Clarion Content

"No, there is another..."

The Clarion Content heard CBS's Bob Schieffer bandy it about on the Monday morning news round table. Now Clarion Content fave, Nate Silver, over at the 538 has written a column about the possibility of it.

What is it?

A brokered convention.

A brokered convention results when a nominee is picked at the convention, through multiple floor votes, after there has been no clear winner from the primary results. The 2012 Republican Convention will be held in Tampa, Florida, during the last week of August.

How might the Republicans arrive at this precedent breaking scenario? (We say precedent breaking as the last time the Republicans had a brokered convention they nominated Thomas E. Dewey in 1948...who went on not to defeat Harry Truman.)

But the times, they are a changing and shuffling. The Democratic nomination race of 2008 between President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton felt unprecedented in its length.

Will this be the year? Schieffer's colleagues noted, he was hoping for it. He wondered if the pundits even remembered how to cover it. Silver speculates that a brokered convention could produce a last minute dark horse candidate like Wisconsin's Paul Ryan or the latest Bush scion, Jeb.

And what might it mean for Ron Paul?

Click through on the various links to read more.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics