It appears 'winter' is coming for The Republican Party. Having already warned "there wil be riots," if he's denied the nomination, Politico reports, a majority of Republican insiders say Donald Trump should not get the GOP presidential nomination if he falls short of winning a majority of delegates – even if Trump amasses more than any of his opponents.
Despite Trump's yuuge lead in the delegate count...
Politico reports,
Roughly six-in-10 Republicans said the party should nominate another candidate if Trump finishes with a plurality, rather than the required 1,237-delegate majority necessary to claim the party nomination.
“Rules is rules. You have to get a majority,” said a Virginia Republican who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “That's the problem with our country: No one ever wins anymore.”
The question is central to the GOP calculus before the Cleveland convention: Should the party award the nomination to the candidate who won the most delegates in total -- as Trump himself has advocated -- or stick to the rule that a candidate must win at least 1,237 delegates in order to be the nominee?
The majority of insiders who want the party to choose someone else if Trump only wins a plurality of delegates said they are motivated by questions of electability, Trump’s capricious campaign style and personality.
“I'm firmly in the ‘Never Trump’ camp,” said a New Hampshire Republican. “The GOP gets killed if he's the nominee. We probably get killed if he doesn't support a different nominee anyway. So if it makes no difference to the eventual outcome, my conscience will be clear going down with a responsible nominee instead.”
Will the Great Wall fall?
As Trump warned,
Asked by CNN what would happen if he can’t muster the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination and ends up getting robbed at the convention in Cleveland, Trump said this:
"I think you'd have riots.”
“[I’m] representing many millions of people. If you disenfranchise those people, and you say, 'I'm sorry, you're 100 votes short' ... I think you'd have problems like you've never seen before. I think bad things would happen."
Yes, “bad things.” And if you’ve seen a Trump rally lately, you know just what he’s talking about.
The establishment better brace themselves as "bad things will happen."