Gingrich: ‘We’re One Step Closer to a Contested Convention’
RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
KILMEADE: “All right. So let’s talk about this election if we could, and switch to what happened over the weekend. You know, a split two and two the caucus and primaries. Louisiana and Kentucky went to Donald Trump. But it seems as though Cruz has got some wind at his back, and guess who’s paying the price for it? It seems to be Marco Rubio. Especially in Louisiana where late breakers, they say, went to Cruz. Where are we heading with this?”
GINGRICH: “Well, for those of you who want a really exciting summer, I think we’re one step closer now to actually having some kind of contested convention. If, in fact, Michigan tomorrow is going to be very, very important. There’s at least two polls now that show Kasich closing the gap in Michigan. And you could suddenly find that as remarkable as the trump phenomenon has been, he hasn’t converted from challenger to frontrunner, and as a result he’s losing the late deciders. Boy, if that continues, no one person is going to have enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot.
MORRIS: “All the journalists in Washington foaming at the mouth about this idea of a contested convention. Could this actually happen James Garfield style? he rolls into the convention. He doesn’t even know he’s going to be president by the time he walks out. Would Mitt Romney be the guy that they draft at the last minute? He was asked by Chris Wallace on FOX news Sunday about this. I want to get your take on his response. Watch.”
[clip starts]
WALLCE: “You say you won’t run for president. But you didn’t rule out a draft.”
ROMNEY: “That’s an absurd — in my opinion that’s an absurd thing to say. No Republican should say that. That makes solutely no sense for someone to say if they were drafted by their country that they’d say no. But what I can tell you is, I’m not running for president. I’m not going to run for president. I’m going to support one of these four people to be our nominee. I’m supporting three of them right now. And that means that we’re going to get one of those people as our nominee.”
[clip ends]
MORRIS: “What do you make of that response?”
GINGRICH: “Look, I think if Mitt had really wanted to maneuver for the nomination, he wouldn’t have given the speech he gave last week. Because that speech was so harsh, and so intense that it virtually guaranteed that I think votes for the trump people but also for a lot of the Cruz people that Romney would be unacceptable. He may have been courageous on his part. It’s certainly what I think he believes but it was such a vitriolic and nasty speech that it guaranteed that the guy who currently has the most votes and the most momentum would never accept a Romney as sort of the draft of the convention. Now the rules of the convention, which frankly every reporter ought to be studying, are fascinating. And after the first ballot, it becomes a free for all. So you could end up in a very extraordinary situation, in addition, the Republican national committee’s rules committee is going to meet in late April. They’ve got to really confront, maybe for the first time since 1952, the possibility that you could go to a number of ballots in order to decide what’s going to happen here.”
KILMEADE: “And it’s nobody playing with the system. You’ve got to go over the threshold. So you could have a big lead but if you don’t have over 1200 it is game on come convention time in July.”
GINGRICH: “I think the real number is about 45%. I think if Trump, for example, or Cruz, and Cruz has had a terrific week now, if either one of them ended up at 45%, 46%, the momentum psychologically would carry them to a majority. Remember you don’t want the convention to blow apart. And so you’ve got to manage the emotions, and the prospects of all these people in way. But it could mean that ReincePriebus is going to have one of the most complicated jobs in America in the next four or five months.”
KILMEADE: “Right.”
GINGRICH: “It’s much wilder than I thought it would be.”
KILMEADE: “And you’ve been such an even commentator throughout the whole thing. Taking it in with a great sense of history. Newt, thanks so much for joining us this morning.” [crosstalk]
