WASHINGTON With Donald Trump leading a splintered field, top Republican Party officials are keeping open the possibility that the fight to be the party's presidential candidate could stretch to the nominating convention in July, officials said on Thursday. 
 
 A so-called "brokered convention," in which no single candidate has a sufficient number of nominating delegates to become the presidential nominee in the November election, used to be a common feature of American politics. But there has not been one in more than 60 years. 
 
 The possibility that the Republican battle for a nominee will extend to the July 18-21 convention in Cleveland was discussed at a dinner on Monday of top party operatives hosted by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. 
 
 Three party officials said Priebus was asked at the dinner if the party was prepared for a brokered convention, and Priebus said he was. For Priebus, the subject comes up frequently in conversations, the officials said. 
 
 Trump's rise to the top of the 14-candidate field has confounded establishment Republicans who have been waiting in vain for the New York billionaire's insurgent campaign to collapse. 
 
 They are alarmed at some of his incendiary rhetoric and proposals, such as his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. 
 
 Various scenarios could play out in coming months with the battle evolving into a contest between two or three candidates, with none of them able to gain enough delegates. 
 
 One official at the dinner meeting said the discussion of a brokered convention only came up briefly and that it was not about Trump. 
 
 "It was more logistical in nature, not strategic. It was more like 'are you planning for a hurricane?'" said the official. 
 
 Republican National Committee (RNC) senior adviser Sean Spicer, asked for comment, said the RNC is neutral in the process. 
 
 "Our goal is to ensure a successful nomination and that requires us thinking through every scenario, including a contested convention," he said. 
 
 (Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Jonathan Oatis) ||||| (CNN) So much for a historic convention floor fight in Cleveland this summer. 
 
 The prospect of a contested Republican convention captivated party officials, political junkies and the media for months -- sending everyone to the rulebooks for a refresher on how the nomination process works. 
 
 That's all a pipe dream now. 
 
 Donald Trump emerged Tuesday as the GOP's presumptive 2016 nominee following a commanding win in Indiana and Ted Cruz's decision to drop out of the race . Trump said he spoke with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus Tuesday night. And the chairman, who has had a contentious relationship with Trump, made clear the real estate mogul would be at the top of the ticket in November. 
 
 "@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee," Priebus tweeted. "We all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton" 
 
 .@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton — Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 4, 2016 
 
 A key strategy of the anti-Trump forces centered on keeping Trump from reaching a majority of delegates. The assumption was that a rival campaign's superior ground game would easily defeat Trump on the convention floor once many delegates were no longer bound by popular votes in their states. 
 
 The architects of this strategy seemed incredibly confident just last month. 
 
 "GOP voters in Wisconsin rejected Donald Trump just like the entire Republican base will do in Cleveland this summer," said Katie Packer of the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC just a month ago, after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz defeated Trump in Wisconsin. "The Republican presidential nomination process now moves to an open convention." 
 
 And few weeks ago, Cruz himself was confident that Trump would not reach the delegate threshold, calling his victory in Wisconsin "the nail in the coffin." 
 
 "We are headed to a contested convention. At this point, nobody is getting 1,237," Cruz told a Philadelphia radio host on April 20. "Donald is going to talk all the time about other folks not getting to 1,237. He's not getting there, either." 
 
 But after the results were in Tuesday night, the tone from Trump's opposition changed. 
 
 Trump's big win forced Cruz to admit that his own path to the nomination "has been foreclosed." 
 
 "In view of tonight's events, it's obviously significantly harder to see how Donald Trump does not become the GOP nominee," said Liz Mair, who co-founded an anti-Trump PAC called Make America Awesome. "For too many Americans, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump feels like a choice between being shot in the head, and being shot in the head, with perhaps the only 'third way' being a vote for the Libertarian Party candidate or a write-in, just to ease the conscience. In any event, I expect the onslaught from the Democratic Party to be imminent, brutal, and devastating." 
 
 Packer, meanwhile, pledged to keep working against Trump, expressing hope that in the month before the June 7 primary in California, he might "disqualify himself in the eyes of voters." 
 
 Unable to best Trump in the popular vote in most states, Cruz's campaign dedicated significant resources to mastering the party's complicated delegate selection process, going meticulously state-by-state to peel delegates from Trump's grasp. Cruz was especially successful last month in Colorado, where strong organization overtook Trump to claim 13 delegates. 
 
 The effort was, in fact, so successful in many states that Trump and his campaign lashed out at the Republican Party, accusing the primary system of being "rigged" and "unfair." 
 
 Party officials responded by saying that Cruz was merely doing a better job of securing delegates through rules that had been public for months. 
 
 Despite Cruz's successes with delegates later in the primary process, Trump's consistent victories with voters made it increasingly difficult to catch up with him in the delegate count. 
 
 Cruz's exit from the race leaves only Ohio Gov. John Kasich to face Trump in future contests, a candidate who has only defeated Trump in a single state: His own.
– Republican strategists who had spoken of a smooth nomination process just a few months ago are now braced for a battle royal at the Quicken Loans Arena. Insiders tell the Washington Post that GOP bigwigs gathered Monday and discussed the possibility of a brokered convention in Cleveland in July. The party hasn't entered a convention without a clear nominee since 1976, when Gerald Ford narrowly defeated conservative insurgent Ronald Reagan on the first ballot. The Post's sources say the GOP leaders discussed strategies in case there is no clear nominee this time around and no winner on the first ballot, allowing delegates to shift allegiances in what Reuters reports would be the first brokered GOP convention since Thomas Dewey was nominated in 1948. A source tells the Post that some GOP strategists argued for a strategy to make sure there was a clear alternative to Donald Trump in the event of a brokered convention, though another official present at the meeting tells Reuters that Trump wasn't the focus of the discussion. "It was more logistical in nature, not strategic," he says. "It was more like 'are you planning for a hurricane?'" A former Mitt Romney adviser agrees that with the field still crowded, talk of a brokered convention goes beyond Trump. "What you're seeing is the party bracing for a potential Hunger Games scenario where you have a different person win each of the first four primaries and they all have the resources to slug it out until the convention," he tells the Post.