DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas get pretty much fixed numbers of pledged delegates.
Also, each state gets three Superdelegates (the heads of the state’s Republican Committee - one man and one woman - and the state’s national committee member).
I think the logic is that the fact that the state went for McCain/Palin is a sign that there’s a greater percentage of Republicans there. Otherwise, you might have a situation where State A (which went for Obama) and State B (which went for McCain), get the same number of delegates, even though State A has a lot more Republicans in it than State B.
Sure, that’s the logic, but the point is that that logic is pointless. They’re stripping delegates from states such as Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia, for example, whose delegates might have more of an interest is voting for a candidate who can win their states. They’re giving extra delegates to states such as Texas, Alabama, and Utah who will vote for Jack the Ripper if he has an R after his name.
Are these new rules, or have the Republicans always done something like this? Do the Democrats do the same?
Here’s the way the Democrats allocate delegates. For the Democrats, it is something like that, although in that case, the modifier is determined as a percentage based on the number of popular votes in each state that went to the Democratic Presidential candidate over the past three election cycles in relation to the total number of votes that went to the Democratic candidate over the past three election cycles. So a state that has more people who vote for Democratic Presidential candidates gets more delegates than a state that has fewer people who vote for Democratic Presidental candidates.
It depends on what their goal is. If their goal is to pick a candidate that best represents the views of the Republican party, then it makes sense. Besides, this also rewards the state parties who have done a good job of mobilizing the state for the candidate in the last election by letting them send more delegates to the convention.
Heck, if a state is safely Republican (based on past elections), give them the standard amount. If a state is hopelessly Democratic, also give them the standard amount. But if a state’s margin was less than 10% in the last election (or last several elections), I figure those marginal states are the ones that should get a bigger voice, since it is those states that can turn the entire election.
Or at least so it seems to me, if winning was more important than preserving some nebulous Republican “values”.
It seems pretty stupid to me to punish loyal republicans because they live in a state that has more independents and Democrats.
But perhaps we’re missing the real reason for it. Perhaps this is a campaign to encourage local Republicans to create hit teams in order to cut down the odds, so to speak.
