Ben Carson's campaign manager says any attempt by party leaders to wrest the nomination away from an insurgent presidential candidate next year would split and potentially ruin the Republican Party.

"If the establishment thinks they can put their thumb on the scale, there will be a massive fight and perhaps our last convention," Carson campaign chief Barry Bennett told U.S. News in an interview Friday.

Bennett says he was outraged by a report in The Washington Post Thursday that GOP leaders, including Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, met privately to discuss plans for a possible convention fight to determine their presidential nominee.



The impetus for such preparations is the continued, unrelenting success of Donald Trump in primary polling despite the torrent of controversial remarks he's made since launching his unlikely bid in June.

The Post report said longtime party power brokers were looking to the convention as a way to coalesce around a mainstream alternative to Trump. But Bennett sees the discussions as paving the way toward stopping any candidate out of favor with establishment forces.

"I think if we were in Trump's position right now, I think the meeting would be, 'How do you stop Carson?' If it was Ted Cruz, it'd be the same thing," Bennett says. "If the agents of change end up with 65 percent of the vote and they tried to nominate someone other than those three, huge chunks of the electorate will walk away from the party."

Trump, Cruz and Carson continue to significantly outpace the 14-person GOP field in national and state polls, though Carson has seen his numbers drop in recent weeks. A New Hampshire poll released Friday showed Trump with a 15-point lead, even after incurring significant media backlash this week for proposing to halt Muslim immigration into the U.S. Trump and Cruz are battling for supremacy in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa, where votes will be tallied Feb. 1.



Officials from other campaigns, who did not want to be quoted speculating on the potential of a brokered national convention in July, signaled they still believe the most likely scenario is that a nominee will emerge by mid-March.

On March 1, a dozen states will vote, offering 624 delegates. That will mark the largest voting day of the 2016 primary, and several top officials working on GOP campaigns said they expect that day, along with March 15, to significantly narrow the field of contenders, possibly to just two or three.

March 15 is the second-largest voting day on the calendar, with 367 delegates up for grabs, including Florida's 99, North Carolina's 72, Illinois' 69 and Ohio's 66.

Candidates without multiple victories at that point will be hard-pressed financially and strategically to soldier on.

"This is over by 3/16," messaged one top campaign official. "After people start winning, these things collapse fast."

Two scenarios for the homestretch of the primary race are being bandied about most frequently. One is a traditional faceoff between a conservative insurgent and an establishment favorite. The other entails those two options, as well as Trump. The latter is more likely to produce a protracted fight than the former, as it could lead to a clash between three factions of the GOP: traditional conservatives, mainline Republicans and Trump's rambunctiously diverse coalition of the disillusioned and disenfranchised.

Because of the intensity of the primary schedule in March – there are eight voting days in five weeks – fundraising time will be limited, forcing campaigns to rely on momentum and organization that they've built months in advance.

Campaigns, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's, that are putting all their resources into defying expectations in a single state could see those gains quickly erased if they don't have an established presence in the flood of March states. Christie has risen to second place in the most recent New Hampshire poll, but the open question is what state he could win after performing well there.



It's the pressure of the condensed calendar and the limited availability of resources that have convinced many in the party that the field of contenders will winnow far before the convention convenes in Cleveland.

"I think by March or April it's going to be a two-person race, and that's going to be Cruz and [Marco] Rubio," says Richard Viguerie, a 50-year GOP activist who endorsed Cruz Wednesday. "The establishment is going to get behind Rubio to prevent a Trump or Cruz nomination."

Viguerie places the odds of a brokered convention at just 25 percent.

Bennett still sees the convention scenario as plausible, which is why he says the Carson campaign takes great care in how it selects its delegates. He says those selected to represent Carson are first-time participants who have no relationship to establishment Republican Party circles.

But he warns of long-term turmoil for the party if its leaders attempt to alter the rules before the convention to assist their preferred candidate.