The front page has an item today about the complicated delegate allocation process in TX threatening to bring the courts into the nomnation process, Clinton allies threaten "imminent" lawsuit over Texas caucuses. Let the courts, packed for years with partisan Republicans, get their oar in, and the whole process will melt down.
It's not just Clark County, and it's not just Texas. The delegate selection process everywhere is a mess, and will tie up the nomination in the courts unless one candidate locks up enough votes to put the winner beyond question and thereby render litigation over the details of the process moot.
Even states that allocate all their pledged delegates based on the results of primaries, still have a complicated local/CD/state caucus/convention process that decides who will fill each candidates' allocation. Yes, the campaigns usually have some ability to pick and choose among folks put forward by these caucuses, so as to select delegates for their allocation who are truly loyal to that candidate. But the rules, which vary from state to state, usually limit the campaigns to selecting only from a list of people the caucuses put forward. These lists could well end up containing no one who is truly loyal to one candidate or the other, depending on who shows up to vote at the caucus that day. Yes, delegates pledged to a candidate are at least theoretically obligated to vote for that candidate, but on the first ballot only. A contested convention, almost by definition, will go longer than one ballot. Worse, much worse, such "Manchurian delegates" -- formally pledged to a candidate, but not really loyal to that candidate -- would be completely free to vote any way they chose on procedural questions, such as the question of seating contested delegations. If it's close enough that we will have a contested convention, then the question of how to seat FL and MI would almost certainly put the winning side over the top for the nomination. The Manchurian delegates would decide the nomination by deciding seating questions, all well before the first ballot.
If one candidate or the other does not withdraw soon after March 4, then both campaigns will be forced to start playing hardball with this delegate selection process that will be ginning up in many states that have already allocated their delegates in all the primaries and caucuses that have already been held this cycle. If only for defensive purposes, to prevent the other campaign from packing local caucuses so that these caucuses will not produce lists that have any delegate candidates at all truly loyal to their campaign, the campaigns will both have to gin up efforts to get their partisans to these caucuses. Even if neither campaign intends it, the result will sometimes be both unfair to one campaign or the other, and procedurally suspect. The latter is a dead certainty. Local caucuses in most states don't even have to be held most cycles, because not enough people file to go the CD/state conventions to even fill up the allocations, and a local caucus to select CD/state convention delegates is not needed. Therefore the local party committees are totally inexperienced at running these things, much less running them in a year when thousands of people may decide to show up, as in Clark County. The results would be chaotic. The lawsuits will pile up. Practically every pledged delegate will be subject to a reasonable seating challenge. The convention will simply not be able to even seat itself, much less nominate anyone.
No, I'm not saying that we're likely to see such an Armageddon this year. We probably will have a nominee by March 5. The consequences of not having the thing decided soon are so dire that superdelegate defections probably would force the candidate clearly behind as of March 5 to withdraw. We will probably get lucky this year. But let's not depend on luck for future cycles. One take home lesson from this year is that the "momentum" thing, that has given us a nominee quickly for 50 years, seems to be losing its potency. We need to take what I hope will be a near miss this cycle as our warning to fix the process before the next cycle, which may well give us a contested convention.
The fundamental structural flaw in this process is that we have allowed the presidential candidate nomination process to be coupled with a very different process, the state and national parties' quadrennial business meetings. And, since the nomiation process has always, for fifty years, been sewn up well ahead of the conventions, we let the needs of the more critical of these functions, nomination, give way to the less important business meeting function. We should have a nomination process that lets the campaigns control, completely, who their allocated delegates will be. But since such control hasn't mattered for fifty years, we have this process that lets the local party committees get their folks in as delegates. In all those years when the convention wasn't contested, it didn't matter that such local party people might not really like the candidate under whose name they got to attend the convention, because the nomination was a foregone conclusion, and attending the convention was partly to transact unrelated party business, and partly a purely honorific perk rewarding years of service to the party.
We need to decouple these two processes. If the parties feel they need a quadrennial convention to transact internal business, fine, let them hold such conventions. But these gatherings of the party's long-term active members need to be kept strictly separate from the immediate question of deciding who the nominee will be this year. That process, at least after the rules have been set ahead of time by the parties, needs to be controlled entirely by the voters and the candidates they have voted for. If no winner emerges from the primary/caucus campaign season, the final winner can be chosen either by a separate convention made up of delegates chosen by the campaigns based on allocations emerging from the primaries and caucuses, or we could skip a nominating convention entirely, and stage a national run-off between the top two candidates. This would be a national primary ideally, but caucuses held the same day will do in states whose legislatures will not cooperate with democracy.