The Race for the GOP Nomination - Post-Thanksgiving Thread

[RTFirefly]

@Martin_Hyde

Cruz likely wins Texas, but it’s proportional (as all the GOP 3/1 states are) and he likely won’t win by more than 5%, so the delegate margin advantage is small.

ETA: Looks like I should have kept reading - ninja’d by CarnalK, with concurrence from Martin. I’ll leave this here for sake of the additional detail, but looks like you guys already got the general idea.

No, you misunderstand how they do it. Texas has 155 delegates: 108 chosen by congressional district results, 44 chosen proportionately by statewide results (among those who clear the 20% cutoff), and 3 automatic delegates (unclear).

So the big thing is the allocation of those 108 delegates tied to the CD winners.

And how that works is:

1. If a candidate gets >50% of the vote in a CD, he gets all 3 delegates for that district.
2. If nobody gets 50%, then whoever gets the most votes in the district gets 2 of the 3 delegates, and the runner-up gets 1.

(#2 also has a caveat for if nobody gets >20% of the vote in a CD, but with only 5 candidates left, that’s pretty unlikely, even given early voting for candidates who’ve since dropped out.)

Wikipedia describes Texas as a ‘winner take most’ state, and that’s a good way of putting it. A Cruz win in Texas would likely gain him ~100 of Texas’ delegates.

Here’s how I gamed it out in the Super Tuesday thread:

@RTFirefly

Just for fun, let’s say Cruz gets 40% of the vote in Texas, Trump and Rubio get 25% each, and the other two split the rest. Of the 44 statewide delegates, Cruz would get 40/90 of them, and Trump and Rubio would get 25/90 of them each. That would get Cruz 20 of the 44 statewide delegates, and Trump and Rubio 12 each.

And say 40% statewide is good enough for Cruz to win 32 districts and finish second in 4, with the leftover firsts and seconds split evenly between Trump and Rubio, and Cruz clears 50% in 8 districts. Cruz gets 24 delegates in the 8 CDs he wins outright, 48 in the others where he finishes first, and 4 in the 4 where he finishes second, for 76 delegates from CDs. Trump and Rubio each finish first in 2 districts and second in 12 districts each where Cruz didn’t get 50%. They’d get 16 delegates each. So the total take would be 96 delegates for Cruz, and 28 for each of the other two.

Obviously things could go a little bit either way here: the percentages could be closer statewide and Trump and Rubio could win more districts, while Cruz didn’t get 50% anywhere, or Cruz might be the winner in every CD and clear 50% in more places.

FWIW, the other SEC states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee) that vote on Super Tuesday are fairly similar to Texas in terms of how they allocate their delegates. So the difference between being the 35 or one of the 25’s in a 35-25-25-8-7 split of the votes in one of those states is really quite big.