Sunday, March 6, 2016

Republicans Have Two Options

Donald Trump under performed slightly yesterday.  He was expected to win three races but only won two.  He lost Kansas by a two to one margin and Maine by a lot more than I thought possible. My prediction was that Trump would be at 77% in the Prediction markets today and he is only at 64%. Cruz, Kasich and Rubio are all slightly higher, although at least I got the order right.

I think we learned three things  yesterday:

1. Marco Rubio will not be the Republican nominee.  He finished last in Maine and a distant third everywhere else.  He is almost certain to win Puerto Rico's primary today, but that is the last contest he will win this year.  He is done.
2. Ted Cruz will stick around until June but he can't get to 1,237 delegates.  He has done well so far but there are very few states that he can win that have not yet voted. A bigger problem for him is that almost none of the states he's likely to win have Winnter Take All rules.  He could get all 32 of Idaho's delegates if he manages to get over 50% of the vote, and he might win all 27 of Montan's delegates  but he has no chance of winning Ohio, Florida,  or Arizona or New Jersey.
3. Donald Trump will get at least a plurality of the delegates and has a good chance of winning a majority. The media narrative of elections is almost always about "momentum" and who beat expectations. Yesterday Cruz took back the momentum and exceeded expectations. But he didn't win enough delegates to match what would be his target to get a majority. Trump is ahead of that pace and he has his best states to look forward to later in the calendar.

This leaves the Republicans Two Options: they can nominate Trump or they can screw him out of the nomination. I'm not sure which option is worse for them, but neither is good.


Votes and Dlegates Math


Popular Vote Percentage Raw Vote
Trump 34.6%      3,603,656
Cruz 28.8%      3,002,218
Rubio 21.3%      2,221,276
Kasih 6.9%          714,355

Trump is winning the vote by six percent and over 600,000 votes. Through 19 states, Trump has won 12, Cruz has won six contests and Rubio only one. One interesting metric is how often a candidate finished first or second.  Trump has done so 18 times, Cruz 12, Rubio 5 and Kasich only three times.

The Delegate Math also favors Trump.  He currently has 391 delegates, to 248 for Cruz, 176 for Rubio and just 37 for Kasich.  As of this writing 18 delegates from Louisiana have not been allocated and Rubio is likely to win all or most of the 23 delegates from Puerto Rico. 

There are about 35 contests left. I played with the delegate allocations for each and came up with the following final projections:

Trump; 1,250 (51%)
Cruz:      732 (30%)
Kasich   286 (12%)
Rubio    178    (7%)

The biggest variables are the Winner Take All states.  I have Trump winning Florida, Arizona and New Jersey but Kasich winning Ohio. My numbers are predicated on Rubio dropping out after losing Florida and Kasich staying in after winning Ohio.

Cruz had a good day but I don't see the delegate math working out for him getting to 1,237. I think his ceiling is about 900.  He also seems to be determined to knock Rubio out by campaigning hard in Florida. That probably guarantees 99 delegates to Trump.  If Trump manages to win Ohio (he led by five in the most recent poll), then his path to 1,237 seems very likely. 

The outcome of the nomination will probably be determined by California on June 7th. The state wide winner gets 10 delegates for winning the state and then each of California's 53 congressional districts have 3 delegates that are awarded to whoever wins that district and three are reserved for party officials.  If Trump wins the state, he'll probably need wins in 17 or 18 California congressional districts to cross the line to 1,237.  Maybe by then the party will have rallied around Cruz or Kasich or decided to make Trump fight a bunch of two-front wars against one or the other throughout the Golden State.  

My math has Trump winning California and 23 of its congressional races. Cruz wins 22 and Kasich wins 8. My methods are far from exact. But that might not even matter. If Trump wins Ohio and Florida on March 15th, he might not need any of California's delegates. And unless Cruz can carry his "momentum" to the big states of the Northeast, he won't be able to prevent Trump from being nominated on the first ballot.




















No comments:

Post a Comment