If Rush Limbaugh and company are upset at the prospect of John McCain as the Republican standard-bearer, perhaps they should take their wrath out on the folks who set the delegate selection rules for the party.
One of our readers, Katie, has done us the favor of going through the Republican contests held so far and determining that if the GOP allocated delegates proportionally, like the Democrats, Romney would be leading McCain by about 50 delegates at this point. (You'll have to ask Katie for the math--we trust her.)
(Another way to look at it--again, hattip to Katie--is that McCain has won 12 states; Romney has won 11 states, and Huckabee has won 6 states. Hardly a rousing endorsement for McCain--but a tribute to good strategery.)
Instead, if you look at various websites that track delegates (and which don't agree with each other, but are close enough for our purposes) you see that McCain has about a 400 delegate lead. It appears, from a quick analysis, that Romney has more popular votes in the Republican contests than McCain--in part because he has competed everywhere, whereas cash-poor McCain has not.
It is certainly the case that Romney and Huckabee together have far more votes than McCain, yet McCain has at least 200 more delegates than the others combined.
The reason for this, of course, is the "winner-take-all" primaries, where McCain has cleaned up. Now don't get us wrong--there is some merit to a winner-take-all approach--after all, that's how the electoral college system works. Indeed, in our view, the Democrats may have gone too far down the road to proportionality--it's looking very doubtful now that either Hillary or Obama will have enough delegates without resorting to the uncommitted superdelegates.
But here's where the GOP system really breaks down: when they allow a candidate with a plurality of the vote to get all the delegates in a state. Consider this: in Missouri, 67% of Republican voters in yesterday's primary--fully two-thirds--voted for someone other than McCain. Hardly a rousing endorsement for a "front-runner." Yet, by beating Huckabee by 9000 votes--just 1%--McCain received all 58 of Missouri's delegates. Missouri Republicans might want to think about whether that's really what they intended!
McCain likewise benefitted from such rules in Florida, where 64% of Republicans voted against him, but he won all 57 delegates. (Meanwhile, poor Mitt Romney, who won Massachusetts with 51% of the vote, saw McCain garner 18 delegates in the Bay State, compared to just 22 for the Mittster, due to proportional selection rules there.)
A couple of interesting issues are at work here: in a two-candidate race, completely proportional representation draws the fight out far longer than it should be; by the same token, in a multi-candidate free-for-all, like the GOP has had, winner-take-all can greatly skew the results.
Now, is McCain's lead as big as it looks? No, but it's still pretty big. Because McCain has won a bunch of winner-take-all primaries, it is easier to count up all his delegates now. But there are nearly 200 delegates from states that have ALREADY VOTED that have not yet been allocated. The bulk of THOSE delegates will be going to Romney and Huckabee.
The main reason for this is that caucus states allocate their delegates over a period of time, culminating in the state convention. Romney and Huckabee have won most of the caucus states, so they have quite a few delegates-in-waiting that aren't yet reflected in the totals you see on various websites.
Here's what we have so far--we're using delegate totals from RealClearPolitics.com for our purposes here:
The following states have allocated all of their delegates, so have no more to hand out to anyone:
New Hampshire, Michigan, SC, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Missouri, Arizona, Utah, Delaware, Montana.
The following states still have delegates to allocate:
Iowa--37/40 delegates allocated. The other 3 should go to Huckabee, maybe one to Romney.
Wyoming--8/14 delegates allocated. Romney should get the other 6.
Nevada--27/34 allocated. Romney should get most of the remaining 7.
Maine--18/21 allocated. Romney should get the remaining 3.
California--137/173 allocated. McCain/Romney will get what's left. (California is a good example of the difference with proportional allocation. On the Dem side, Hillary won by 10 percentage points, getting 202 delegates, but Obama got 163; on the GOP side, McCain won by only 8 points, but got 134 delegates to Romney's 3, so far.)
Alabama--36/48 allocated. Huckabee should get most of what's left.
Colorado--22/46 allocated. Romney should get most of what's left.
Massachusetts--40/43 allocated. Romney should get the other 3.
Minnesota--27/41 allocated. Romney should get the rest.
Oklahoma--38/41 allocated. McCain should get the other 3.
Georgia--48/72 allocated. Huckabee should get most of the rest.
Illinois--56/70 allocated. McCain should get most of the rest.
Tennessee--44/55 allocated. Huckabee should get most of the rest, some for McCain.
Arkansas--28/44 allocated. Huckabee should get the rest.
Connecticut--27/30 allocated. McCain gets the rest.
West Virginia--18/30 allocated. Huckabee should get the rest.
Alaska--26/29 allocated. Romney has advantage for the rest.
North Dakota--23/26 allocated. Romney has advantage for the rest.
Totals: 188 delegates unallocated. Of those, roughly 50 will go to McCain, and 70 to each of Romney and Huckabee.
The rest of the election calendar, however, favors McCain--most remaining states have primaries, instead of caucuses (which tend to favor Romney). However, the next round, this Saturday, is caucuses in Kansas and Washington, along with a beauty contest primary in Louisiana. Romney could win all three, which would give him some much needed free publicity before a spate of primaries in coming weeks.
McCain remains the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. Will it be McCain-Huckabee? We sure wouldn't rule it out. (Or maybe McCain-Thompson--the pace of the Veep's duties seems suited to Big John. He could probably still do his television gig between state funerals.)
3 comments:
do wish to reconsider now that Romney looked at the board and decided to take his ball and go home?
I love all the math and statistics! I have a question that deals with the math on the Democrat side.
Back in Nevada, Bill Clinton was complaining that the at-large caucus sites favored those voters by 5 to 1 in determining the state winner (where Obama was thought to win due to his Culinary Union Endorsement), and Clinton supporters tried to stop those at-large caucus sites with a lawsuit. Yet, in the end Clinton won most of those caucus sites. Now the math question that I haven't seen addressed: Has anyone determined if there actually was an advantage to those voting in the at-large caucus sites? And, if so, how much did that actually help Hillary?
Andy--
Sorry for the late response. We tried to figure that one out, but it's beyond us. Part of the problem is comparing the number who voted in at-large sites versus other sites--if a lot voted in at-large sites relative to other sites, they should have more weight. We doubt it mattered too much in the end, although Hillary's complaint was clearly lame.
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