This November's election in the U.S. has the potential to be... interesting.

It's starting to look like Donald Trump may end up winning enough 2016 delegates to cinch the Republican party's nomination, sending the core of the Republican leadership into panic mode as they strategize about how to stop The Donald. They are still trying to muck up his primary juggernaut and hope they can install one of the underdogs in an open convention, but time is running out. They know that Trump at the top of the Republican ticket would speak doomsday to the down ballot senators. So the Republican leadership is drafting a doomsday plan: Run Mitt Romney or one of the other GOP candidates as a 3rd party.

Adam Phillips at HuffPo played out an all too likely scenario in which a third party ticket would take enough votes from Trump to thwart him from winning the election, with the possibility that between the two of them they might get the 270-plus electors needed to also deny Hillary Clinton the win.

Taking up where Phillips left off, you can see the crux of the 2016 election becomes whether Clinton will or won't achieve the 270 Democratic electors that the party has come to rely on. Would Clinton become stronger or weaker against two opponents? There's no reason to believe the left of center vote would be any lesser for her than if she only faced one opponent, and splitting the right wing vote in half only increases candidate Clinton's chances of winning in a state. But you never know. Moderates and Independents comprise 30% of the electorate and they might decide that whoever the Republicans put up represents the moderate center. Could a Romney/Kasich ticket take Ohio, Wisconsin or Michigan?

Even if Romney only took a handful of states - or even just one - and runs 3rd to Trump and Clinton or vice versa, the election would be decided by 50 delegations of the U.S. House of Representatives. The makeup of the 114th Congress in the House consists of 33 state delegations with a majority of Republican Congressman, 14 states with a majority of Democratic Congressmen, and 3 states with evenly split delegations (Maine, New Hampshire and New Jersey).

The most likely outcome of the House delegations voting via the 12th Amendment would be a President Mitt Romney. Let that sink in. President Mitt Romney. The guy whose Bain Capital private equity firm structured Clear Channel / iHeart Radio debt Mitt Romney.

But remember that the House will only be allowed to vote for the top three finishes in the November election. If there was a fourth candidate, perhaps a Democratic Socialist on the ballot, the Republican plan to install Mitt Romney goes awry. An election pitting Sanders-Clinton-Trump-Romney against each other would thwart the establishment Republican plot because Romney would come in fourth among the four. The "blue states" would experience a redux of the 2016 primary, and many of the reliably blue states have chosen Sanders as their favorite among the Democrats. Sanders would probably take a majority of them, with California, Ohio, and New York falling to Clinton.

Without Romney in the top three, the House would have to choose between Trump, Clinton, or Sanders. It seems extremely unlikely that Congress' Republican leadership would vote for Trump after the lengths they went through to stop him. I think it's a given that at this point Trump will have been stopped. So between Clinton and Sanders they each have a 50-50 chance. Will the GOP led House decide that an establishment Democrat is better than an end-the-establishment Democratic Socialist? Or will they spurn Hillary as they are wont to do and take the only choice left to them, Bernie Sanders?

Bernie currently has no plans to run as a 3rd party candidate should he fail to secure the Democratic nomination. As far as I know, he will endorse Clinton if she is the nominee, to do otherwise would surely adopt the role of 'spoiler', blocking her from a clear win in November. Current polls matching up Hillary against Trump indicate that she is likely to win the November election. But there have been no polls as yet that pit her against both Trump and Romney. Is it possible that Romney could steal votes away from the Democrat to prevent her from winning the election outright, and force the election to the Congress? If Hillary wins just 269 electors and Romney and Trump split the remaining 271, Clinton will not become the next president. In this storyline Bernie as the fourth candidate becomes the savior, not the spoiler, bumping Romney down to the fourth place and removing him as a choice for the U.S. House who then has no choice but to elect President Bernie Sanders.