Just an FYI: I’ve updated the Poor Man’s Stop-Trump Delegate Tracker following the anti-Trump triumph in Wisconsin on Tuesday.
In my recent piece on convention delegates, I speculated that, in the scrum to win the loyalty of as many delegates as possible, Ted Cruz would have the edge. Cruz has a strong organization, has been gearing up for precisely this fight for over a year, and his base is both a lot larger than Kasich’s base and a lot more active within the GOP than Trump’s. This might allow Cruz to secure the loyalty of delegates bound to him, as well as capture the loyalty of delegates bound to others.
Early indicators suggest this might be right.
A story from Politico yesterday discusses South Dakota’s delegation, which Cruz apparently dominates. But this is not too surprising, because South Dakota is prime Cruz Country: a Midwestern conservative plains state with an especially arcane delegate election method (delegates are chosen in convention before the primary on June 7th). I would be surprised if Cruz did not win the state outright, ending up with 29 bound delegates who are also totally loyal to him.
I have a lot of friends who are asking a lot of questions about brokered conventions these days. In this series, Conventional Chaos, I’ll be explaining how a Republican party convention works… and why 2016’s convention could be very different from the dull pageants we’ve seen since the 1970s. In Part 2, we’ll take a close look at the delegates — and why the official delegate count tells you less than you think. If you’re just joining us, start with a basic overview of the convention process in Part 1.
So there will be 2,427 delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But who are they? What will they do? What can they do?
Bound or Unbound?
As we discussed in our last post, most Republican delegates are bound, which means they are required to vote for a specific candidate at the convention, regardless of their personal feelings, at least up to a certain point. Some Republican delegates are unbound,* which means they can vote for whichever candidate they prefer, at any time. There will be approximately 170 officially unbound delegates at the convention (from Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, and several U.S. territorial possessions like Guam), plus 60-90** bound delegates who became unbound when their candidates dropped out. (Only a few states allow this.)
This means the convention will have around 230 unbound delegates and 2,242 bound delegates. (1,237 delegates is enough to form a majority.)
Who Will The Bound Delegates Be Bound To?†
The binding of the delegates is the great question of the primaries, to which the Associated Press and the Election Wizards devote nearly all their energies, and the primaries aren’t over yet. As of today, 754 are bound to Donald Trump, 465 to Ted Cruz, 112 remain bound to Marco Rubio, 144 to John Kasich, 111 are unbound, and 10 remain bound to other minor candidates (Bush, Carson, Fiorina, and Paul).
By the time the convention rolls around, there are four likely scenarios. Bear these four scenarios in mind, because we’ll be coming back to them in future posts. The first three scenarios are (more or less) taken from FiveThirtyEight; the last is based on Kasich dropping out.
According to exit polls, if John Kasich dropped out of the presidential race, 45% of his voters would stay home. 37% would vote for Ted Cruz. 18% would vote for Donald Trump.
These are the numbers FiveThirtyEight computed last week, which I then used after the March 8th primaries, and which were confirmed, broadly speaking, by exit polls after the March 15th primaries. Today, I am using them once again. After all, it is now mathematically impossible for Kasich to actually win the nomination during the primary season, and, thanks to Rule 40(b) of the Republican Party (which I’ll be discussing a lot more in the upcoming parts of Conventional Chaos), it is almost impossible to foresee him even winning enough states to have his name entered into nomination, and even less possible to foresee the convention changing Rule 40(b) to help out Kasich, given that the convention will almost certainly be controlled by a mix of Cruz and Trump supporters, both of whom want Kasich out. By any rational measurement, Speaker Paul Ryan has a better chance at the GOP nomination than John Kasich.
So the only effect of continuing the Kasich campaign — and Kasich surely knows this — is to take votes away from Ted Cruz, allowing Donald Trump to win an outright majority of delegates and win the presidential nomination. (In fact, because staying in reduces the chance of a brokered convention, Kasich has a better shot at the presidency if he drops out!) One wonders: is Kasich simply so overconfident about his appeal to the Northeast that he actually believes he can win, or is he deliberately helping Donald Trump in the hopes of winning the vice-presidential slot on a Trump ticket?
For now, that’s not a question we can answer. Here’s one we can, though: exactly how much Kasich is helping Trump? We’ll go through the March 15th states one by one and see how many delegates were lost to Trump because of Gov. Kasich. (We’ll do the same for Marco Rubio, simply for transparency, though Rubio has since done the honorable thing and dropped out.)
| MISSOURI | Actual Result | w/o Rubio | Cruz Alone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trump | 37 | 20 | 0 |
| Cruz | 15 | 32 | 52 |
| Kasich | 0 | 0 | – |
| Rubio | 0 | – | – |
| Trump Margin | +22 | -12 | -52 |
In Missouri, Kasich blocked Cruz not just from winning, but from climbing over the 50% threshold, which would have activated a winner-take-all clause that would have handed Cruz all 52 of Missouri’s delegates. Instead, Trump walked home with the majority of those delegates… despite winning by only 0.2%.
Mr. Tim Alberta, a generally commendable fellow whose columns I typically enjoy, has a piece up at National Review today arguing that, if Donald Trump wins both Ohio and Florida tomorrow, it will be “nearly impossible” for his only viable competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz, to deny Mr. Trump the 1,237 delegates Mr. Trump needs to win the nomination.
This is the same conventional wisdom I have railed against time and time and time again in recent weeks, and, normally, I would let this one pass, but Alberta (unlike most pundits panicking about March 15th), has actually done some delegate math, which he lays out in his article. This lends his piece the appearance of mathematical rigor.
However, while Mr. Alberta is to be commended for going through the actual delegate math, as so many other pundits have failed to do, his ultimate conclusions are based on grossly inaccurate assumptions about how Sen. Cruz would perform in head-to-head races against Mr. Trump. These assumptions defy all available polling data, and lead Mr. Alberta to believe that Cruz would lose most contests with Trump in a head-to-head race. Yes, it is obviously true, as Mr. Alberta contends, that, if a candidate loses most of the head-to-head races, he is not going to win a primary season — nor would he deserve to, since that would prove him to be the less popular candidate. But there is no good reason to be so terribly pessimistic about Cruz’s chances in head-to-head races with Trump. On the contrary, Cruz is likely to win most races (and most delegates) once his rivals (Sen. Rubio and Sen. Kasich) have been eliminated from the race.
We can see this from the exit polling data in Michigan and Mississippi, in two ways:
(1) The obvious way: in Michigan, a demographically middling blueish-purple state where Trump won by 12 points (36% – 24%), polling shows that Trump would lose to Cruz in a head-to-head contest by 13 points (54% – 41%). That’s not even close, and shows, in effect, a 25-point swing in Cruz’s favor if Rubio and Kasich drop out of the race. Trump currently leads almost everywhere, but nowhere does he lead by more than 15 points. It would be a Trump-loving state indeed where Cruz would even be capable of losing with that kind of national lead on Trump.
(2) The precise way: FiveThirtyEight combined exit polls from Michigan and Missouri to determine exactly how Rubio and Kasich’s voters would behave if both dropped out, making the primary a head-to-head between Cruz and Trump. They determined that 25% of Rubio’s voters would stay home, 60% would vote for Cruz, and 15% for Trump. 45% of Kasich’s voters would stay home, 37% would vote for Cruz, and 18% for Trump. (You may recognize these numbers from the recent De Civ post, “How Much is Rubio Helping Trump?“.)
We can take these numbers and compute likely results in various states. For example, FiveThirtyEight’s current weighted polling average in Wisconsin (which Mr. Alberta calls “prime terrain” for Trump) shows Mr. Trump with 30% of the vote, Rubio with 20%, Cruz with 19%, and Kasich with 8%. (23% are either undecided or support candidates who have now dropped out.) If Rubio and Kasich then drop out, according to the Michigan exit polls, Trump ends up with 37% of the remaining vote, and Cruz gets 38% — Cruz wins Wisconsin. That’s without counting the undecideds, who typically favor the non-Trump candidate (which is why Trump keeps underperforming his final poll numbers, even in states where he wins). “Prime terrain” for Trump? With respect, Mr. Alberta, the data do not support you.
This is broadly supported at the national level, as well, for those who go in for national polls. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which pushed undecideds toward one candidate or another and sampled only likely voters, had Trump at 30%, Cruz at 27%, Rubio at 20%, and Kasich at 22%. Redistribute those votes as above, and Cruz has a 54% – 46% lead over Mr. Trump.
So let’s dispel once and for all with this myth that Trump is a national leader if Rubio and Kasich drop out. On the contrary, Rubio and Kasich dropping out makes Cruz the national leader — and is the only plausible path to making anyone but Trump the national leader. What about Alberta’s claim that the individual states coming up tend to favor Trump?
For the most part, Alberta’s claims here are based simply on wild assumptions. Trump would be “heavily favored” to win in Arizona because “the Republican base is highly animated by immigration and border security.” (The state that keeps re-electing pro-amnesty Sen. John McCain? Seriously?) This defies Cruz’s regional performance in most Western states so far, and ignores the polling data, which shows a close race once Rubio and Kasich are out (though Cruz’s win would still depend on get-out-the-vote efforts and undecideds in the state’s closed primary). New York’s closed primary “could actually help Trump,” even though Trump has consistently and dramatically undershot his final poll numbers in closed primaries so far, because “Democrats in his home state won’t be able to show up and vote against him.” (The white working-class Democrats of upstate New York represent one of Mr. Trump’s strongest potential voter areas, so locking them out could not be better news for Mr. Cruz.)
Nebraska, says Mr. Alberta, “could be a tossup,” for no particular reason, which is pretty shocking given that Cruz has beaten and usually dominated Trump in every nearby state that has voted so far (Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Idaho). In California, “Trump could could be expected to win more than half, and probably closer to two-thirds” of congressional districts, because… actually, Mr. Alberta doesn’t give a reason. Again, though, his conclusion stands in stark defiance of the only available polling data, a January 2016 Field Poll which showed Cruz leading Trump even before Cruz’s polling surge and before the field began to consolidate. The Field Poll is extremely bearish on Trump’s chances in California for a wide variety of reasons, all of them still applicable today.
There are only two areas where I agree with Mr. Alberta’s analysis: Cruz is likely to do relatively poorly in the Northeast, where Trump has done very well so far (which tells you most everything you need to know about why the Republican party in the Northeast has failed), so his projection of “at least 100 delegates” on April 26th seems about right to me. Also, Cruz may split the vote with Trump in the Pacific Northwest, where there is precious little polling data so far and demographics do not clearly favor either candidate (Cruz’s libertarian streak likely favors him there, while his evangelical streak hurts him. Trump is likely the opposite.)
Everywhere else, Mr. Alberta does good delegate math, but based on extremely pessimistic assumptions about Cruz’s performance head-to-head with Trump. This leads him to conclude, in error, that Trump is highly likely to win the race if Trump wins both Ohio and Florida. (Since there is no path plausible to stopping Trump with Kasich and Rubio in the race — at least, none I’m aware of — Mr. Alberta appears to concede the entire nomination to Trump through his aggressive naysaying on Cruz.) His analysis is inaccurate, and should be disregarded in toto.
In reality, there is a good case to be made that the optimal strategy for stopping Trump involves Trump winning both Ohio and Florida, which would force the field to consolidate around Cruz. Nate Silver thinks that’s plausibly the best anti-Trump strategy (a “close call”), and I believe it outright. The much bigger risk is posed by the possibility that Rubio and/or Kasich will cling to their doomed candidacies a second past March 16th, which would give Trump every opportunity to sweep across the remaining backloaded winner-take-all and winner-take-most states to win the nomination. The faster the field consolidates, the clearer the path to stopping Trump.
Skip To: May 3 | April 26 | April 19 | April 6 | March 22 | March 15 | March 12 | March 8 | March 6 | March 1
A few weeks ago, I wrote a fairly popular post, “Trump’s Delegate Lead Is Overstated.” The post is as true now as it was then; political insiders continue to make poor predictions about the race, because they are not willing to learn the intricate delegate rules that govern it. (To be fair, who but a nerd like me would want to figure out, for example, what Illinois’s “loophole” primary is and how it differs from Pennsylvania’s loophole primary?) So people keep saying that Trump is doing much better than he, in fact, is. Trump is doing well and must be considered the frontrunner, but he is by no means the prohibitive leader, and his nomination is only inevitable if the party decides to accept it as inevitable. (This won’t change until — at the earliest — April 26th, when much of the Northeast votes.)
Based on these poor predictions, pundits and even some Republican political figures are making all sorts of bad strategic decisions. For example, the widespread but false belief that Trump is guaranteed to win the nomination if he wins Florida and/or Ohio has led the Republican establishment to keep Rubio and Kasich in the race in an unlikely effort to deny Trump delegates in both states. (Sean Davis dismantles this strategy in a recent piece at The Federalist.) On the contrary, the optimal strategy for stopping Trump is to rapidly consolidate the field behind a single candidate who can defeat Trump head-to-head. Three weeks ago, I believed that candidate would be Sen. Marco Rubio, a man I greatly admire. However, intervening votes have proved me wrong: mathematically, the only plausible non-Trump competitor is now Sen. Ted Cruz. The longer Rubio and Gov. Kasich stay in the race, the more likely Trump wins the nomination instead. This is but one example of incorrect party strategy based on unrealistically gloomy assessments of Trump’s current situation.
This post is De Civitate‘s poor-man’s delegate tracker, designed to counter those assessments. It will be updated after each primary election, so bookmark it and stay tuned. This delegate tracker doesn’t have any of Politico‘s fancy-pants graphics or FiveThirtyEight‘s sophisticated demographic projections or The Green Papers’ astonishing depth and update speed. But De Civ will tell you two things nobody else can:
If you are cheering against Trump, you want to see the “Progress to Brokered Convention” stat reach 100%. Once that happens, the worst that could happen is a brokered convention where Trump is unlikely to win. (It might still be possible for another candidate to clinch instead, though this becomes more difficult every day.) On the other hand, if Trump reaches 100% on “Progress to Trump Clinch,” then it’s all over, and Trump wins.
This tracker is not pretty, but, if you ever need reassurance that the mainstream media is overstating Trump’s lead (still), come here for a breath of fresh air and a little sigh of relief. If De Civitate is panicking, then it’s time to panic… and not before. We — unlike, say, Ben Ginsberg* — have done the math.
UPDATE: Infographic now in HD high-definition. Our thanks to the artist, Mike Dupuis, for sending us the high-resolution file.
In my last post, I predicted that Rubio’s continued presence in the race is not worth it, even in the extremely unlikely event that he wins his home state of Florida, because Rubio’s running diverts votes from actually viable candidates… all to Donald Trump’s advantage.
Unfortunately, on Tuesday March 8th, I was proven correct. Rubio only won a single delegate, but at the same time Rubio gave Donald Trump more than a dozen. Let’s break it down. We’ll use the same assumptions as FiveThirtyEight, based on the Tuesday exit polls: if Rubio left the race, 25% of his voters stay home, 20% of the remainder go to Trump, and 80% to Cruz (split with Kasich if Kasich stays in).
We’ll do the same for Kasich, while we’re at it: according to the exit poll, if he left the race, 45% stay home, 66% go to Cruz (split with Rubio if Rubio stays in) and the remaining third go to Trump.
Fortunately, Tuesday’s races were pretty simple, with some nicely uniform vote distributions and few weird Congressional district rules. The results:
| MICHIGAN | Actual Result | w/o Rubio | w/o Kasich | Cruz Alone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trump | 25 | 24 | 34 | 31 |
| Cruz | 17 | 18 | 25 | 28 |
| Kasich | 17 | 17 | – | – |
| Rubio | 0 | – | 0 | – |
| Trump Margin | +8 | +6 | +9 | +3 |
I love Marco Rubio. I haven’t talked about him too much here on the blog, because I haven’t had much to say about him that hasn’t been said better by others elsewhere. But I think he’s a great American, an inspiring leader, and an all-around decent guy. I will always be grateful to him for giving the best debate answer in history — a politically risky defense of human life in the heart of hostile New Hampshire, even as his so-called “Catholic” opponents, Christie and Bush, attacked him for daring to stand up for the most innocent, most defenseless people in our society. I wrote a stirring pro-Rubio speech for the Minnesota caucuses last week, and was very proud to live in the first (and, so far, only) state to deliver Rubio a victory.* Somehow, he has been tarred with the brush of “Establishment” over a single mistake he made over an immigration bill several years ago; I know that this is not the case, and that Rubio is one of our finest conservative rebels. (I mean, c’mon, guys, the Conservative Review, no friend of Rubio’s, still admits that he’s the 7th-most-conservative guy in the Senate!)
I have a lot of friends who are asking a lot of questions about brokered conventions these days. In this series, Conventional Chaos, I’ll be explaining how a Republican party convention works… and why 2016’s convention could be very different from the dull pageants we’ve seen since the 1970s. In Part 1, we’ll go over the basics.
In this post, we’re going to explain how Republicans pick a president. But first, we need to explain the old process, because the modern process seems completely insane, wasteful, and incomprehensible… until you know where it came from. So, here is how Republican presidential nominees were picked from the party’s founding in 1856 until the liberal-progressive reforms of 1972:
First, you got together with your neighbors of the same political party in a gathering called a “caucus.” At the caucus, you would help elect a few of your wisest, most charismatic, most trustworthy neighbors as state delegates. Those delegates would then be sent to the state convention, where state delegates from all over the state would gather, each representing the Republicans of their own towns and districts.*
On Super Tuesday (1 March 2016, for those of you reading this on a Multivac archive in the far future), Minnesota went to the caucuses.
For those of you who aren’t from caucus states, let me explain them quickly: caucuses are a wonderful system where all members of the local party come together to discuss the issues of the day, conduct the business of the party, and select our wisest and most enthusiastic members to represent our precincts as officers and delegates for the district party (and, ultimately, the state party and the national party as well). It’s a bit more work than pulling a lever in an anonymous box, and there’s a lot more opportunity for chaos (since they are run by party volunteers, not by the government), but caucuses are an American tradition, dating back to the Jacksonian Era, that ensures the whole party speaks for the People… without handing over the reins to the mob. (Primaries are prone to errors on both sides of that ellipsis. And they’re more vulnerable to the influence of big money. And… well, this isn’t a post about why you should ask your primary state to switch to a caucus. But that may be a future post! So look out!)
One point of caucuses that makes them different from primaries is that, in a caucus, you have the chance to debate the candidates with your neighbors before voting on them. This year, I wrote a speech about the grave threat posed by Mr. Donald Trump. I expected to give my speech to the voters in my precinct (about 15 people in a normal presidential year) and that would be that. These are the remarks I prepared. (This was going to be the whole blog post, but there’s a twist! So stay tuned after the speech.)