Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, who in the past has been skeptical of the likelihood of a brokered Republican convention, now sees the opening for one:
My assumption -- and the assumption of many -- was that the GOP fight would eventually degenerate into an ideological battle between the very conservative and somewhat conservative/moderate wings of the party, with Romney on one side and a single alternative on the other. Unless there was a late entrant or Ron Paul caught fire in the caucus states, someone was virtually assured of claiming the requisite number of delegates in that scenario.
But for the first time, the two way faceoff doesn't seem inevitable, and a viable path to a brokered convention is beginning to emerge. Let’s start with something else I overlooked. The GOP does have super-delegates of a sort, in the form of the 63 RNC members. They aren’t as numerous as they are in the Democratic Party, but they are still there. While many of them have already declared allegiance to one candidate or another, those commitments can evaporate quickly, as Hillary Clinton learned to her sorrow in 2008.
Read the whole thing here. In December, the boss wrote about how a brokered or "deliberative" convention could be good for the GOP.
