If the GOP primary season had been run under the same rules as the Democratic primary process -
i.e strictly proportional allocation with Super Delegates in the mix,
who would have been the Republican nominee?
Assuming for the sake of the argument that vote totals didn’t change and that each state’s available delegates remains the same.
It wouldn’t have really made a difference. The Democrats have 4763 delegates of whom 712 (15%) are superdelegates.
The Republicans have 2472 delegates. If they were to add an equivalent percentage of superdelegates, it would be 371 for a total of 2843. A candidate would need 1422 delegates to win the nomination.
Trump won 1543 delegates. Even if 371 extra superdelegates had existed and they had all voted for Cruz, he would have only had 930 delegates.
But bengangmo’s OP suggests that the Democrats have “strictly proportional allocation” of delegates (to vote shares, presumably) and, by implication, that the Republicans don’t.
So, if Republican elected delegates had been allocated to candidates according to the “strictly proportional” rules that the Democrats employ, would Trump have got 1,543 delegates? Or a lower number, which might be less than 1,422?
The question is interesting because, on the assumption that this election turns into a train wreck for the Republicans, they’ll be looking to see what they can do in the future to prevent an angry toddler wearing a dead squirrel from securing the nomination again. And it would be hard for the Democrats to criticise them for adopting more Democrat-like selection procedures, if that seemed likely to do the trick.
Yep… Instead of the Republican winner take all / most…
What if the allocation had been proportional?
Kasich, at least would have had a tonne more delegates.
About twice as many, but he never had many so that’s still not much.
There are 2472 GOP delegates. If you make 15% of them superdelegates, that leaves 2101 to win. Kasich only got 13.8% overall. Assuming that the delegate allocation was exactly proportional with the national vote (that’s not quite how the Democrats work but it’s close enough for this), he’d only end up with 290. That’s more than the 161 he got, but it’s still nowhere near winning. Even if you add the superdelegates on top of the 2472 delegates rather than making them part of the 2472, that’s only 341 for Kasich.
He didn’t actually do very well in the part of the primaries where people vote. If he hadn’t been up against two people who are hated by the talking head types, he would have been written out of the narrative in March.
Now that I think about it, under the actual Democratic rules, I’m pretty sure Kasich wouldn’t have qualified for 13.8% of the delegates, so 290 and 341 are probably optimistic. There were usually thresholds for getting any delegates at all in the Democratic contests, and Kasich wouldn’t have met that threshold in many states and congressional districts. I remember 15% being a common threshold, and ending up with 13.8% means he would have been under 15% in many, many places. (There were southern congressional districts where Sanders was shut out of receiving any delegates because he didn’t hit the threshold, and I believe Clinton received nothing from Vermont for the same reason.)
Like how the Chicago Cubs don’t do very well in the part of the pennant race where teams win games?
You could apply this reasoning to Jeb, I think: He did well very early, but even when he was sixth or so the media still gave him attention and treated him like something other than a no-hope. He was supposed to be the handpicked successor, the one who, by 2012 rules, would rise to the top of a large, fractured field after the base had gotten it through its thick skull that you don’t marry the crazy summertime fling.
Certainly no Republican superdelegates would have voted for Trump. And the elimination of winner take all states would have at the very least delayed Trump’s inevitability. This might have enabled Cruz and Kasich to continue their campaigns much later and Trump could not have run the score up in the late uncontested primaries. I’m not positive it would have led to a different nominee, but it could have. In retrospect 2016 was the mirror image of 2012. Romney solidified the sane vote while the crazy vote was split several ways, Trump solidified the crazy vote while the sane vote was split several ways. To me, the problem really is the crazy vote.
It depends on whether a candidate could lock up the superdelegates in the beginning the way Hillary did. If they were split among the many candidates the GOP had this year it wouldn’t have much effect on the primary process. If the vast majority of them went to Bush at the outset he would have looked like the inevitable winner and it would have reflected in the votes.
What I’m curious about; but not sure how to do the math…
What if, out of 2400 delegates we ended up
Trump 1100
Rubio 800
Kasich 200
Supers 300.
Would such a splithing have been possible under DNC rules?
Assuming then that Trump couldn’t attract Supers…could they have been used to stop him?
Except the Republicans don’t have very many winner-take-all states. According to this map (2016 Republican Delegate Allocation Rules by State), there’s only 7 states which are winner-take-all: FL, OH, AZ, NJ, MN, SD and NE.
Of the 2472 delegates, only 391(15.8%) were awarded based on winner-take-all. The rest were awarded by a state convention (121 - 4.9%)); proportional (637 - 25.8%); hybrid (e.g. winner take all by district) (613 - 24.8%); or proportional but with a winner-take-all trigger, if the overall amount for one candidate reached a certain level (710 - 28.7)).
So eliminating state “winner-take-all” wouldn’t have that much impact.
Minnesota was proportional, not winner-take-all. Also, Trump would have gained delegates if Ohio had been proportional.
He got 80% of the vote in New Jersey while no one else even reached the 15% threshold, so he wouldn’t have lost any delegates there, even witha proportional vote.
That leaves Florida and Arizona. Trump got 45% of the vote in both states, so let’s say he loses 50 of his 99 delegates in Florida, and 30 of 58 delegates in Arizona. He would have picked up about 23 delegates in a proportional Ohio, so we’re talking roughly 60 delegates (it’s late, so I’m disregarding Nebraska and S. Dakota.)
People can play with numbers and different rules all they want, but Trump won the nomination. Period.
My apologies.
When I put “MN” I thought that was the abbreviation for Montana, which is listed on that chart as a winner-take-all state.
Minnesota, as you correctly state, is a proportional state.
Us non-USians sometimes have trouble with all your state abbreviations. 
One of the downsides to superdelegates; they’re expected to attend the convention and vote. Even assuming they couldn’t make a difference in the final outcome that would’ve made this year’s convention a lot more awkward; every prominent Republican officeholder in the country would’ve been expected show up & make a public show of support for Trump. Any absences could by default be interpreted as a disendorsement of the party’s nominee.
Around 1,000 delegates by some form of winner take all seems a lot to me …
If that were changed instead to proportional, it would take around 500 votes away from a candidate getting 50% of the vote share right?
Well, it is *just *possible that if a LOT of superdelegates were pledged to Cruz (for example) that would have given him more momentum.
I don’t think it’s fair to say removing the winner take all and winner take most rules wouldn’t have made a difference. Right off the bat, Trump won all 50 of South Carolina’s delegates with 32% of the vote. Suddenly he was way out ahead. All of Florida’s 99 with 45%? And the state that finally knocked out Cruz, Indiana, would have felt less devastating if Trump had only got 58% of the delegates rather than 100%.
Which brings me to another point: a good 500 delegates were awarded after Trump was left alone in the race. If you just dump the final delegate count into a proportional equation you are not giving a good look at what the end result would have been with the greatly altered dynamics of an actual proportional system. Not saying Trump wouldn’t have won anyways but if you really want a decent look at how it would have changed things, it would probably be better to look state by state up to Indiana.
Momentum, the Big Mo, is what it’s all about. CNN always showed Hillary’s delegate counts including the super dels she had on her side, making her appear to have a big lead over Bernie right from the start. So if Cruz, or any other candidate in GOP primaries started out by locking up that many delegates it would be quite the advantage. Now since Cruz is largely hated by the members of the House and Senate who would comprise a lot of those delegates it would more likely have been someone like Bush who could lock them up. Hillary had those delegates in her pocket for a long time precluding numerous candidates from running, but if those delegates aren’t locked up with 17 candidates announced they’ll likely be split up and not all that much of an advantage.
Oops, a little over 400 delegates after Indiana.