Mark Mellman: Convention games

Having failed (as of Monday) to stem the Trump tide with voters, the Republican establishment is looking to the party’s Cleveland convention as the site of its counter-coup.

It won’t really solve the problem, though. 

{mosads}With good reason, Republicans regard a Donald Trump nomination as an existential threat. In the HuffPost Pollster averages, Hillary Clinton leads the GOP front-runner by an average of over 8 points. Moreover, Republican defections from Trump are high.

Despite that, the GOP establishment has thus far failed to act, falsifying yet another earlier prediction of mine and demonstrating there is no Republican Party leadership. 

A year ago I was predicting Trump wouldn’t make it much past the starting gate. Wrong!

More recently, I suggested that once the billionaire businessman won a contest, the GOP establishment would move second-tier candidates out of the race to give their best a one-on-one shot at Trump. Wrong again.

In making that prediction, I forgot for a moment that our parties are not very strong and that our political system is run by entrepreneurial politicians who select themselves, raise their own money and field their own campaigns.

I also overestimated the leadership skills and cohesion of Republican elites. 

You would have thought that “Leader” Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan along with, say, Govs. Scott Walker and Susana Martinez would have convened their key colleagues — that is, some of the billionaires now funding the myriad GOP super-PACs and other party bigwigs — and calmly explained the reality to them to extract some kind of agreement among all present.

But that never happened, which tells us more about the absence of Republican leadership than anything else could have. 

The new fantasy — not mine, I’ve learned my lesson — is that a “brokered convention” will take care of the Trump problem.

The first weakness in that theory is that there are no brokers. That’s another word for leaders, and we’ve just described their absence from the Republican stage. Contested convention? Possible. Brokered? No. 

Just imagine the scene unfolding at the convention. 

For illustrative purposes, let’s make the unlikely assumption that all the Republican candidates continue winning delegates at the same rate they have until now. Trump would have about 200 fewer delegates than he needs for the nomination; his nearest competitor, Ted Cruz, would be about 100 behind Trump.

If the manipulators go to work behind the scenes, denying Trump the nomination, you can readily imagine almost half the convention angrily leaving their seats, walking out and setting up their own party. They’ll rightly argue the elites overturned the expressed will of the people.

That’s neither a visual, nor a reality, that any party can endure. Denying Trump the nomination, even through perfectly legal means, is also an existential threat.

To get around this, some GOP operatives are urging that the party organize to deny real Trump supporters delegate seats at the convention, substituting instead party loyalists who will vote for Trump on the first ballot, as the rules require, but desert him on subsequent votes, while keeping their seats during the coup.

But that won’t prevent a large walkout and even greater anger at the GOP from Trump voters across the country.

Some six in 10 Republicans oppose efforts by party leaders to prevent Trump from getting the nomination, according to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll. Moreover, the same poll found a 53 percent to 42 percent majority of Republicans saying the following: “If Trump has the most delegates going into the Republican convention but not enough to win a majority on the first ballot,” he “should win the nomination.” 

The potential to do lasting damage stretches beyond just Trump voters. Unless he is completely derailed in the coming contests, the Republican Party is truly trapped between Scylla and Charybdis.

Either way the GOP turns lies disaster. Leadership earlier on might have helped.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.