There are three ways that Donald Trump still could be denied the Republican nomination.

He could lose the delegate lead: Trump is ahead of Senator Ted Cruz by a little less than 300 delegates. That’s a large advantage, but there are still more than 800 bound delegates remaining to be selected, almost all of them in winner-take-all or winner-take-most states. There isn't enough polling data to indicate what’s going to happen in most of these.

And that delegate lead is a little shakier than it might seem. About 200 delegates are either uncommitted or allocated to candidates who have dropped out of the race. Most of them are free to choose, and there’s reason to believe that most won’t support Trump. Once they declare, Trump's margin could narrow.

There’s an interactive effect, too. If Trump is winning, the free-to-choose delegates will tend to either support him or remain undeclared. If Cruz (or even Governor John Kasich) starts winning, they’ll move in that direction.

If Trump does lose the delegate lead before the convention, it’s extremely unlikely that he could recover to win the nomination.

He could retain the delegate lead, but fail to reach the 1,237 needed to clinch the nomination. If Trump doesn’t win any of the uncommitted or unbound delegates, he needs to win about 60 percent of the remaining bound delegates to get over the top. He’s on pace to fall short by just a few delegates, according to several close observers.

If Trump can’t quite reach 1,237 after the July 7 primaries, he will try to get them during the pre-convention period, the six weeks between the final primaries and the convention.

Party actors who have opposed Trump throughout the primaries will be important players in that scenario. They might fight on, risking a very messy or even downright ugly convention. If most party actors accept Trump as the nominee, it’s likely—though hardly certain—that enough delegates will follow that Trump will get over the hump.

The key questions for party actors at this point are simple: How far from 1,237 Trump remains; what public opinion polls say about both the nomination and the general election; and the extent to which Trump has either reconciled with the party or failed to do so. They might also pay attention to polling on voter preferences about procedure—the new Bloomberg Politics poll has voters preferring the plurality candidate from the primaries over delegates acting on their own—but voters are unlikely to have strong views about procedure, at least if they wind up with a candidate they can support.

He could hit 1,237 and still lose at the convention. It’s not necessarily over even if he appears to have won, though many Republican party actors have signaled that they would consider Trump the legitimate winner if he hit that milestone. That’s because when it comes to the convention, the real players are the delegates and the candidates.

The problem for Trump will be that some of his delegates might be disloyal. That’s because Republican delegate allocation—which candidate gets the votes—is determined in many states separately from delegate selection—choosing the actual people who will make up the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

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