Winner-take-all States Have 50% of the Republican Delegates Left

Half of the Republican delegates left to be chosen are in winner-take-all (WTA) states.  There are 534 WTA delegates in 9 WTA states left.  Of the 1061 delegates left, the WTA delegates are 50.3% or half!

Of the WTA delegates, 252 are left for the end of the primary season on June 7:  California with 172; New Jersey with 51; and South Dakota with 29.  That is, 47% of the WTA will not be available until three months from now, while we wait biting our finger nails (to quote Wolf Blitzer.)

Being in California, we are somewhat happy that we finally might matter in the nominations.  Our 172 out of the remaining 534 WTA delegates are 32%, or almost a full one-third.

With New Jersey’s 51 WTA delegates, we also understand now why Chris Christie has become such a welcome friend of The Donald’s.

We note that the Republican delegates are “bound” to vote for the candidate that won them on the first ballot.  However, only 43% are bound to them after that.  The rest may vote for who they want to.  The Republican delegates are not selected by the candidate who won them.  Does this sound like another disenfranchisement of the voters that selected their candidate, going into the realm of chaos?

 

Some of the WTA states are mostly WTA in each congressional district, not like Florida and Ohio where all delegates are pooled to make the states’ popular vote determine all delegates.  To see how this matters, we take the just decided case of Missouri.  The Republican party voted that of Missouri’s 52 delegates, with Trump at 40.8% and Cruz at 40.6%, Trump has received 37 delegates, and Cruz 15.  This means that Trump won the 9 at large WTA delegates plus the 3 party delegates.  He then won 5 districts with 5 each, and Cruz won 3 districts with 5 each.  (What a great system where a 0.2% lead can give you a factor of 2.5 in delegates.  That’s a leveraging factor of over 1200.)

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
This entry was posted in 2016 Primaries, Politics and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply