With Donald Trump soaring ever higher in the polls, the Republican Establishment is preparing to try to shoot him down over Cleveland.

That’s where the GOP convention will be held in July 2016, and it’s where the Old Guard is strategizing about a possible floor fight for delegates if they can just keep Trump from assembling enough of them to win on the first ballot.

The gambit, leaked to the Washington Post, was described by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to a group of party strategists earlier this week. It seems partially an attempt to urge discouraged donors not to abandon Establishment candidates, since victory can still be pulled from the jaws of defeat.

RNC spokesman Sean Spicer sought to minimize the comments, telling Politico, “The chairman acknowledged that if we got to that point we would be prepared. Our job is to prepare for a successful nomination process.”

The attacks by a terrified Establishment on Donald Trump as an anti-immigrant, anti-woman and anti-Muslim xenophobe along the lines of Hitler and Mussolini have only served to make the candidate stronger.

Even if the delegate strength of such candidates as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio is fractured and far below Trump’s, the Establishment can win at the convention.

Delegates are committed to vote for the candidate they were selected to support on the first ballot. If Trump doesn’t gain the votes to win –- a majority is needed — then Republican leaders can begin coercing, cajoling and sweet talking convention goers whom they know well — and Trump doesn’t.

But such a maneuver, and even the notion that party bigwigs are attempting to override the voice of the voters, threatens to further rip open the schism between the divergent Establishment and base factions of the party.

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who had been in second place behind Trump in national polling until recently, called the meeting a “betrayal” of voters who are demanding change. He threatened to bolt the party altogether.

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“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” Carson said in a statement released by his campaign. “If this was the beginning of a plant to subvert the will of the voters and replace it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party,” he continued.

To win the presidential nomination, a candidate must secure votes from a majority of the 2,471 delegates and win eight states.

Chris Krueger, a widely quote political analyst at Guggenheim Partners, said in a client note that a failure by Trump or any other candidate to win a majority of delegates through the nominating process is a probability.

“We continue to place a 60 percent probability that none of the 14 candidates receives a majority of the delegates by the GOP Convention in July 2016 — though we are no longer referring to this as a ‘brokered’ convention situation because we have no idea who would broker a deal (Speaker Paul Ryan is the only one who immediately comes to mind),” Krueger wrote.

Each state has its own protocol for how its delegates vote, so predicting how a potential convention floor fight might play out is virtually impossible.

Brokered conventions in the modern era are quite rare because the nominees are generally decided on well in advance through the state primaries.

Each state has its own protocol for how its delegates vote, so predicting how a potential convention floor fight might play out is virtually impossible.

“Each state has different rules. Most states have proportional rules of some kind; many have winner-take all provisions,” said Geoffrey Skelling, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Basically, you can make no blanket statements about any state.”

While some states currently are winner-take-all, most award at least some delegates to several candidates based on their vote tally. This makes it easier for candidates who lose to amass delegates anyway and have a say at the convention.

The last convention where the nomination was even in question was in 1976, when Ronald Reagan mounted an unsuccessful challenge against the Establishment-backed Gerald Ford. A candidate has not failed to earn a majority on the first ballot since 1948, when Thomas Dewey was finally nominated on the third ballot.

With outsider candidates like Trump and Ted Cruz threatening to leave the traditional nominating process in tatters, that scenario could easily repeat itself.