Although California’s Republican primary is listed as a winner-take-all (WTA) primary, it is primarily a winner-take-district primary. The primary has 172 delegates, but only 13 are at-large WTA. California has 53 congressional districts that are each given 3 delegates for WTA in each district, contributing the other 159 delegates to the 172 total. If the liberal versus conservative areas of the state carry over into the Republican voters, the districts and delegates may make a type of proportional split in the final California delegates.
This split happened in Missouri, as related in the last post, with Trump winning 5 districts, and Cruz winning 3, and Trump having 37 delegates to Cruz’s 15, since they used 5 delegates per district. In Missouri, the popular vote ended with Trump at 40.8%, and Cruz at 40.6%, just 0.2% behind. That was a form of disenfranchisement of delegates that could also happen in California. Since Democrats have a proportional split in all their primaries, this would and will give an equal number of delegates to each in this case.
Another form of disenfranchisement is that San Francisco’s district has only 30,000 registered Republicans, and McClintock’s district has 175,000, yet they get 3 delegates each. In the Democrats’ proportional split, the statewide delegate distribution would have given the appropriate number of voters in splitting delegates.
The Republicans in California have a closed primary, meaning that only registered Republicans can vote in it. However, voters can change their registration from no preference or Democratic to Republican until May 23. The primary is on June 7.
Democrats, in the usual contrast, have an open primary, allowing no preference voters to vote as well.
