When was the last brokered election

When there was only a 10 percent difference in the delegate count between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in after 22 primaries and caucuses, rumors of a potential brokered convention grew.

At several nominating conventions, delegates have shifted their votes during a roll call to buttress a leading candidate. Eisenhower narrowly leading Robert Taft with votes to Taft's votes. Before the next roll call could begin, delegates from Minnesota and several other states shifted their votes to Eisenhower to give him the majority he needed to clinch the nomination without a formal second ballot. The Democratic National Convention is another example of this phenomenon. After the first ballot, Alfred Smith was within 10 votes of the supermajority needed to win the nomination.

Delegates from Ohio and several other states shifted their votes to enable Smith to become the Democratic nominee on the first ballot. In November , Republican consultant Karl Rove predicted a brokered convention was possible in , as a result of the large Republican field, the number of states that award delegates proportionally and the "fluid force" of uncommitted superdelegates. On December 10, , The Washington Post reported that the Republican National Committee had begun to make preparations for a potential brokered convention.

In response, Trump said he would be "disadvantaged" if one occurred. In an interview on Fox News later in the day, Carson clarified that he would not run as a third-party candidate. Mitt Romney supporters have also reportedly "mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks. On March 3, , Romney publicly condemned Trump's candidacy and encouraged voters to support Marco Rubio and John Kasich in their respective home states of Florida and Ohio.

Reuters reported, "By calling for targeted voting, Romney was setting up the possibility of a contested convention when Republicans gather in Cleveland in mid-July to select their nominee for the November election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama. That could create a pathway to deny Trump the 1, delegates needed for nomination. The following day, Ted Cruz argued against a brokered convention. He said, "A brokered convention is the pipe-dream of the Washington establishment.

It is their hope they can snatch this nomination from the people. If the Washington deal-makers try to steal the nomination from the people, I think it will be a disaster. Some of them will have been elected to a candidate who is falling far short of the magic number and they will be wooed by candidates seeking to reach or add to a majority.

In other words, in a fluid situation, the identity of the delegates—who they are, where they come from, and what their political views are—matters a great deal. If no one has reached the magic number 1, delegates when the primaries are over in June, expect to see a frenzy of negotiations in the weeks between the end of the primaries and the opening of the Democratic convention on July If the leading candidate is close to 1, delegates he or she will call for unity and attempt to get there.

If two or more candidates have large numbers of delegates but no one has 1,, an even more complex negotiation process will begin—with everything up for grabs, from rules to platform planks to the vice presidency itself. They include all Democratic members of Congress, all Democratic governors, the more than members of the Democratic National Committee, and assorted others including former Democratic presidents and vice presidents of the United States.

In the past, these superdelegates cast votes in the first ballot at Democratic conventions. In the campaign of Bernie Sanders mounted opposition to this category of delegates.

Subsequently the Democratic National Committee changed the rules so that superdelegates can only vote on the second ballot at the convention. So, if there is no first ballot nominee, the negotiations will include not just the delegates in the convention hall but approximately elected officials and party leaders who will be eligible to vote. Thus, on a second ballot the number needed to nominate will increase, not decrease. If national polls before Super Tuesday are something like Sanders 42 percent, Biden 20 percent, Warren 15 percent, Buttigeg 15 percent, then — well, a lot of things could happen — but Sanders is going to wind up with a majority a lot of the time.

The model is trying to take a lot of history and encode it into a statistical form, which is what most statistical models do. In particular, the model is somewhat sensitive to the logic of when candidates drop out.

And small changes in our assumptions about this could make a reasonably large difference. In another 11 percent of simulations, the winning candidate got more than 50 percent of pledged delegates but under 55 percent. And in a further 11 percent of simulations, the winner had more than 55 percent of pledged delegates but still under 60 percent.

So I looked at how often our model predicted candidates to drop out when: i they were polling at least 15 percent nationally at the time they quit; 4 and ii whether it was before Apr. In other words, the model has a candidate quitting when they still have a chance to accumulate more delegates — even though they might have little or no chance to actually win the nomination — about 30 percent of the time. Should we be worried about that?

So far in , that pattern has held, too. On the other hand, there are at least some reasons to think some candidates might hang around longer this time. Biden and the other moderates could stay in the race in an effort to stop Sanders, with the party establishment starting to fret to put it mildly about the possibility of Sanders winning.

Meanwhile, Sanders hung around until the last states voted in and could do so again, perhaps out of the hopes of forging some alliance with Warren. But in any event where Bloomberg increases in strength, a contested convention would be that much more likely. Of course, all of this is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. Our advice is not to assume there will be a contested convention just because things look a little chaotic at the moment — many primaries have looked chaotic at this stage of the race.

Not counting undecided voters. Although it does have some vague, more distant precedent. Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. As a result, modern political conventions are often viewed as spectacles , rather than as formative political events. At the same time, pundits and political junkies still love to talk about the possibility of a brokered convention. In , there was a lot of speculation that Republicans might have a brokered convention.

In the event, the Republican convention was not brokered.