Rubio makes move to keep all the delegates he won, just in case

Usually when candidates announce they're "suspending" their campaign, that's a legal term of art that simply means, "I'm no longer running but I need to be able to still raise money to pay off my campaign debts." In Marco Rubio's case, though, maybe he is only suspending it. In this election year there's hardly anyone who can truly be said to be out of the running. And if we do get to a contested convention and the party starts looking for a compromise candidate, I suppose you'd be in a good position if you already have at least some pledged delegates. But more likely, the request Rubio made today is designed to help deny Donald Trump a first-ballot majority:

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If Trump fails to win a majority of delegates during the primaries, he can try to make up the gap by winning over some of the 323 delegates thought to be up for grabs. Campaigns have talked about winning over those 323 delegates, a reference to delegates from states that don't bind their vote — which some describe as a GOP version of the Democrats' super delegates — combined with delegates backing candidates no longer in the race. The Trump Campaign, for example, has explicitly said it can woo those delegates if it finishes the primaries short the 1,237-delegate majority. If Rubio is successful, however, he could cut that prized pool of delegates down to just 151. That means if Trump finishes more than 100 delegates shy of a majority, he is less likely to win the nomination on the first ballot.

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So in other words, let's say Trump goes into the convention with 1,100 delegates, which is 137 short of the majority he needs to clinch the nomination. Theoretically, the 323 delegates won by candidates who have now dropped out would also be up for grabs, and Trump could try to win over some of those to cobble together a first-ballot majority. That's important because after the first ballot many of Trump's pledged delegates will also be released to vote for other candidates, and my guess is he would lose an awful lot of them at that point. So by keeping his delegates, Rubio cuts by more than half the number of released delegates now available to Trump to try to win over, making it much more difficult for him to overcome any sort of sizeable shortfall. Now, having said all this, if the convention gets thrown completely open, you could always argue that a guy who got 172 votes on the first ballot could make a case for himself as a compromise nominee - certainly more so than someone who was never running and had no delegates at all. I'd say it's a long shot that Rubio could become the nominee under any circumstance, but what would you call impossible in a year like this?

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