It’s been a common complaint in every election cycle for years: America’s national political conventions have become scripted, meaningless infomercials, devoid of any substance or debate. Where is the political drama of yesteryear?
For Republicans from Missouri, Illinois and around the nation who are gathering in Cleveland on Monday, that kind of nostalgia may turn out to be a case of watching what you wish for.
“It’s going to be somewhat historic no matter what happens,” predicted Missouri delegate Carl Bearden.
Donald Trump, the Manhattan real estate mogul and reality show star who upended the GOP primary race this year, goes into the four-day convention with enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination. Among them are 37 Trump-pledged delegates from Missouri and 54 from Illinois.
But the possibility remains of a last-gasp parliamentary maneuver to “Free the Delegates” and derail Trump.
It would be the first serious such attempt in more than three decades — since Sen. Ted Kennedy tried to replace incumbent President Jimmy Carter on the ballot during the 1980 Democratic National Convention. It has the potential to create the first genuinely contentious national convention in some younger voters’ lifetimes.
Not everyone is worried about that prospect.
“I think political conventions are too boring anyway,” said Bearden, a delegate from St. Charles and a leader of the movement to release Trump’s delegates so they can nominate someone else. “The Republican Party can and should be able to do better than Donald Trump.”
Others in the delegation say the mogul should be treated like any other nominee in modern times — meaning, even delegates who don’t personally support him should vote the views of the primary voters who sent them.
“Donald Trump was not my candidate of choice, but as a delegate, I’m bound to vote for him, and I plan to honor that,” said Missouri state Rep. Paul Curtman, R-Union.
Curtman said he holds out hope that the conflict “ultimately is going to wind up being good for the party. Diversity of views is a healthy thing.”
If so, the GOP today has plenty of health these days.
One of the big stories going into the convention is how many top Republicans are planning to steer clear of it. Among those who have said they won’t be at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena this week are U.S. Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill.; Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner; both former presidents Bush; and the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
Those divisions stem in part from the fact that Trump won the primaries with only a plurality of the national popular vote; the majority of Republicans voted for someone else. That and the complicated formula for assigning delegates means that many who are pledged to Trump may actually oppose his views, or may worry that he can’t beat presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in November.
Missouri, for example, will send 52 GOP delegates to Cleveland, with 37 of them pledged to Trump by virtue of how primary voters in their congressional districts voted. But that wide majority of delegates doesn’t reflect just how close Missouri’s popular vote was. Trump beat challenger Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas by just 1,726 votes here, out of more than 762,000 cast in Missouri’s presidential primary in March.
Still, Bearden, the “Free the Delegates” supporter, acknowledged last week that the movement faces “an uphill battle.”
Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock agreed.
“We have some members that are in the dump-Trump campaign,” Hancock said last week, “but I think it’s a very small number in our delegation. The effort to change the rules, I just don’t think it’s going to meet with success ... We’re going to cast 37 voters for Donald Trump.”
The Missouri delegation will stay at a Hilton in Fairlawn, near Akron, about 35 minutes from the convention site. “Back in the old days, when we were a battleground state, we had great hotels,” quipped Hancock, who traveled to Cleveland on Friday in advance of the arrival of the rest of the state’s delegation.
Trump also won Illinois’ primary, though with an even smaller percentage of support than in Missouri. He took less than 39 percent of the Illinois vote, but enough to beat voter-splitters Cruz, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Trump goes into Cleveland with 54 of Illinois’ 69 delegates. They will be staying at the Cleveland Airport Marriott — minus the state’s two top Republicans.
Sen. Kirk, locked in a tight re-election race in a heavily Democratic state, initially supported Trump, then withdrew his endorsement after Trump’s suggestion that a federal judge shouldn’t be allowed to preside over a lawsuit against him because of the judge’s Hispanic heritage.
Gov. Rauner — who in the past has called Trump’s rhetoric “ugly,” “nasty” and “weird” — said he is skipping the convention to focus on his state’s ongoing fiscal crisis.
Several of Trump’s Illinois delegates also could be missing, with some refusing to go in protest of their state Republican leaders’ refusal to get behind Trump.
“Now that we finally have a Republican governor after years of not having one ... (Rauner is) basically kind of blowing off the convention,” Galva, Ill., Mayor Rich Nordstrom, a Trump delegate and supporter, told Chicago’s WBEZ Radio last week, explaining why he is considering skipping the convention himself.
“I thought it was kind of a letdown, a slap in the face.”
Kevin McDermott • 314-340-8268
@kevinmcdermott on Twitter
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