Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

Curly Haugland loves the rules. The stubborn 69-year-old pool-supply magnate is North Dakota’s top Republican gadfly, its rule-mongering crank, its official state pain in the ass. On the national GOP’s standing rules committee, he’s been the pedantic curmudgeon, the stubborn speed bump who for years has raised points of order only to watch establishment Republicans stampede over him.

Yet now, as his party teeters on the edge of civil war, Haugland has become one of the most dangerous men in politics: He’s the mainstream GOP’s last hope to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination in Cleveland. It would take a miracle—and almost certainly lead to a historic split in the party—but there is still a way, buried in the labyrinthine rulebook, that the party could free delegates from their obligation to vote for Trump. To get there, the convention’s rules committee would need to travel a perilous road. But nobody knows the terrain better than Haugland, a self-taught maverick expert on the Republican convention rules, who has spent a decade pushing schemes to take power away from Republican primary voters and give it back to party insiders.


There is one article of faith in the Republican Party: On the convention’s first ballot, bound delegates are required to vote for the candidate to whom they’re bound. What you need to know about Haugland’s radical vision is this: He insists that’s not the case. Haugland has been trumpeting this nuclear option for months. In March, he blasted out a letter to fellow Republican National Committee members with the subject line: “NEWS FLASH: All Republican Delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention are Unbound!” He’s on a mission to let all the delegates at the convention in Cleveland to vote however they’d like on the first ballot, no matter whom their state’s voters chose.

This has long seemed like a crazy cause—who doesn’t want voters to decide? Back when Haugland was advocating the party assert its independence from a sitting Republican president, George W. Bush, Curlyism was viewed as a kind of benign, obscure heresy. But could this be the year Haugland’s strange view of the primary—that the party, not voters, chooses the nominee, as he often insists—finds its moment? In April, Eric O’Keefe, a Cruz supporter and Club for Growth activist, told the Wall Street Journal that he would lobby Republican delegates to assert their right to reject Trump at the convention. (O’Keefe did not return an email seeking comment.) Trump’s old pal Roger Stone has predicted for months that the Republican establishment would try to snatch the nomination from Trump at the convention, even if he won a pledged-delegate majority. Now that Trump’s opposition has dropped out, “the whole scenario is far, far less likely,” Stone says—but, he admits, it could still happen. “The Republican convention can do whatever it wants,” he says. “You can’t bring a lawsuit. There’s no jurisdiction.”

Now, as #NeverTrump conservatives begin to turn their attention to the possibility of a third-party candidate, it’s clear many GOP leaders are still deeply opposed to Trump as the nominee. The question is: How unhappy are they? And how far are they willing to go to stop him on the floor in Cleveland? Haugland knows the weird contours, obscure clauses and contradictory history of the party’s governing rules—so he knows the last, desperate hand the #NeverTrump crowd could play. He says he’s not taking sides in the presidential race—and, oddly enough, he even praises Trump. Still, now that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, all that stands in the way of the Trump Train is the idea Haugland champions: that the party can rewrite the convention rules to undo the voters’ choice.

On the surface, Haugland’s lonely stance seems to contradict every democratic reform of the presidential nominating process from the past 45 years: moves by Democrats and Republicans away from smoke-filled rooms to party primaries, especially open contests that allow independents to vote. His bald assertion that the Republican Party can simply veto the voters’ choice and dump a presumptive nominee provoked a backlash from Trump fans and enemies alike. “What’s the point of anybody voting then?” declared Sean Hannity on Fox. “Talk about nondemocracy!” complained Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Even Haugland’s own congressman—Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, whom Haugland backed early in his career—dismissed him as a “rules nerd.”

“Curly is one of these guys, he means well, he sort of likes to talk about the rules,” Cramer, a Trump supporter, told a Fargo TV station, “and usually [people] roll their eyes, pat him on the head, hope he buys the next round at the cocktail party, and say, ‘Isn’t he fun to have around?’”

Curly Haugland, a Bismarck businessman and North Dakota representative on the Republican National Committee, waits for the North Dakota state Republican convention to begin in Grand Forks, N.D. | AP Photo/Dale Wentzel

And yet, incredibly, Republicans at the highest level can’t quite dismiss Haugland’s arguments. Even last week, three days after Reince Priebus declared Trump the presumptive nominee, the party chairman couldn’t quite bring himself to dismiss the possibility that the convention could nominate someone other than Trump. “It’s highly, highly doubtful,” Priebus told Mike Allen at the POLITICO Playbook Breakfast on May 6—but still, he noted, “nothing is impossible.” Meanwhile, party leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan are withholding their support from Trump—now asserting, as Haugland insisted during the Dubya era, that the party can remain independent of its own presumptive nominee.

You could call Haugland’s ideas a recipe for chaos, even a subversion of democracy. But if Trump reaches the magic number of 1,237 pledged delegates before the convention—and now that all the other Republican candidates have dropped out, he’s almost certain to do so—then establishment Republicans who still want to resist Trump’s hostile takeover will have only one option left: the ancient art of manipulating the convention rules. When Haugland gets to Cleveland, will his obsession with party arcana leave him as lonely and defeated as ever? Or will the #NeverTrump crowd, in desperation, unleash Curly?

***

Nobody—not even Haugland—remembers how he got his nickname: Curly’s hair is straight. It always was. Other kids nicknamed him at 10 or 11; maybe they played on his given name, Erling. If not for his obsession with rules, you could mistake Haugland for a typical archconservative Great Plains businessman. Haugland made his modest fortune supplying ladders and diving boards for large pools. “I’ve always been a free-market type, an entrepreneur,” he says. For years, he owned a ranch three hours west of Bismarck, where he hunted deer, elk, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats and beaver. He opposes federal land management policies, abortion and illegal immigration. “Countries have to have borders,” he says. “That’s just fundamental.” He used to fly Republican candidates to meetings across North Dakota in his company plane, a six-seat Piper Cherokee.

He traces his obsession with the fine print back to his early career: He became a stickler for studying the bids and contracts for his pool business. “You put your economic life on the line every time you submit a bid,” he says. “The contracts are the rules.”

Unlike most Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans, Haugland harbors a libertarian hatred for “corporate welfare”—any government grants to business. For decades, just about any time North Dakota attempted to implement an economic development strategy, Haugland claimed it violated the state and federal constitutions. When Bismarck set up a special tax district for downtown improvements, Haugland fought it all the way to the North Dakota Supreme Court. (He lost, 5-0, in 2012.)

Former North Dakota Governor Ed Schafer put Haugland’s bulldog instincts to work in 1993 by nominating him to the board of the Bank of North Dakota. For years after, Haugland was “that curmudgeon, difficult, pushback type of leader, cranky,” says Schafer, who counted on Haugland to spot flaws in proposals. “He doesn’t get discouraged when he gets outvoted time after time after time,” adds Schafer. “He has a resolved smile when things don’t go his way. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

In 1999, after years of supporting North Dakota Republican candidates, Haugland won a two-year term as state party chairman. Five years later, party members named him one of North Dakota’s Republican national committeemen, and he joined the RNC’s standing rules committee. Around that time, Haugland began to care more about rules than candidates.

Haugland became convinced that the RNC was too focused on symbolic gestures and power politics, not the basics of building strong state and local parties. A turning point came in 2007, when the RNC considered endorsing a $30 billion U.S. contribution to U2 singer Bono’s anti-poverty campaign One. Haugland protested, saying it would “force Americans to support global socialism with their tax dollars.”

That same year, Haugland joined an uprising of party activists against President George W. Bush’s move to install U.S. Senator Mel Martinez as the RNC’s general chairman—a sort of spokesman’s post. On the one hand, it broke the rules, Haugland felt: The RNC didn’t provide for a general chairman. But there was also a much larger issue at stake: Haugland felt the national committee ought to have more autonomy from the president. Even a sitting Republican president. This, of course, was seen as heresy. At the vote, Haugland submitted a report from a certified parliamentarian to bolster his case. But Mike Duncan, the RNC chair, quickly overruled him and rammed Martinez through on a voice vote. A year later, when Michael Steele ran to replace Duncan, Haugland objected again: The rules said the chairman had to be an RNC member. Steele wasn’t. Didn’t matter. Steele won anyway.

Haugland’s many rules committee defeats have earned him a reputation as a loose cannon. He’s undaunted. “The biggest victory is one I’m going to have in a couple months,” he says. “Up ’til now, I’ve basically been laying the groundwork.”

***

To Haugland, extremism in defense of the party rules is no vice. His personal blog—on which he’s shared chapters of his forthcoming book, Unbound: The Conscience of a Republican Delegate—is titled Curly Haugland Truthers. (His son named it, as a joke.)

“I don’t care who the nominee is, particularly,” Haugland says. “I’m trying to save the Republican Party from being destroyed, consumed or rendered useless by the primaries. We can choose our president one [of two] ways: delegates at the convention, or the vote of the mob, if you want to call it that—the general public in the primaries.”

Haugland’s view, almost extinct today, was common in American political parties until the 1970s. He thinks primary elections ruin political parties. In his eyes, primaries weaken party discipline, making parties vulnerable to infiltration by independents and the undemocratic influence of big money. “The modern smoke-filled room is what’s politely referred to as the invisible primary—$150 million for Jeb Bush,” Haugland says. “That’s what’s wrong with primaries.”

So Haugland is against primaries of any kind, especially open primaries, winner-take-all-primaries and delegate slates chosen by candidates who win primaries. Above all, he’s against binding the delegates to the results of primaries and caucuses. “Actually, I’m for every rule that prohibits those things,” he says, “and those rules are on the books.”

For every RNC rule that authorizes something he’s against, Haugland cites an older rule that, in his interpretation, allows convention delegates freedom to vote their conscience on all matters. For example, Rule 16 explicitly says delegates can be bound “in a winner-take-all manner,” but Haugland says that violates the intent of Rules 37 and 38, which prevent majorities in state delegations from imposing unanimity on dissenters. His ideal Republican convention: 1880 in Chicago, where James Garfield chaired the rules committee, wrote rules protecting delegates’ freedom, then got the nomination as a dark horse after a deadlock.

Of course, when Haugland starts talking about subverting the will of the people, voters—and politicians who value them—recoil in horror. So there might be a few Republicans who wish Curly could be locked in a bunker this summer, preferably a bunker several thousand miles from the convention. But alas, it is not to be. As an RNC member, Haugland gets an automatic ticket to Cleveland. And at the North Dakota Republican Convention, held in early April at a hockey arena in Fargo, state party members elected Haugland to the national convention’s rules committee. Since North Dakota held neither a Republican primary nor a caucus this year, party members also elected 25 unbound delegates to represent them in Cleveland. Ted Cruz came to the state convention to charm his fellow Republicans, as much as Ted Cruz ever charms anyone. Trump sent Ben Carson as his surrogate, perhaps because Trump’s personality was thought to clash with North Dakota nice. John Kasich, who is known to despise the movie Fargo, did not make the trek.

When the rules committee convenes in Cleveland the week before the convention, Haugland will be at the table, ready to raise hell. And at least one of the causes Haugland will take up is thoroughly mainstream. Like many Republicans, he wants to rewrite Rule 40(b), the 2012 Mitt Romney concoction that says only candidates who have the support of a majority of the delegates from eight states will have their votes counted. At a contested convention, Rule 40(b) would’ve created a high bar for Kasich or a dark horse such as Paul Ryan to challenge Trump or Cruz, even on a third or fourth ballot. Haugland proposes to count the votes of any candidate with even one pledged delegate. That’d revive seven expired candidacies, from Jeb Bush’s to Mike Huckabee’s. “Rand Paul!” adds Haugland. “He worked his tail off!”

But if Trump comes into Cleveland with 1,237 delegates, as he’s now expected to do, axing Rule 40(b) won’t matter. He’ll be the nominee, unless the Never-Trump Republicans do something drastic. That’s where the party establishment could, in desperation, turn to the gadfly they’ve long brushed aside.

Haugland won’t say what else he’ll propose to the rules committee. “The element of surprise is important,” he says. But he’ll likely challenge his least favorite rule: Rule 16, which binds delegates to their state’s primary and caucus results.

Specifically, Rule 16(a)(2) says that if bound delegates go rogue and try to vote for someone else, the secretary of the convention will ignore them and record their votes “in accordance with the delegate’s obligation.” Haugland claims Rule 16’s language on binding is “fraudulent”—by which he means it was added in violation of proper procedure. He also says it contradicts the intent of older rules meant to preserve delegates’ right to vote their conscience. The bound-delegate language was “written into Rule 16 by a bunch of Progressives who thought they could get away with it,” he grouses. (That’s capital-P Progressives, the 1910 reformers who introduced primaries, to Haugland’s chagrin.)

Snip out Rule 16(a)(2), and the binding unravels. Some states’ laws require the binding of delegates, but Haugland says they can’t be enforced because of Supreme Court rulings. And rogue delegates could escape state-party sanctions back home, he suggests, because most convention votes are announced by state, not individual roll call. “See, people haven’t thought this stuff through,” Haugland says.

So here’s how the nuclear option works: If Trump comes to Cleveland with a delegate majority, axing Rule 16(a)(2) could instantly dismantle it. Since delegates are typically longtime party activists, many delegates pledged to vote for Trump might be open to voting against him if unbound. Still, Haugland insists restoring the rules is his only motivation: He hoped to unbind the delegates in 2012, too. “I’m standing on principle,” he says. “I’m not trying to obtain special advantage or disadvantage for anybody.” Ask about the three candidates who lasted into May, and he praises them all, including Trump: “Why would he be a good president? His ability to manage large, complex enterprises.” Cruz, he says, impressed lots of North Dakotans with his conservative stump speech. Kasich? Well, he’s “a serious-minded person.”

Dig deeper, and Haugland’s desire for a stronger party is rooted in a deeply conservative impulse. Republicans in Ohio, where the state party committee is chosen in an open primary, are “RINOs,” he complains. He says the party’s post-2012 “autopsy,” which called for compromise on immigration, clashes with its base’s belief in “borders, language and culture.” The past two “primary-chosen nominees,” John McCain and Mitt Romney, “didn’t work so well,” he says. “Maybe the party should choose the nominee. Maybe we can do better.”

***

Josh Putnam, whose blog Frontloading HQ tracks the delegate selection process, doesn’t think much of Haugland’s theories. “Mr. Haugland is oftentimes a committee of one on the RNC rules committee,” says Putnam, a political science lecturer at the University of Georgia. Haugland’s complaints about Rule 16 aren’t new, and “fell on deaf ears” at the RNC, says Putnam. The idea that older rules allow delegates to follow their conscience? That’s based on a selective reading, Putnam says. “I don’t think it holds water.”

Still, Putnam concedes, the Republican delegates really could choose to unbind themselves.

“That’s an awfully dangerous game to play, though,” says Putnam. “They’d face immediate backlash from Trump supporters and damage to the party’s prospects in the national election.” If Never-Trump forces challenge Trump at the convention even though he’s the presumptive nominee, Putnam thinks an anti-chaos faction will emerge: Party regulars who may not love Trump, but would fight radical rule changes meant to block him. “The national party has said over and over and over again, if someone has 1,237 delegates, they’re the nominee,” Putnam says.

But Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book Primary Politics, calls Haugland’s arguments “very sound.”

“Curly is historically and legally right in saying there is a lot of discretion in the action of delegates,” Kamarck says. “The argument he’s making is that ultimately the decision is a party decision—which is in fact true.” Party activity is protected by the First Amendment right of free association, Kamarck agrees, so state laws binding delegates don’t matter. “The only way delegates will be bound is if, when they vote on the rules of the convention, they vote to bind themselves,” she says. “Otherwise, they’re not.”

Haugland’s argument is a lot like Ted Kennedy’s at the 1980 Democratic convention, Kamarck says. Kennedy thought he could snatch the nomination from President Jimmy Carter if he could unbind the delegates. He even mocked the binding rule as the “robot rule,” creating programmed delegates with no free will. On the first night of the convention, the robot rule became the test vote that revealed the candidates’ strengths. Carter was in control of the convention, so the robot rule was overwhelmingly upheld.

Kamarck thinks the Republicans may choose chaos over Trump.

“I think the Republican Party is facing two bad choices,” Kamarck says. If they unbind the delegates, Republicans will anger Trump voters, who might stay home on Election Day. “On the other hand, if they don’t do that, they’re saddling themselves with a deeply unpopular candidate who might have consequences down-ballot.”

So the Republicans could execute a Full Curly in Cleveland. But should they?

Former Ohio governor and U.S. Senator George Voinovich, a Kasich convention delegate, thinks not. “If that happened, I think we’d have a real problem,” Voinovich says. “I just think it’s not democratic. People are pledged to vote for a candidate on the first ballot. We have an obligation to do that.”

Schafer, the former North Dakota governor, predicts Haugland will lose this fight, like he’s lost all the others. “I think what happens is the establishment takes over and nothing changes,” says Schafer, “and he gets that cute little resolved smile of having tried and failed.”

Haugland isn’t worried that he could wound his party by thwarting the will of primary voters. He’s convinced true conservatism will win in the end.

“I don’t think a lot of voters are motivated to a single candidate,” he says. “They will stay with the party. Voters want good government. They’re not fussy about who delivers it.”