention this summer, a looming question for the Republican presidential front-runner will be whether he is a Lincoln or a Dewey.

 

Mr. Trump obviously would prefer to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, who emerged the nominee from a brokered Republican convention in 1860 and went on to win the White House and become one of America’s most revered presidents.

 

Unfortunately for Mr. Trump, the experience of Thomas E. Dewey at contested Republican conventions is more common and far less inspirational. The front-runner heading into a contested Republican convention has never won the White House and most of the time does not even secure the party’s nomination.

 

The trend may be weighing heavily on Mr. Trump, who insists that the convention will have to pick him if he has more delegates than any other hopeful but short of the 1,237 majority needed to win on the first ballot.

 

“The notion that you go in with a plurality, therefore you deserve the nomination is just flat wrong,” said Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Dallas-based think tank Institute for Policy Innovation.

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/20/donald-trump-could-be-doomed-by-brokered-conventio/