Decided to repost what I'd written about a brokered convention:
Conventional wisdom, especially amongst Donnie Trump’s fan club, is that a brokered convention would be the ultimate betrayal by the GOP establishment because the GOPe (or whatever your favorite slur du jour is) will use a brokered convention to “steal” from Donnie the nomination that is rightfully his. The anti-Donnie crowd feel similarly: that a brokered convention is now the only way to prevent the epic electoral disaster that will befall the Republican party of Donnie is the GOP nominee.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if a brokered convention would instead provide Donnie with the best chance of getting the nomination? The plausibility of this thought should become clear if we take the Trumpists at their word and accept as true two of their primary beliefs:
(1) that Donnie is a superlative businessman who gets things done to his satisfaction, and
(2) the GOPe are a bunch of sordid, unprincipled cowards who are only interested in their own private gain and the perks of position and utterly uninterested in governing the country in accordance with conservative principle.
Posit the truth of these two propositions, and it should become clear that Donnie is as likely to be the winner at a brokered convention as anyone else.
Why? Because a brokered convention is nothing more than a grand series of private one-to-one negotiations, largely conducted in isolation and so potentially inconsistent with other negotiations, where the winner is the person who can believably promise more, to more people, than anyone else.
But that is precisely what a good businessman excels at, particularly a real estate developer who is successful at putting together multimillion dollar real estate projects: cobbling together a coalition out of disparate factions, some of which have mutually inconsistent goals and interests. Further - and as is in the nature of free market economics - each faction is interested only in its own private gains, even if achieving those gains comes at the expense of some of the other factions. (A personal aside: one of the refreshing aspects of a free market is that it lacks the conceit of disinterested public generosity that pervades government.)
For example, the interests of the junior equity and senior equity don’t fully align because the senior equity only needs assurances that the pie will be big enough for them while the junior equity needs the pie to be big enough for both them and the senior equity. The interest of all equity together are also not perfectly aligned with the interests of the lenders; the lenders get the return on their loan - the interest - before equity gets anything, and since interest is paid out of operating revenues but is rarely determined by the amount of revenues, if revenues drop too far below expectations, debt service can push a project into bankruptcy, where the equity may be likely to escape with pennies on the dollar (and the junior equity wiped out).
A large scale real estate developer succeeds by convincing each faction, often in private one-on-one negotiations, that he can make good on his promises to get them what they want in the future in exchange for their support now. And because a substantial number of these negotiations are one-on-one, the promises made to one faction need not have any relationship to the promises made to any other, and may in fact be mutually inconsistent. The only real consistency requirement is that each faction feel that it is not significantly worse off than any other faction (because factions that felt worse off would not have agreed to the private deal offered to it). Essentially, the factions will coalesce into one group when each faction feels that it will get at least the minimum value it needs in exchange for its participation, and - since nobody can get everything they want - all factions are more or less equally dissatisfied with the resulting deal.
Further, because asymmetry of information often provides an edge to the actor who possesses it, the factions being wooed by the real estate developer are unlikely to disclose the full extent of their private negotiations to the others. As a result, it is unlikely that the group of factions, taken as a whole, will have sufficient information to really guarantee that they aren’t being taken for a ride; that the developer will not, in fact, be able to fulfill the promises he made to everyone.
Basically, the successful real estate developer achieves his goals - immediate receipt of funding and services in exchange for promises to provide some benefit in the future (regardless of whether he can objectively fulfill all of those promises) - by constructing a least-worst scenario where every party feels that they will get at least as much of a return as each of the others, even if they won’t get everything they wanted (sort of a pseudo pareto optimal result).
But back to the subject of brokered conventions. A brokered convention occurs when no one candidate has won the support of a majority of delegates to the convention during the primaries. In that situation, the first vote will not yield a majority vote for any one candidate. After the first vote, delegates are free to throw their support to their preferred candidate, even if that candidate is not the one to whom they were assigned based on the primaries. Of necessity then, a brokered convention consists of a number of different factions, each with interests and goals that are different from, and possibly inconsistent with, the interests and goals of one or more of the other factions (if this were not the case, then there wouldn’t be a brokered convention because all would have agreed on the nominee at the first vote).
The convention will end when a majority of the delegates vote for a particular candidate. However, because the delegates are now free to vote for any of the candidates, the candidates must now negotiate with at least some of the delegates to get their support; since it is a negotiation, however, that necessarily requires that there be an exchange: support now in exchange for some benefit to be provided in the future. Since the mass of delegates are divided up into different factions, that means that what one faction expects to get for its support may be very different from, and possibly inconsistent with, what the other factions expect to get for their support. Since these negotiations take place faction-by-faction, often in private (the so-called smoke-filled back rooms of yore), and since each faction will not divulge the full extent of its deal to any of the others (otherwise, some other faction may be able to get an even better deal by being the hold-out) it is possible for one candidate to make promises to one faction that are inconsistent with the promises he makes to other factions. The successful candidate is the one who manages to get more factions to accept his promises in exchange for their votes than does any other candidate, and regardless of whether the promises he makes are mutually inconsistent. And, because the candidate is promising to provide a benefit at a later date in exchange for immediate support now, it is also irrelevant whether the candidate could in fact deliver on all of his promises; all that matters is that the factions believe that he can, and will.
In other words, a brokered convention is very much like a large real estate deal: the candidate - the developer - who manages to put together a large enough coalition of factions - the investors, lenders, etc - to get a majority vote of the delegates wins the nomination - closes the deal.
Which brings us back to Donnie and the other candidates. Of the lot, Donnie indisputably has the most experience at putting together enough disparate factions to pull off his real estate projects. And although Donnie’s supporters don’t appear to believe that past performance has any bearing on future performance, I do. As such, I believe that there is a very real chance that Donnie may be able to close the deal at a brokered convention.
However - and this is where the second belief of the Trumpists comes into play - many of the factions at a brokered convention will be those who support GOPe candidates, which means that to close the deal Donnie will have to successfully negotiate with at least several of the GOPe factions. But, since by hypothesis the GOPe consists of individuals who are unprincipled, if not corrupt, and whose primary goals in life are satisfying their private desires for power and privilege, even at the expense of the country and the electorate, any successful negotiation with one of those factions will necessarily require the successful candidate to promise to satisfy at least some minimum level of the faction’s unprincipled, if not corrupt, private desires for power and perks. In other words, in order for Donnie to close the deal, he will have to promise to give the GOPe precisely the sort of things that Donnie’s supporters are counting on him to take away from the GOPe. I say “will” not “may” because - if we are to take the Trumpists at their word - the only things that motivate the GOPe are power and privilege; Donnie cannot get their support without promising to give them those things.
But things could get much worse. At present, Donnie’s base of support is the Trumpists and as a result he needs to cater to them and their wants because he needs their support. That would all change if Donnie managed to win the nomination in a brokered convention. Why? Because at that point Donnie will have built a new base of support, and moreover, a base of support that would be of considerable more use to him because it would include GOPe senators and representatives. The Trumpists may be useful in ruffling the feathers of the GOPe and pressuring them to comply with Donnie, but they are outsiders and have only an indirect influence on what the Congress does. GOPe senators and representatives are not only insiders, but by definition they determine what Congress does; that sort of influence would be substantially more useful to Donnie than any number of Trumpists, no matter how loudly they roared.
When a politician changes his base of support, he must also change the goals he seeks and the policies he supports - one does not bite the hand that feeds. In this case, that would be catastrophic to the Trumpists. Because Donnie will have had to make common cause with the GOPe in order to win the nomination at a brokered convention, his goals and policies will have to change to be more consistent with those of the GOPe. As a result, not only would Donnie have facilitated GOPe goals on a one-time basis in order to win the nomination itself, but - assuming he wins the general election - he would continue to facilitate GOPe goals and policies on an on-going basis during the course of his presidency. In other words, if Donnie wins the nomination at a brokered convention and then goes on to win the presidency - the ultimate goal of the Trumpists - then the Trumpists will have necessarily helped to elect precisely the sort of president they say they absolutely do not want: a president beholden to the GOPe.
All of which leads us to an interesting state of affairs: for the Trumpists, a brokered convention is not the dire threat they believe it is, because Donnie has the skills and talent to win the nomination at a brokered convention. However, winning a brokered convention will necessarily come at the price of facilitating rather than frustrating the GOPe’s unprincipled corruption the Trumpists wish to defeat. And this will be, not because the Trumpists are wrong about Donnie’s business acumen or the GOPe’s unprincipled nature, but because they are right about Donnie and the GOPe. In short, if we go to a brokered convention, the Trumpists can win the battle only by forfeiting the war.
I love a good Catch-22.
