I’m for a brokered convention as well, but I can not envision a scenario is which 90 % of the delegates are ssigned to people who have to accede to transferring them to somebody who hasnt even bothered running... This is not 1894..
“This is not 1894..” this election is not like anything we’ve ever seen before.....
If Newt were to win a vast majority of the primaries, what would it took like to hand the nomination over to somebody who took it easy, sitting out the race? Especially somebody like Christy or Bush who came out and said they didn’t want to run this year.
It would be the worse move the Republicans could make.
In the old days, you had "favorite son" candidates. Many state delegates were either uncommitted and in play for whoever pleased local bosses or else pledged or inclined to vote for their state's Governor or Senator, at least on the first ballot.
Today there may be some uncommitted superdelegates who get their position from being officeholders in the party, but most of them will be committed to one of the declared candidates. There seem to be more of them in Democratic conventions than Republican, and they aren't usually spoken of as a major factor in GOP politics.
There's not much room for a brokered convention nowadays. The last conventions to go to a second ballot were the Republican convention of 1948 and the Democratic convention of 1952. Both went to three ballots.
There's some irony in insurgent and anti-establishment Republicans looking forward to a return to the bad old days of brokered conventions, but this time around it's not hard to sympatize or share the sentiment.