With Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Minnesota, Colorado, and Maine now on the record in the republican presidential primary sweepstakes, the accumulated "soft total" count of elected delegates is projected thus (according to The Green Papers):

• Mitt Romney:  105 delegates (6 IA + 7 NH + 2 SC + 50 FL + 14 NV + 6 MN + 12 CO + 8 ME) plus 18 RNC party delegates
  
• Rick Santorum:  43 delegates (6 IA + 3 NV + 17 MN + 13 CO + 4 ME) plus 1 RNC party delegate
  
• Newt Gingrich:  42 delegates (4 IA + 23 SC + 6 NV + 4 MN + 4 CO + 1 ME) plus 3 RNC party delegates
  
• Ron Paul:  36 delegates (6 IA + 3 NH + 5 NV + 10 MN + 4 CO + 8 ME) plus 1 RNC party delegate
  
• Uncommitted (available):  3 IA (formerly committed to Rick Perry) and 2 NH (formerly committed to Jon Huntsman)

The RNC's intention behind the change to the delegate awarding rules is that the republican nominee wouldn't be awarded until late in the contest, certainly not before April 3rd (the first authorized winner-take-all contests, in Maryland, District of Columbia, Wisconsin, and Texas).  On paper the concept seems very sound, as this means that the politically savvy members of the republican primary electorate will have plenty of time to weed through the field and theoretically select the best candidate to hand BHO his pink slip come this November.

Of course, the media elites note the fact that WMR has somewhere between 120 and 123 projected pledged delegates out of the 1,144 that he needs to secure the nomination (~10.58%), note that he has this number as 8 of the 56 contests in the primary campaign are complete (~14.29%), and are thus trumpeting the inevitability that Romney will arrive at convention with the nomination firmly in hand, even if that won't be locked up until the Utah Primary (June 26) is in the books.

The reality, of course, is a tad messier.

See, the word "projected" isn't there for show.  According to the RNC rules, with the exception of four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada), no state is supposed to be allowed to hold a binding contest before March 1st without being penalized 50% of their delegation.  (That New Hampshire and South Carolina are being penalized is due to them violating the RNC's rule that no state is supposed to hold a binding contest before February 1st.)  This means that Rick Santorum, for all the media fuss otherwise, has yet to win a state where the results were actually binding, including Missouri!

So, if we strip out all the non-binding states, and add back in the "party delegates" who've already publicly committed, then our "secured delegates" running total would look like this (using the Green Papers' numbers again):

• Mitt Romney:  91 delegates (18 RNC + 7 NH + 2 SC + 50 FL + 14 NV)
  
• Newt Gingrich:  32 delegates (3 RNC + 23 SC + 6 NV)
  
• Ron Paul:  9 delegates (1 RNC + 3 NH + 5 NV)
  
• Rick Santorum:  4 delegates (1 RNC + 3 NV)

Newt Gingrich's appeal of the Florida results may also be a factor here.  According to a Gingrich campaign memo, NLG intends to challenge the results based on the Republican National Committee's rules that state that no contest can be winner-take-all prior to April 1, 2012, and will request that the RNC enforce the proportional awarding of the RPFL delegates.  And if the RNC does enforce its rules, then the projected proportional awarding of the Florida delegation would look like this:

• Mitt Romney:  23 Florida delegates (which reduces his hard total to 64 delegates)
  
• Newt Gingrich:  16 Florida delegates (which increases his hard total to 48 delegates)
  
• Rick Santorum:  7 Florida delegates (which increases his hard total to 11 delegates)
  
• Ron Paul:  4 Florida delegates (which increases his hard total to 13 delegates)

Maine's municipal straw poll caucus is also an open question right now, even though that fact isn't getting much press coverage.  While the Maine Republican Party encouraged all of the municipal committees to conduct their polling between February 4th and 11th, each local committee was free to choose any date it wished.  And while the state party has already officially reported the results, the truth is that 98 precincts in Maine (fully one-sixth of the state, if I have the numbers right) have yet to report.  According to the Ron Paul campaign, many of those precincts are areas which are expected to heavily favor Dr. Paul, and given the closeness of the reported statewide vote totals, Maine may turn out to be a state that REP actually wins when all of the precincts are counted.

That brings up another point.  The Campaign for Liberty has been training their ground crews to pick up the delegate slots that are available in the precincts after caucus events.  The intention is to pick up enough delegates in those states that they can control the RNC's platform going forward into the general campaign.  In nonbinding states (IA, MN, CO, and ME, among others), they also seem intent on packing as many pro-Paul delegates as possible into the national delegation.

Here's a reason why that might matter.  Consider the binding requirements on the states whose primaries occur before Super Tuesday (March 6th this year):

• Iowa's delegates are entirely uncommitted at the National Convention
  
• New Hampshire's delegates are bound for so long as the candidate to which they are bound remains in the contest
  
• South Carolina's delegates are bound through the second ballot, unless the candidate to which the delegates are bound falls below 30% of the vote on the first ballot.
  
• Florida's delegates are bound through the 3rd ballot at National Convention unless the candidate withdraws or releases his/her delegates.
  
• Nevada's delegates are bound through the 1st ballot at the National Convention
  
• Minnesota's delegates are not bound (unless state party votes to bind for 1st ballot at the National Convention)
  
• Colorado's delegates are entirely uncommitted at the National Convention
  
• Maine's delegates are entirely uncommitted at the National Convention
  
• Michigan's delegates are bound through the 1st ballot at the National Convention
  
• Arizona's delegates are bound by "best effort" (whatever that means) through the 1st ballot at the National Convention
  
• Washington State's delegates are bound through the 1st ballot at the National Convention

• Eleven states (including NH) bind their delegations "until released" (though exactly how the delegation is considered released varies by state)
  
• Only two states (FL and TX) bind their delegations through the 3rd ballot at national convention
  
• Seven states (including SC) bind their delegations through the 2nd ballot at national convention
  
• Twenty-one states and territories (including NV, MI, AZ, and WA) bind their delegations only through the 1st ballot at national convention
  
• Fifteen states and territories (including IA, MN, CO, and ME) send their delegations to national convention effectively unbound and uncommitted

Which is where the e-mail that I received last week comes in.

There's a link in the e-mail to an interesting preference survey that features hypothetical match-ups of potential nominees, not all of whom are currently candidates in the primary race.  The final question, predictably, asks who you would vote for (of the four current primary candidates) if the election were held today.  Some interesting names are up there, and as of this post, the five most popular are:  Paul Ryan (72%), Marco Rubio (67%), Jim DeMint (64%), Rick Santorum (63%), and Mitch Daniels (52%).  Although the first two positions haven't changed in the five days since I first saw this list, I recall that Gingrich was in third place a week ago.

Other than putting forward the point, that at a brokered convention the delegates may have opportunity to voice their disgust with the current primary ballot by nominating anyone they choose from the floor, the preference survey seems about as useful as an opinion poll that I might decide to stick over on the right sidebar.  In other words, in and of itself, not that big of a deal.

But the core point, that a brokered convention has the potential to get really messy, should not be ignored.  Count on lawyers from all four campaigns to be present, prepared to challenge anything that puts their candidate at a disadvantage (which will have all kinds of "Florida can't seem to get elections right" jokes floating around).  Expect all manner of arm-twisting and backroom deals, especially as it might apply to delegates who are unbound on the first ballot at convention.

All of this will be in an effort to get the nomination settled on the first ballot.  Perhaps this is because the Republican Party has a history of choosing its presidential nominee on the first ballot (only 10 of the 39 republican national conventions held to date have gone past the first ballot, and none of those, even at brokered conventions, have occurred since 1948), so the party officers may want to avoid the appearance of disunity.  But I rather suspect that's because the Rockefeller-wing establishment is deathly afraid that if Romney can't win on the first pass, then he won't win at all.

So, how does this apply to us?

First, let's make sure we understand what a "brokered convention" is in this context.  Simply put, it's a convention where none of the official candidates arrive at convention with a committed majority of the available delegates.

Second, we need to keep in mind that a brokered convention is not necessarily anything to fear.  Those who don't have a proper understanding of history or those who don't want political power anywhere other than in their own hands would love to persuade us otherwise.  The reality, however, is that a brokered convention provides conservatives with their best shot at doing precisely what the liberals and moderates in the party hierarchy don't want to do, namely building the necessary intraparty consensus needed to defeat the machine-style politics of the communist currently occupying the White House.  The trick, of course, is to have a sufficiently coordinated strategy going in.

As an example, let's take a look at the results of five brokered conventions in republican history:

• The Chicago Convention of 1860 provided us with President Lincoln
  
• The Chicago Convention of 1920 provided us with President Harding . . . which ultimately provided us with President Coolidge
  
• The Chicago Convention of 1952 provided us with President Eisenhower, who, due to the influence of Senator Taft and Vice President Nixon, became far more conservative after the convention than he was before it
  
• The Miami Beach Convention of 1968 provided us with President Nixon . . . which seemed like a good idea at the time given that the leading alternative was Nelson Rockefeller (and at least Nixon could get both major factions of the party to cooperate with each other)
  
• The Kansas City Convention of 1976 almost provided us with Ronald Reagan (but for the last-minute treachery of Clarke Reed, then-chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, we would have had him then, instead of after four years of Carter)

If June 27th finds us with a brokered convention on the schedule (which will make it the 17th in party history), then so be it.  On that day, only the weak and the tyrants will have anything to fear.