Competition is understandably heavy among Arkansas Republicans seeking to be delegates to the party's nominating convention.
Why shouldn't it be? The convention, to be held in mid-July in Cleveland, promises to be historic.
This column is necessarily written before the results of Tuesday's latest round of primaries is known, but no one will have yet secured the necessary number of delegates for a first-round nomination.
And, with delegates splitting among the remaining candidates, there is a possibility of a contested convention with the Republican nominee chosen on something other than the first ballot.
How much of a possibility depends in part on how Tuesday's elections turned out. But Republican faithful will still want to be there to choose the nominee.
The nominee will need 1,237 delegate votes and none of the candidates may have achieved that goal by the start of the July convention.
New York billionaire Donald Trump still leads the pack, gathering delegates with almost every election or caucus. Only the recent winner-take-all contests had the potential to produce no delegates for the front-running Republican candidate.
Despite an anti-Trump movement in recent weeks, he still looks to go into the convention with more committed delegate votes than anyone else. The number may fall short of the the 1,237 requirement, however.
That means the people in those delegate seats could make the call at the convention, choosing among the remaining declared candidates for president or picking someone altogether different.
So, the question becomes who will be the delegates from Arkansas and from elsewhere who might pick the Republican nominee for president.
In Arkansas last month, more than twice as many candidates as expected submitted the necessary paperwork to represent this state's Republicans at the convention.
Doyle Webb, the Arkansas party chairman, had figured on maybe 100 candidates for the 37 Arkansas delegate slots. But, by the Feb. 29 deadline, more than 220 sets of documents had been filed.
Some of those were multiple filings by individual candidates. Both U.S. Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton, for example, put up multiple filing fees so they could be delegates for Trump or for U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Those two and other state party leaders will doubtlessly be among those standing in at the convention for Arkansas' Republican electorate.
The state's delegates will be elected in April and May and, for that first vote at the convention, their collective votes will reflect the way Arkansas Republicans voted in the March 1 preferential primary. Trump won it with 32.6 percent of the vote. Cruz placed second with 30.4 percent. Rubio came in third with 24.7 percent. That translates to 16 first-round delegate votes for Trump, 15 for Cruz and 9 for Rubio.
If Rubio, for example, drops out of the race before the convention, he may release his Arkansas delegates to vote for someone else even on the first vote. Neither Trump nor Cruz is likely to leave the race.
If no candidate gets the magic 1,237 first-round votes, all of the Arkansas delegates will be free to vote for whomever they please on second or subsequent ballots.
To have that option, delegate candidates must first be elected to represent the state. The first of the elections happen at the congressional district level when each of the state's four districts will choose three delegates, or 12 of the 37 statewide slots.
They will be apportioned based on the March 1 vote within the congressional districts. Trump will get six of the 12 delegates, Cruz five and Rubio one.
The other 25 delegates will be chosen May 14 at a meeting of the party's state committee in Hot Springs. Again the delegates will be allocated based on the March 1 primary vote.
Maybe by those April or May dates, the Arkansas delegate candidates will know which of the candidates, if any, has locked down nomination.
Maybe they won't.
Either way, the newly selected delegates will be headed to an historic gathering.
It could feature a rare contested convention and whatever comes of that.
Or it may display a fractured Republican Party trying to close up gaping wounds in advance of the general election.
Commentary on 03/16/2016