If the GOP presidential nomination goes to someone other than Donald Trump at this summer's convention, it may not end in the upheaval the front-runner is predicting, but there "would be chaos" because many voters don't understand how the convention process works, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said Thursday.
"He is an outside insurgent candidate," Schmidt, a former advisor for Sen. John McCain, told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "His voters, many of them are first-time voters in the process, and those voters don't necessarily understand the two parties are the vehicles by which we advance democracy in America, but by themselves are not inherently small 'D' democratic institutions."
Wednesday, Trump told
CNN that he thinks
"there would be riots" if he is denied the nomination if he comes in just short of having enough delegates, while the other candidates remain far behind.
"This is not a one man, one vote process, but I think ordinary people view it as such," Schmidt said Thursday.
"So if you go into the convention, you have all the political machinations and it results in a nomination by someone who maybe didn't even run for president during this process or with the second or third place candidate and people will go nuts."
Further, he said, such a move will be seen as being engineered by "the establishment," and the move could cause the Republican Party "to implode under those circumstances and have dire consequences down the ballot for the House and Senate."
The issue was stirred even more on Wednesday, when Curly Haugland, an unbound GOP North Dakota delegate, told CNBC's
"Squawk Box" that the media has "created the perception that the voters choose the nomination," when really, it's the delegates who choose the nominees.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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