Could tight election races in both parties lead to brokered conventions?

Matt Stearns
McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday January 27, 2008

What happens if the primaries don't produce presidential nominees for one party — or the other — or both?

For Democrats, the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama race could continue through the primaries. If John Edwards stays in, he could win enough delegates to prevent either Clinton or Obama from securing enough convention delegates to win the nomination.

On the Republican side, the once implausible seems possible. Three candidates — Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Mitt Romney — each have won important early contests. All show strength among disparate party constituencies. A fourth candidate, Rudy Giuliani, hasn't seriously competed in any primaries yet. It's possible that the four could split primary wins — and delegates — all the way through the primary season, leaving none with a majority of delegates.

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Suddenly those summer conventions — ridiculed in recent years as four-day parties with scripted outcomes — could matter: Delegates might have to stay awake and sober long enough to choose a nominee.

"It's not so amazing," said R. Craig Sautter, who's written three books on presidential nominating conventions. "Any time you have more than two candidates who are strong, you have the possibility of nobody going into the convention with enough delegates."

It hasn't been that way for a long while.

The last truly contested convention was 1976, when Republicans gathered in Kansas City. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan fought President Gerald Ford all the way through the primaries. Ford had just enough delegates to win entering the convention. Reagan worked hard to woo some away; Ford worked equally hard to keep them. Ultimately, Ford won by a slender margin on the first ballot of delegates.

The last time a convention went beyond the first ballot for the top spot on a ticket was in 1952, when it took three ballots for Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson to win the Democratic nomination. Republicans went three ballots in 1948 to give New York Gov. Tom Dewey the nomination over Ohio Sen. Robert Taft.

Such excitement was once the norm, in an era when primaries mattered little because powerful local bosses controlled vast numbers of delegates who generally were party hacks. Back then, conventions were vehicles to wield power and settle scores.

Even Franklin Roosevelt had to wheel and deal his way to the Democratic nomination on four ballots in Chicago in 1932. (Until 1936, Democrats required nominees to have the support of two-thirds of the delegates; now, both parties require simple majorities.)

In 1924, Democrats went through 103 ballots over nine days in New York to settle on John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer, one-term congressman and former ambassador to Great Britain. That ended the brutal duel between the two leading candidates, New York Gov. Al Smith and Californian William McAdoo, a former secretary of the Treasury, which was heightened by the fact that many delegates were Ku Klux Klan members virulently opposed to Smith, a Roman Catholic.

Full article here.

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