Okay, back to business. Beldar, I certainly believe New Hampshire influences the immediately following primaries. That doesn't mean there's a lock on the winning candidate by any means, but there's certainly influence.

I feel very confident that the Republican nominee will be known months before the Republican convention is held.

My guess is that something similar is common by state rule in most other states, and the national GOP rules permit the states to make these sorts of choices.

If a third- or fourth-place candidate is stubborn (does that sound to you like, oh, John McCain or Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson), but he still has some hundreds of delegates and there's no majority vote-holder going into the convention, wouldn't this cut strongly in favor of him trying to get something in exchange for his delegates?

But we aren't talking about one vote, we are talking about many. Iowa influences New Hampshire, New Hampshire South Carolina and several other smaller contest, which influence Feb. 5th, which influences the next bit. There will be candidates affected all along the chain.

BTW, in the past while there were states that were drain out and late, they rarely mattered. Historically candidates have started dropping out from the get go and some will again this cycle. The compression is not as dramaticv as you are making it out to be. Again, think back to 2004 to a scattered field with shifting front runners, yet somehow we went from numerous possibilities to Kerry by February.

I will concede that this year the chance are higher than in years past, but only slightly. I would argue that in the past the chances were, say, 1% and this year maybe they are 5% or a few ticks higher--but those are still long odds.

Miami has a better chance of beating the Patriots this weekend by far than there is of a brokered convention.

On a single day, Feb. 5th, almost half of the GOP delegates (1113 of about 2500 total) will be selected by voters who -- by definition -- will only know the results of primaries in 8 previous states, only two of which (FL and MI) are large states, and which altogether will have selected only 299 delegates. Moreover, a large chunk of those 299 will not be counted unless the GOP goes back on its sanctions on states holding "too-early" primaries.

That historically unique circumstance all by itself makes it entirely possible that three to five candidates may each pick up several hundred delegates that day -- resulting in chaos which then may persist through the close-following primaries (awarding 300+ delegates) on Feb. 9th & 12th.

The compressed schedule means that what's traditionally weeded out candidates -- a long stretch where funds have essentially stopped flowing to apparent also-rans -- isn't going to happen. Romney can self-finance, but otherwise, the winners on Feb. 5, for example, aren't going to be able to raise massive new funds and buy TV time in time for the 12th.

You're using tried and true assumptions, I agree. But the game has changed. Surely you'll at least agree that a brokered convention is more probable this cycle than it has been in recent ones, even if you still think that probability is quite small, won't you?

If it helps any, I, too, am a native Texan (heck, my Ph.D. is from the University of Texas, in fact!).

Seriously, Beldar, while it's possible, it seems to me to be vanishingly unlikely that the state-by-state votes will unfold in such a way to have three strong candidates for nomination.

I'll be happy to sit at the table with Dr Taylor for that huge helping of crow in March if the Republican nominee hasn't been determined by then.

And by "brokered" I simply mean one in which deals would have to be struck at the convention (or, really, any scenario in which there was no clear winner going into the event). BTW, I am not certain, but I am fairly sure that delegates are not automatically released from their pledges if there is a failure to reach a majority on the first ballot.

Seriously, this isn't going to happen. It simply isn't. The structure of the process (and I don't simply mean IA/NH) makes it virtually impossible that it will result in a brokered convention/the convention mattering at all. We haven't even come close since the current procedures have been in place--even when there was hefty competition for the nomination, say in 1980, for example. (And I referring here only to the GOP side of things, as the Democratic Party and its "Superdelegates" virtually assures that there will never be a brokered convention for them).

If it does happen, I will gladly go online and say that I was wrong, but this is one of those situations where the odds are so in my favor, that I have no problem sticking to my position rather vociferously.

To get a scenario where there would be no designated nominee at the end of the primary/caucus process, you would have to have different states rotating winners, and in a way that fairly evenly distributed delegates. This is incredibly unlikely.

Your scenario wherein there is a 4-to-5-way tie is utter fantasy. The reason there is not front-runner now is because all of the candidates have soft support, not because each has a firm 20-25% of it, and even if they did, that wouldn't produce your scenario-as it would require each of the 4 or 5 top candidates to have really strong support in a specific 1/4th of the country, not in each state.

Plus, soft support means that defecting from one's first choice is easier than if one were strongly committed.

Candidates will start to falter, and falter early, and the field will narrow.

Again: remember Dean in 2004. Frontrunner one day, late night monologue fodder the next.

That doesn't necessarily mean the convention will be consciously, deliberately "brokered," though. Consider, for example, a scenario that I think is entirely likely, in which Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson each come into the convention with 20-25% of the delegates each, with the remainder split between McCain and Huckabee. McCain won't agree to be anyone's Veep (although he might agree to be someone's SecDef); Huck would presumably love a Veep slot rather than setting up his fishing shack back in the Ozarks, and might also be bought off with a cabinet slot (e.g., H&HR) on a subject near and dear to him. But will either of them be in a realistic position to actually "deliver" he delegates originally pledged to him on the first ballot? I think they might be somewhat influential, but not decisively so.

How that quarter of the delegates is redistributed (via brokering) or redistributes itself (based on issues and second choices) will shape the dynamics of the convention. And it's at that point where delegates who are not already committed to either Romney or Giuliani will decisively reveal their discomfort with both as being "true life-long conservatives." I personally think Thompson's likely to be the second choice of those Huckabee or McCain delegates.

Next to crater will be Romney. He's five years younger than Thompson, and a Thompson/Romney ticket would look a lot like Reagan/Bush-41 did in 1980 (with Romney as heir apparent from day one). And he probably can steer most of his delegates in a brokered arrangement. Thus does Thompson beat Giuliani on the second ballot.

I think a deadlocked convention that takes forty ballots to produce a compromise, dark-horse nominee is ridiculously unlikely. But I think you're way over-estimating the persuasive band-wagon effect of the very earliest states (Iowa & New Hampshire). It's not an accident that the GOP race is wide open now, and there's not really a good reason — except for conventional wisdom and wishful thinking (which the present wide-open race already controvert) — to believe that the race can't stay genuinely open up until the convention.