The four GOP presidential campaigns are quietly preparing for a battle over an obscure rule-making committee that could control the balance of power in a contested Republican National Convention in July.

The convention's 112-member Rules Committee wields enormous power to influence the outcome of the party’s nomination fight, including the authority to undo policies requiring most of the 2,472 convention delegates to abide by the will of the voters — freeing them to vote according to personal preference — or to erect all kinds of obstacles to Donald Trump’s nomination.


“By majority rule, they can do anything that they want,” said Barry Bennett, an adviser to Donald Trump who’s coordinating the mogul’s convention strategy. “They can throw out the chairman. You can throw out the RNC members. You can do anything.”

For now, the campaigns are fairly limited in the steps each can take to stack the Rules Committee to its advantage. There are no officials to lobby or members to cajole. The committee doesn’t actually exist yet — and it won’t for months, at least until state-level primaries end in June.

But the campaigns are still working feverishly on a state-by-state basis to line up steadfast allies for delegate slots, and thus possible appointments to the rules panel. Whichever campaign is most successful at getting its loyalists appointed could broker a set of rules that deny Trump a path to the nomination — or ensure that he has one.

But those familiar with the process already see trouble ahead.

“It’ll be a bloodbath,” said Tom Lundstrum, an Arkansas Republican who served on the convention Rules Committee in 2012 when rules changes surrounding Ron Paul supporters created a dust-up.

The task of gaining an edge on the committee — which has been an afterthought for decades — is complicated. Each state and territory gets two appointees, one man and one woman. They’re selected from among each jurisdiction’s full roster of delegates to the national convention. And, in many cases, those delegate rosters won’t be decided until local conventions and district elections are held throughout the spring. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus will appoint a chairman and co-chairman of the panel from among the delegates chosen to participate, but otherwise the RNC has no role in the process.

“All the campaigns know that they have to get their people on the Convention Rules Committee," said Ben Ginsberg, a former RNC general counsel and national counsel to the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. "If they do their work right, the most logical assumption is that the make-up of the convention will be roughly reflected in the convention Rules Committee.”

Since the most recent contested convention — in 1976, when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully challenged President Gerald Ford — the business of naming convention delegates has been largely ceremonial. Not this time.

“This is not going to be a Bush reelection, where donors want all the delegates to be their kids,” Bennett said. “There’s a whole team of folks that will do nothing but worry about this, the mechanics of delegates and the rules committee and 15 other things. You’ve got all these state conventions.”

“The television advertising was the easy part,” he added. “Now it’s hand-to-hand combat.”

Trump’s campaign intends to appoint first-time delegates wherever it can, which means those delegates won’t be beholden to party traditions. But they’ll have little institutional knowledge of the rules process.

While each campaign has acknowledged that their convention teams are already strategizing in advance of the July convention, not all of them are willing to delve into specifics.

“I don't want to discuss strategy,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Marco Rubio campaign. “It would only give our competition an advantage to show them our playbook.”

John Kasich ally Tom Rath, a veteran RNC member, said the Ohio governor’s campaign would rely on veteran party hands to guide the process. But when asked to provide insight into his campaign’s convention approach, Kasich chief strategist John Weaver simply said, “No.”

For the past four decades, the Republican Party has usually had a presumptive nominee months in advance, and the convention simply ratified the predetermined outcome. That means even longtime students of the RNC’s arcane rules haven’t had to operate in a brokered convention environment, leaving only a small handful of operatives with a nuanced understanding of the process.

“So few people working on these campaigns really understand this process,” said one party activist who has previously worked on the GOP convention Rules Committee and requested anonymity. “Some of the things they think they can do to influence it, folks on the inside kind of laugh at it.”

Even so, party insiders say that radical rule changes this year are unlikely. There’s too much institutional inertia, they say, and changing the rules of the game at the last minute would be explosive. In addition, any adjustments must be approved by the full convention — a check on any extreme changes.

“There might be things in like a mad scientist’s laboratory where you could screw with the rules for the convention,” said a source familiar with the convention rules process. “I think in reality it’s pretty unlikely that anyone’s going to be able to mess with the existing set of rules.”

“Any changes that impact the outcome of the voting immediately I think will be rejected and would be problematic by all accounts,” added Charlie Spies, a former RNC counsel.

But a slew of party veterans and activists say any expectation of normality should be scrapped this year, with two anti-establishment campaigns in the hunt for the nomination.

“The establishment, which has always had a tight grip on the convention, doesn’t,” Bennett noted. “Can you imagine? Cruz delegates and Trump delegates — they’d pick the rules in a much different way.”

For example, Trump and Cruz supporters could use the rules to box out challenges by Rubio and Kasich. The simplest way to do it would be to manipulate the so-called eight-state threshold. That rule, rewritten in 2012 by Romney campaign allies, required any candidate eligible for the Republican nomination to win a majority of the delegates from at least eight states or territories. Back then, it prevented Ron Paul from sharing the stage with Romney, and the rule change — which increased the threshold from five states — sparked outrage among Paul’s backers.

Rubio and Kasich are unlikely to achieve that level of support, so if they plan a serious effort to win a contested convention, they desperately need a rules change in order to place their names in nomination on the first ballot. Even Cruz, who’s won majority support in three states so far, could get shut out.

“It’s immensely important largely because of the changes that were put in place by Romney’s team in 2012 to sort of block out Ron Paul,” said Michael Steele, a former RNC chairman. “If Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and John Kasich intend to prosecute their case for the nomination right through the convention, they better go hire some good lawyers now to begin to look at the rules.”

Ginsberg, the attorney and Romney ally who spearheaded the drive to change the threshold, said it would be reasonable for the convention Rules Committee to adjust the number again "wherever it wants to."

A more cataclysmic battle could occur over two other rules that have been widely accepted – in public – as unchangeable. One binds delegates to vote according to the outcomes of the state primaries and caucuses. The other permits states to award delegates on a winner-take-all basis. Both could be targets for significant overhauls depending on who controls the rules committee.

“The Rules Committee that is elected by the convention delegates will ultimately clarify binding. There is a disagreement,” said John Yob, a former Rand Paul aide who just released a book, “Chaos,” about the prospect of a contested convention. Yob and his wife Erica were also just selected as delegates to the convention from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Yob cites the agitation of longtime RNC member Curly Haugland, who has argued that binding delegates to the results of statewide votes is improper and unenforceable. Haugland has said he intends to introduce rule changes at the upcoming convention that would eliminate binding requirements — which he calls illegitimate — and permit convention delegates to decide who among the eight most successful GOP candidates should be the party’s nominee.

On Friday, Haugland issued a new memo, insisting that he and all fellow RNC delegates can’t be bound under current rules. “That’s right. Every delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention is a completely free agent, free to vote for the candidate of their choice on every ballot at the convention in Cleveland in July,” he wrote. “Every delegate is a Superdelegate!”

Though Haugland’s theories about the rules have n the past largely been brushed off by party insiders, they could end up as the an ace in the hole for Stop Trump forces.

“Ironically, it’s the establishment that might find Curly’s interpretation of greatest value,” said Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan RNC committeeman who’s advising Ted Cruz. “It might be the majority that now thinks that his position might be the most valuable one.”

All of it is fueling rampant — and so far groundless — speculation that party insiders intent on derailing Trump, and more expert at exploiting obscure party rules than their adversaries, will exert their will on the most opaque parts of the convention.

“I think if there was a way they could rig it, without hurting the RNC’s integrity — if there was a way they could rig it to make probably a Mitt Romney or a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio win — there’s a good chance they’d do it,” said Spies, the former RNC counsel.

That prospect has one Republican ally pleading with party leaders to publicize the process and help GOP rank-and-file voters and potential delegates understand their authority, so no candidate walks away from the convention aggrieved by sudden and seemingly arbitrary rule changes.

“I think that we have time to educate everybody that needs to be educated to make sure that people can’t argue if they were surprised by anything,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who said he has communicated his concerns to some RNC committee members and intends to make a more formal pitch to the RNC.

Brian Faler contributed to this report.