Republican Party leaders will not allow history to repeat of a showdown at the Republican National Convention to prevent former President Donald Trump from becoming the party’s nominee.
The party experienced a last-ditch effort from a group of delegates in 2016 trying to prevent Trump from being selected for the Republican presidential nomination. However, party members are not expecting any outbursts from delegates at this year’s convention, held July 15-18.
“It didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now,” David Bossie, a Trump ally and RNC member from Maryland, told NBC News. “There is no one who is going to attempt to do that. … There’s none of that conversation that has happened in here. Not one iota of it.”
Following Trump’s primary wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and his large lead over former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, his last major competitor left in the primary race, party officials said the potential of upheaval or resistance to his nomination is virtually nonexistent — particularly after Trump allies and several state GOP members have worked relentlessly to alter rules essentially to give all delegates to the winner, which polling indicates will be the former president.
In California, a new procedure adopted in July 2023 allows for a candidate to receive all of the delegates at stake if they receive more than 50% of the primary vote. If no candidate receives more than 50%, then delegates will be allocated proportionately among the candidates. Given Trump’s high polling numbers above 50% in the Golden State, Trump is all but guaranteed the delegate votes from California.
Essentially, Haley should not rely on a convention floor fight to aid her campaign to become the party’s nominee.
“The rules could be changed, but it probably wouldn’t be fair — and I don’t think it would pass — absent a cement truck coming around the corner and killing the nominee,” Morton Blackwell, a member of the RNC’s convention rules committee since 1988, said to NBC News.
“There is a lot of smoke going around that has no reality,” Blackwell added.
Party members in 2016 who were against Trump’s nomination argued that delegates be released from obligations to support a certain candidate in an at-the-buzzer plan to boost Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as the Republican nominee. The “Free the Delegates” movement failed, and its leader, Kendal Unruh, a former RNC member of Colorado, left the party.
“The people who I was fighting alongside with in 2016 — those people are now fully onboard with Trump,” she said to the outlet. “He has a lock on [the nomination].”
Under RNC rules, more than 94% of the 2,429 convention delegations are required to vote for the person they were sent by their state parties to support, “for at least one round of balloting.” However, a section of the party rules could give delegates a way out: The RNC 168-member body may grant a “waiver” allowing the state Republican parties to unbind their delegates if it’s “in the best interests of the Republican Party” and “compliance” is impossible.
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Ken Cuccinelli, who recently served as the founder and leader of the super PAC Never Back Down supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), had blasted the rule changes back in July, arguing that “smoke-filled back rooms” do not reflect the will of the voters. Cuccinelli also ran delegate operations for Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and, at the time, sought to change party rules to affect future primaries.
“It is virtually impossible to unseat Trump as the nominee,” Cuccinelli said to NBC News. “The campaigns get to pick the delegates themselves in more states in 2024 than they got to do in 2016.”