Brokered Convention

In the United States , a brokered convention is a nomination party conference at which none of the candidates for president has a majority of delegates. Other names are contested convention or open convention . In this case, the delegates will negotiate and vote until a majority is achieved.

Up until the presidential primaries were introduced , every nomination convention in the USA was a brokered convention . The meetings often dragged on for several days. The Democrats' nomination convention for the 1924 presidential election set a record , which was determined by clashes between supporters and opponents of the Ku Klux Klan . The candidate John W. Davis was not chosen until the 103rd ballot.

The first primaries took place before the 1912 presidential election. However, their results were not binding on the delegates. The system of primaries with tied delegates only prevailed after the Second World War. Since then, the delegates can hardly negotiate voting. The last candidates selected from a brokered convention were Republican Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 and Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952. In the 1976 presidential election , neither Gerald Ford nor Ronald Reagan had a majority in the Republican delegates, but Ford sat down in the first round by.

Observers believed that a brokered convention was possible for both major parties in 2016 . The Republican Party's currently valid party convention statutes bind the delegates to voting for their candidate in the first round of voting (Rule 16) - only the “ super delegates ” are an exception - and stipulate that only candidates who have a majority of delegates in at least eight states may stand have (Rule 40). The rules can be changed by the party congress.

In the feature film The Candidate and in the television series House of Cards , the candidates have to prevail at a brokered convention .