I don’t know what Booty-judge is running for, but I think it’s going to be him versus Biden at the end of it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden steps down to let him go on through. It’s an early prediction, obviously, but he’s the only standout competitor at the moment.
But anyways, as to the OP:
I went through the 2016 Republican Primary results once to try and get a sense for whether Trump won outright or if it was more a matter that Cruz and Rubio split the serious vote.
It’s a bit tricky to go through and, quite possibly, I read the numbers wrong but if you look at who sat out of any particular convention and who seemed to get a home-town boost, it looked to me like there were basically three camps among the voters: Pro-Business, Pro-Latino, and Pro-Traditional.
Trump, Kasich, Paul, and Fiorina split the Business vote. Rubio and Cruz split the Latino vote. Jeb and Christie had the traditional vote, but it never had many backers.
Of the two main camps, the Business group was larger and Trump was always the largest vote-puller within that camp. But he was never in the majority, simply because there were more competitors in his camp. The Latino group was smaller than Business, but they always did better than Trump.
Ultimately, though, the candidate who was most popular in the most popular camp was the one who won. While that isn’t necessarily the Condorcet winner, that is a fairly “good” outcome, so far as trying to ensure that the election doesn’t spit out some random person that no one can understand how he got it.
But so… If we assume that things would more-or-less play out the same way in the Democratic primary, then we would expect Warran and Sanders to win based, essentially, on the size of their camp. If it’s the biggest camp in the party, then probably - even if they split the vote within the camp about even - one of them will be the Presidential candidate.
