This is where it gets interesting. It’s unlikely Donald Trump will win enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot at the Republican Convention. The likelihood for Ted Cruz is even less certain. Should neither accumulate the required 1,237 pledged delegates, it could be a brand new ballgame, come the second ballot.

This must be unsettling for Trump, who, despite his self-anointed title of “deal-maker,” will be out of his element trying to sweet-talk into his column enough delegates who opposed him. The Never-Trump movement is deep and wide. That leaves only Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whom even establishment Republicans are starting to warm to, given the unpalatable alternative.

Establishment Republicans blocked outlier Ron Paul from convention consideration in 2012 by adopting a rule that a candidate must win at least eight primaries to be nominated. Trump passed that test Tuesday. Cruz has won four, but is likely to reach the magic eight before the July 18 convention.

Both campaigns intend to use the rule to block Ohio’s John Kasich from consideration. He’s won only one state and is highly unlikely to win another, let alone seven more. This is a delicious irony as the anti-establishment factions invoke an establishment-created obstacle to block establishmentarian Kasich.

Meanwhile, the Ides of March knocked out of the race another establishment-friendly candidate, Marco Rubio. Et tu, Marco? Voters who knew Rubio best in his home state of Florida overwhelmingly rejected him. Is there any doubt about the vast majority of Republicans’ wholesale rejection of GOP establishment, compromise-to-get-things-done Bushism?

Speaking of ironies, many who are fed up with the establishment curiously support Trump, a man whose claim to fame is that he’s a deal-maker. Isn’t that precisely what the establishment problem has been? Politicians making deals and necessarily breaking promises to constituents as a result?

For those shuddering at the prospect of a contested convention, here’s a news flash. Seven times in the GOP’s 160-year history, the candidate with a plurality of delegates but short of a majority was denied the nomination. The GOP election process is a republican-representative form of choosing. It’s not a democratic form, in which the candidate receiving the most votes of the people wins. Cruz understands how the system works, which also is ironic, considering he’s an outsider.

Cruz’s campaign has been feverishly working in Iowa and other states where voters already have cast ballots. Why? To influence which delegates are chosen to fill the delegate seats. It is those delegates, not the voters, who will cast ballots at the Republican Convention. In many instances, after the first ballot, delegates no longer will be obliged to vote for candidates they represented on the first ballot. You might say, at that point it’s a brand new ballgame.

Let’s dispense with the notion that an open convention that doesn’t nominate Trump “steals” the nomination from him. Should Trump reach the convention with too few delegates to win on the first ballot, that is, less than the majority required by the rules, he will have failed to win the nomination. Therefore, he doesn’t own it.

“You can’t steal something from someone who has no legitimate claim to it,” writes Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics.com, “and the rules here do not give someone a legitimate claim to the nomination without a majority of the delegates. If Trump can’t get that majority to back him, he will lose, and it will be because he should.”

If this seems unfair, consider that, had Texas been a winner-take-all state, Cruz would have gained 155 delegates and Trump zero. Instead, Cruz has to settle for 104 and Trump got 48. But in New Jersey, likely to go to Trump, the winner gets all 51 delegates.

As a Democratic veteran of campaign wars said, “Life’s unfair.” As yours truly says, “Get over it.” If you don’t like the rules, become one of the rule-makers. If you can’t be bothered, you forfeit grounds for complaint. The founders preferred a republican system rather than a direct democracy, not because they were enamored with arcane complexities, but to protect us from the tyranny of majorities.

The game is afoot. Trump needs to win about 55 percent of the 1,000-plus delegates still up for grabs to reach 1,237, a majority. Trump hasn’t won 50 percent of the vote in any contest to date. True, Trump got 100 percent of Florida delegates for winning only 45 percent of the vote. But of the remaining 20 primaries, only six are winner-take-all, and could be about evenly split between Trump and Cruz.

Moreover, many remaining primaries are closed, in which only Republicans can vote. Closed primaries almost always have gone to Cruz.