Apportioning Republican Primary District Delegates
While we have discussed in detail how Democratic congressional district delegates are apportioned, we have not yet done so for Republican district delegates. The number of Democratic district delegates are assigned according to the number or proportion of Democratic voters in the district. I have seen numbers ranging from 1 to 10. The most common are 5, 6, or 7. Republicans, on the other hand, seem to be more democratic, assigning 3 delegates to each congressional district. The Democratic Party version seems more designed to win elections, in selecting a nominee and issues that are more attuned to winning or pleasing Democratic voters. The Republican Party version gives the same number of delegates to even heavily Democratic districts, whose votes they are unlikely to win. Let’s take the case of New York, where CD27 had the largest Republican vote of 76,126, and CD15 had 1,223 votes, giving a ratio of 62 to 1. Again, both districts got 3 delegates.
The Republicans have mainly three types of statewide delegate selection methods, which we cover individually below.
Winner Take All Primaries: Here, the plurality leader in each district takes all 3 votes in each district inwhich they have the plurality. The statewide plurality leader takes all of the state’s at large delegates. Let’s look at the question of disenfranchisement in cases of different leading candidates. If there are three leading candidates that are fairly close, if the plurality goes to the leader which may only have above 34% of the vote, the leader gets all 3 or 100% of the districts delegates. That is a multiplicative factor of 3 over the actual percentage of the vote that the leader got. Also, 2/3 of the district’s voters who voted for someone else, have now been disenfranchised. If there are two main candidates, getting say 51% versus 49% of the votes, the 51% leader gets 100% of the 3 delegates, which is a magnifying factor of 2. 49% of the voters in the district have now been disenfranchised. While the Republicans look to be more democratic by assigning the same number of 3 to each district, the use of a large number of Winner Take All primaries actually disenfranchises voters by larger factors than the Democrats’ Proportional primaries.
Winner Take Most Primaries: In these primaries, if the district leader has more than 50% of the vote, then they take all 3 delegates. Again, if they just squeeze by with 51%, then the other 49% are disenfranchised. Again, the delegate count is 2 times the vote count. To get any delegates, a candidate must get more than a minimum percentage, which is often 20% or 15%. If the district leader has less than 50%, the leader gets 2 delegates and the second place candidate gets 1 delegate, if they have more than the minimum. In New York’s CD12, Kasich got 43.743%, and Trump got 43.117%, a difference of 112 votes. This is where Kasich got 2 of his 6 New York votes, and Trump got 1 from the district.
Proportional Primaries: Now, the three delegates are distributed proportional to the vote for all candidates above the 15% or 20% or other minimum. The sum of the sub minimum candidates is deducted from number or percentage of the votes. The remaining votes or percentage is then called 100% and split up again. The method is to multiply the percentage by 3 delegates, and then round to the nearest whole number. Say there are two candidates left in this group, and one gets just above 50%. Multiplying by 3 gives slightly larger than 1.5, which rounds off to 2. That candidate would get 2 delegates, and the other gets 1, since you cannot do the Solomonesque judgement of splitting a delegate. Since the leader gets 66.7% of the delegates to his or her vote of 50.1%, in the limiting case, that is an enhancement of delegates over the vote by 33.3%. For a candidate to get all three delegates, the percentage times three would have to be 2.501 or larger. That means the percentage would have to be 2.501/3 = 83.367 or 5/6 of the vote. To get one delegate you need 0.501 of the percentage times 3, or a percentage of only 0.501/3 = 0.167, or 16.7%, or only 1/6 of the vote.
In the case of 3 candidates qualifying above the minimum, if all three are around a third, then they each should get one delegate. Again, if one gets above 50%, they would get 2 delegates, leaving only 1 delegate for the runner up.
The iniquities that exist with only 3 delegates per district can be reduced by using 6 delegates per district, which is the Democrats average. The Republicans also have 80% of their primaries as Winner-Take-All or Winner-Take-Most to speed the choice of the leading candidate to an early nomination. Noting the present Republican leadership’s unhappiness with Donald Trump, they should consider changing their primaries to proportional representation as the Democrats have.
