The Republican National Committee is not looking to bring in a "white knight" candidate to take the party's presidential nomination, but wants a nominee that will take a majority of the delegates, no matter how many votes it takes, Chairman Reince Priebus said Thursday.
"The point is, if it takes one ballot, or it takes five ballots, it is, the nominee of our party is going to be the person that gets a majority of the delegates on the floor of the convention or even sooner, perhaps," Priebus told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on the
"America's Newsroom" program. "It is the same thing that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed, the same thing that will happen in 2016. A lot of this is a lot of rhetoric in the end. A majority is going to rule, and nothing's going to change that."
Further, he pointed out that there are bound delegates, and in most cases, "almost 95 percent of the cases," the delegates remain bound, but that changes when more rounds of voting occur.
"If a candidate get a majority on the first ballot it's over," he said. "I mean so there is really, it is a lost conversation about, you know how many angels are dancing on a pin. But in the end it will be determined by the delegates."
But he said he does not know if any of the candidates will have the 1,237 votes needed on the first round, "but it doesn't matter because I'm going to accept the results as to whatever they are."
Priebus said he has called on the RNC's rules committee not to make any major changes for the convention, and he does not believe there will be any changes coming this week.
He also would not speculate on MacCallum's questions about whether the "Never Trump" movement is starting to fade away.
"All I know is I've got a job to do in running the party, having an open and fair convention and making sure that I try to correct the record as much as I can, in responding to 24/7 so-called experts on television that don't know what they're talking about," he told her.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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