La primaria interminable

Como dice David Weigel en Slate, nunca es demasiado pronto para empezar a pensar en una convención abierta.

(...) Can Mitt Romney and Rick Perry stay deadlocked well into 2012? Can the legions of Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul sweep the caucuses and refuse to quit? Can Jon Huntsman ironically tweet his way to victory in the Puerto Rico primary and become the power broker at the Tampa convention a year from now, summoning candidates into his hotel suite to lecture them on global-warming data?

(...) Thus the scenario—floated every four years—in which the race drags on, no one locks up the nomination, and the convention doesn't pick a candidate on the first ballot. This is the first GOP presidential primary of the Tea Party era, with state parties that have been taken over by the sort of people who decapitated Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, and (less successfully) Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It's the first post-Citizens United primary, which makes it theoretically possible for candidates to be bailed out by Super PACs funded by the sort of people who really started sweating when President Obama went after private jets.

(...) What would one of the GOP's nightmare scenarios look like? The simplest one starts with a Bachmann win in Iowa, followed (possibly, if the state sticks with a current plan) by a win in her own state's caucuses the next day. It continues with an indecisive Missouri primary, with the state punished for moving the date up. It goes on to a Mitt Romney win in New Hampshire and a too-close-for-comfort Romney-Bachmann-Perry-Paul split in the Nevada caucuses the following Saturday. Perry wins South Carolina. Romney wins Michigan. There are no surprises as we head into March. (There's no use guessing what happens in Florida yet, but if the other primaries are split, it may not be decisive.)

On March 6, Super Tuesday, Romney wins the his home state and neighboring Vermont, while Perry wins his home state and neighboring Oklahoma. At this point, Perry has more delegates than Romney, but Bachmann's not out of the race yet, and neither is Paul. Paul does well in the Hawaii caucuses, Perry wins the Mississippi primary, and March ends with a slugfest in Illinois and another winnable Perry primary in Louisiana.

After that, we're mostly done with the South, and we're done with non-winner-take-all primaries. The race moves back to the Midwest, West, and East Coast. If Perry's rivals are still in the hunt, and Super PACs are still playing, then there's no obvious Republican front-runner. And that would give Republican activists more than enough motive to start showing up at state conventions and steering them to the candidates they like. (...)