Republicans: Trump dominating delegate race

To be on a pace to win, Trump needed 26 of the 50 delegates in South Carolina. Instead, he got all 50 of them. Just as this site pointed out was very likely on the 10th and again on the 11th. I’ve seen some surprise at this result in some of the commentary, but absent the polls being way off, this was predictable weeks ago.

Delegate rules matter. The popular vote is only relevant in terms of how it determines the delegates.

So Trump jumps way up in the delegate race:

So… 67 Trump, 11 Cruz, 10 Rubio, 5 Kasich, 3 Carson, and 7 for people who have dropped out.

Lets look at this in percentage terms:

Trump now has more than 50% of the delegates allocated so far. About 65% of them. That is just under 2/3 of the delegates.

Now, we’re only 4.2% of the way through the delegates, but at this point Trump is dominating.

How about “% of remaining delegates needed to win”?

Now that he has a majority, Trump’s line dives down. (Down is good on this graph.) He now only needs 49.39% of the remaining delegates to win.

More importantly though, because of how the delegates split between his opponents, they are all just racing upward. Cruz is second right now, and he now needs 51.75% of the remaining delegates in order to win. Now, this still isn’t a crazy number, although obviously Cruz hasn’t come close to it in any contest yet. But… time is running out.

We are down to five candidates after South Carolina. It is possible we will lose more after Nevada in a couple days. But most polling and modeling I have seen says Trump wins in a five way race, in a four way race, and even in a three way race. It takes bringing it down to a two person race before the non-Trump starts winning. The question is if that happens fast enough to “Stop Trump”.

With the number of delegates determined between March 1st and March 15th, if such a move is going to happen, it has to happen very quickly. Still having 3+ candidates when the March 1st votes happen puts Trump in a very strong position. If we’re not down to 3 before March 15th, Trump may just be wrapping things up.

Or something dramatic could happen that changes everything. You never know.

For now though, polls in Nevada and the March 1st states look good for Trump, and we still have five people in the race.

Trump is on a path to victory.

Nevada is up next on Tuesday.

Note: This post is an update based on the data on ElectionGraphs.com. Election Graphs tracks both a poll based estimate of the Electoral College and a numbers based look at the Delegate Races. All of the charts and graphs seen in this post are from that site. Additional graphs, charts and raw data can be found there. All charts above are clickable to go to the current version of the detail page the chart is from, which may contain more up to date information than the snapshots on this page, which were current as of the time of this post. Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or like Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates or to join the conversation. For those interested in individual general election poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as they are added.