This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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I mentioned yesterday that the delegate totals were provisional and the counting wasn’t done yet. The counting is complete now, and in addition there have been some clarifications to the delegate allocation rules.
First on the rules, the way in which rounding is done was clarified. Instead of just rounding at the end, the percentages are rounded to a whole number first, and then the delegates are rounded to whole numbers at the end. This is a bit of a silly way to do it, because you are introducing the rounding distortion twice instead of just once, but that’s how New Hampshire chose to do it.
Then a rule change that affects not just New Hampshire, but all subsequent states too. Frontloading HQ has the scoop. The bottom line is that national RNC party rules changes are overriding rules at the state level about what happens to the three “automatic delegates” in each state. These are the National Committeeman, the National Committeewoman, and the chairman of the state Republican Party who all get to be delegates “automatically” based on their positions. In some states they were bound by primary or caucus results. In some states they were required by the rules to stay neutral. But in others, they were free agents. In the past the ones that were free agents had been the Republican party’s equivalent of the Democratic superdelegates. But the RNC national rule change is requiring these three automatic delegates to always be “bound” by the same rules that cover at-large delegates in each state.
So, essentially, no more superdelegates on the Republican side. All delegates will be bound by primary or caucus results. (There is still an exception for delegates who are directly elected by their own name apparently, but that is rare.)
For New Hampshire, when you consider final vote totals, and both rule clarifications, this changes the results from the primary from:
11 Trump, 3 Kasich, 2 Bush, 2 Cruz, 2 Rubio, 3 TBD
to:
10 Trump, 4 Kasich, 3 Bush, 3 Cruz, 3 Rubio, 0 TBD
The updated raw delegate chart showing this change is here:
The net result here is Trump loses one delegate, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Bush all gain one.
Trump is still clearly in the lead, but it does change his New Hampshire results in an important way. 11 out of 20 delegates was a majority, and above the threshold he needed to improve his “% of remaining delegates needed to win” number. 10 out of 23 is not a majority, and was not enough to improve his position on that metric:
If you look at full movement from before New Hampshire to these updated results, you can see that ALL of the candidates now got worse, as none of them got the level of delegate support needed to be on track for an outright win. Trump specifically went from needing 50.37% of the remaining delegates, to now needing 50.43% of the remaining delegates. This is much less of a change than the others of course, but it still went up.
So the statement I made in yesterdays update that “if Trump continues to match New Hampshire, he wins” is no longer true. If Trump (and the rest) continue to match New Hampshire, we are in for a contested convention.
Of course, we won’t see New Hampshire cloned in the subsequent states. We will see continued developments in the campaigns, more candidates drop out, and a very dynamic race continue to play out.
And fundamentally, the one delegate difference in Trump’s total doesn’t change the over all picture all that much.
I won’t repeat the details of yesterday’s post walking through scenarios for South Carolina and Nevada. If you haven’t already, go read it.
The bottom line is that unless there is a major change before South Carolina, it is very plausible that Trump walks out of it with a significant delegate lead. Updating for the New Hampshire changes above, that could look something like:
67 Trump, 11 Cruz, 10 Rubio, 15 Others
Nevada is more proportional, but will still give Trump a further opportunity to increase his delegate lead. Absent a surprise loss in South Carolina, he will almost certainly have a majority of the delegates allocated by then.
At that point, only 5.4% of delegates will have been decided. Lots of delegates left to play with.
But that is when things speed up. If the non-Trumps are going to consolidate support by all but one or two dropping out, it really should happen by the end of February, because 25.8% of the delegates will get decided on March 1st. And then another 30% or so in the two weeks between that and March 15th. When we pass March 15th, 60% or so of the convention delegates will have been decided.
If the anti-Trumps consolidated before then, it is possible that one of them will be leading instead of Trump. If the anti-Trumps are still divided though, then if Trump has managed to get over 50%, he’s almost certainly going to be the nominee. If he is leading, but under 50%, then talk of a contested convention becomes real, not just news junkie fantasy.
Absent the oft-predicted but never realized Trump collapse, for any of the other Republicans to beat Trump, all but one (MAYBE two) need to drop out and drop out quickly, and then they need to focus all of their effort on Trump. But for the moment, all the anti-Trumps are still squabbling with each other, leaving Trump to consolidate a lead while they are for the most part continuing to ignore him.
That is just a formula to anoint Trump. At some point people will drop out, and the race will narrow. The question is does it happen in time for whoever is the surviving anti-Trump to have a real chance.
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.
[Edit 2016-02-14 06:18 UTC to add end note.]
New Hampshire’s delegate rules are such that the winner gets a big bonus. (The details of how this works were discussed here last week.) So Trump’s approximately 36% of the vote turns into 55% of the delegates. Counting isn’t actually done yet, but if current trends hold, the delegate haul out of New Hampshire will be:
Trump 11, Kasich 3, Bush 2, Cruz 2, Rubio 2.
Adding these to the previous results in Iowa, and we have these new totals: Trump 18, Cruz 10, Rubio 9, Kasich 4, Bush 3, Carson 3, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 1, Paul 1.
In the form of a graph of the total delegates, we see this:
Some groupings look apparent on this chart.
Trump is out by himself in the lead.
Cruz and Rubio make up a second tier, at about half of Trump’s level.
Kasich, Bush and Carson are the third tier. Way behind, but at least with multiple delegates.
Then finally Fiorina, Huckabee and Paul bringing up the rear with one delegate each. Two of these three have already dropped out. It will be surprising if the third does not do so soon.
How does this match what we’re hearing in the spin out of New Hampshire? Well, there is wide acknowledgment that Trump did have a nice win. But the majority of the attention still seems to have been on the race for second, and how that positions the anti-Trumps going forward.
Within that, relatively little attention was paid to Cruz, and he is still in 2nd. Rubio is being dismissed because he did badly in New Hampshire, but he is still in 3rd over all. Meanwhile lots of attention given to Kasich and Bush, but they are still stuck in the third tier with Carson with less than a handful of delegates.
Time to flip this and look at this in terms of my favorite metric, the “% of remaining needed to win”:
Trump exceeded the 50.37% of the delegates he needed to get to improve his position. Going forward he needs 50.33% of delegates to be on a pace to win. That is a relatively small change. With almost 98% of delegates still to be determined, there is a huge amount of flexibility available here to all the candidates.
Given that Trump got 55% of the delegates in New Hampshire, that means however that NONE of the other candidates got what they needed, or even close. Essentially, every one of the non-Trump candidates fell further behind today.
Now, Trump still doesn’t have a majority of delegates. To be on a pace to actually win, rather than just to have the most delegates going into the convention, he needs to do better than he has so far. But he is far closer to that mark than any of the other candidates. And if he continues matching his New Hampshire results, he will win.
The story here continues to be that while Trump hasn’t managed a majority in any contest so far, the opposition is so divided that Trump still easily wins (New Hampshire) or at the very least comes very close (Iowa). Does this continue? Does it get worse?
Time to look at the next contest on the Republican side, South Carolina.
There have not been any South Carolina polls since before Iowa, so new polls are eagerly anticipated, but at the moment the RCP average has Trump at 36.0%, Cruz at 19.7%, Rubio at 12.7%, Bush at 10.0% and then everybody else.
Now, that may change. Specifically if either Rubio or Bush drop out that will scramble things a bit. But that may not happen. There is a case to be made for both of them sticking in at least through South Carolina.
Trump probably wins this. But by how much? Time to look at the delegate rules in South Carolina.
From Greenpapers:
- 21 district delegates are to be allocated to presidential contenders based on the primary results in each of the state’s 7 congressional districts: each congressional district is assigned 3 National Convention delegates and the presidential contender receiving the greatest number of votes in that district will receive all 3 of that district’s National Convention delegates. [Rule 11(b)(4)]
- 26 (10 base at-large delegates plus 16 bonus delegates) at-large delegates are to be allocated to the presidential contender receiving the greatest number of votes in the primary statewide. [Rule 11(b)(5)]
- 3 party leaders, the National Committeeman, the National Committeewoman, and the chairman of the South Carolina’s Republican Party are pledged to the presidential contender receiving the greatest number of votes in the primary statewide.
If Trump wins by any margin, no matter how small, he gets 29 of the 50 delegates right up front. That already would give him 47 of the 100 delegates that would have been allocated in Iowa + New Hampshire + South Carolina.
Of course, in order to win the whole state, he would have had to have won some of the congressional districts too. Probably most of them. And so far in Iowa and New Hampshire, it doesn’t seem like there has been a lot of geographic lumpiness to Trump’s support. So he may well win ALL of the congressional districts. In that case Trump would walk out of South Carolina with all 50 of the available delegates. This is very possible.
In that scenario, after South Carolina, the overall delegate count would look like: Trump 68, Cruz 10, Rubio 9, Others 13
Trump would have a huge delegate lead. Even if he doesn’t win all 50, he will still have a very large delegate lead.
Nevada is three days after South Carolina. It is proportional, not semi-winner-take-all like South Carolina, but the latest polls still have Trump with a nice lead in Nevada. Those polls are old and out of date, but does anybody think two straight wins would hurt Trump’s position?
To “stop Trump” things have to move very quickly to a one on one with Trump vs Somebody. Maybe a three way race could do it, but might just be a recipe for a contested convention. But as long as we’re still looking at four or five candidates splitting the non-Trump vote, Trump wins.
But the non-Trumps still seem to be in a locked battle with each other for that anti-Trump one on one slot. And in doing so, they just let Trump win. The race will of course consolidate further. More candidates will drop out. Some may drop out before South Carolina. But it is unclear if that will be enough to let one of the others actually win in South Carolina.
Trump won New Hampshire. Trump looks like he will probably win the next two states. Things get more complicated once we get into March, but Trump would get there with a substantial lead.
Things are by no means settled yet. There is a long way to go. Even after we get past both South Carolina and Nevada 94.6% of delegates will still be up for grabs. There will still be time for the non-Trumps.
But if we only get consolidation down to 2 or three candidates after the March 1st contests, when 25.8% of the total delegates will be decided, the non-Trumps that are left may have a really tough uphill fight to catch up.
If consolidation doesn’t happen until after March 15th, 60% of the delegates will already have been decided, and it may just be too late. (Although if several non-Trumps are still strong at that point and Trump has the lead but not a majority, we’re looking at a contested convention, and that starts getting into completely different scenarios.)
But if the non-Trumps want to actually win, they have to stop fighting each other, some of them have to drop out, and they have to actually act like Trump is the frontrunner, and that their priority has to be bringing him down rather than each other. Otherwise they are done, and Trump ends up walking away with this.
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.
The Iowa results on the Republican side were officially certified on Wednesday, earlier than anybody expected, and with a surprise. Almost every source believed 27 delegates would be decided by the caucus results, but the remaining 3 “automatic delegates” who are party leaders, would attend the convention unbound and able to support whoever they wished. But it looks like those three delegates will be bound by the caucus results as well.
When you do the required math on 30 delegates instead of 27, everything remains the same, except Huckabee gets a delegate too.
Updating the chart showing the “% of remaining needed to win” graph:
And the raw numbers:
Huckabee and Paul have suspended their campaigns, but since these are bound delegates, they keep them unless the candidates officially release them. I haven’t seen a report of that yet, so won’t remove them from the list at this point. Not that it matters much for single delegates. This is a much more important factor when candidates drop out later in the race once they have already accumulated a significantly sized chunk of delegates.
Huckabee’s one delegate makes no difference to the analysis I posted Tuesday or the follow up from Wednesday.
We still have three candidates showing strength going into New Hampshire It is within the realm of possibility that New Hampshire will add a fourth to that list, but just as likely it will solidify the “three way race” picture. And as I outlined in the Wednesday post the specific New Hampshire delegate rules matter a lot. Specifically the rules essentially give extra bonus delegates to the winner, and don’t allow delegates at all for anyone coming in under 10%. This is a recipe to transform a plurality win to a healthy delegate majority.
So if you are watching the polls as they start to include post-Iowa data, watch carefully not only who is in the lead, but exactly who is above or below the 10% threshold, because that will make a huge difference in the delegate counts.
And an 8-7-7 split with only 1.21% of delegates determined is essentially a tie. And a tie that will soon be overwhelmed numerically by the results from New Hampshire and beyond. So don’t get sucked too deeply into the spin from all quarters taking about who is up and who is doomed. It is still too early for that. (Well, at least if you don’t drop out.)
Five days until New Hampshire.
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.
Yesterday’s update was preliminary, and I ended up using the delegate estimates provided by the AP which were used at the New York Times, Washington Post, and other places. My favorite source, Green Papers, had a different set of numbers. When I tried to calculate delegate numbers myself, I came up with yet another set of numbers. I ended up going with the AP numbers.
A little more than a day later and Green Papers updated, now matching what I had calculated myself. So I’m updating the estimates accordingly.
This moves us from:
8 Cruz, 7 Trump, 7 Rubio, 3 Carson, 1 Bush, 1 Paul
to
7 Cruz, 7 Trump, 6 Rubio, 3 Carson, 1 Bush, 1 Fiorina, 1 Kasich, 1 Paul.
The main change here is one less delegate each to Cruz and Rubio, with those delegates picked up at the bottom end by Fiorina and Kasich.
But wait! There is more! The Washington Post and Politico both add two additional delegates. The 27 allocated by the caucus results were already accounted for, so these would be two of the three “party leaders” who end up as automatic delegates. No indication of which party leader did what, but they add one additional delegate each to Cruz and Rubio.
The new Iowa totals become:
8 Cruz, 7 Rubio, 7 Trump, 3 Carson, 1 Bush, 1 Fiorina, 1 Kasich, 1 Paul.
Between these two changes, the net is simply adding the delegates for Fiorina and Kasich. This means 29 of the 30 Iowa delegates are now accounted for.
Note that even though Paul has “suspended his campaign”, he keeps his delegate unless he explicitly releases it.
The raw delegate count chart now looks like this:
Just a little uptick at the end for Fiorina and Kasich to join Bush and Paul at the 1 delegate mark.
Flipping this over to look at “% of remaining needed to win”:
On this chart, lower is better. When you get down to 0% you win. If you get to 100% you are eliminated. Everybody is still heading upward, not downward, but it is still very early. The whole field here ranges from needing 50.31% of the remaining delegates, to needing 50.59% of the remaining delegates.
Looking specifically at New Hampshire, there are 20 delegates at stake. We are so early, and the % needed numbers so close, that this is easy. The number needed to be on track to win is 11 delegates. Anything less, and the candidate is actually going to be in a harder position in the next contest rather than an easier one.
Let’s game out New Hampshire based on the current RCP averages. Yes, yes, this is based on polling before New Hampshire. Things will change in the next six days. But this is just to model how it works.
The rules via The Green Papers:
- 20 National Convention delegates are to be bound proportionally to presidential contenders based on the primary vote statewide.
- A 10% threshold is required in order for a presidential contender to be allocated National Convention delegates.
- Allocate delegates based on the 20 Г— candidate’s vote Г· total statewide vote. Round to the nearest whole number.
- Any delegate positions that remain open are awarded to the candidate with the highest statewide vote total.
Assume each candidate gets exactly their poll average today. Only the candidates over 10% matter, so with RCP as of right now that is:
33.4% Trump, 12.2% Cruz, 10.8% Rubio, 10.4% Kasich
Converting this to delegates with the rounding rules above, you get:
7 Trump, 2 Cruz, 2 Kasich, 2 Rubio
This is only 13, so there are 7 delegates left. According to the last rule, these all go to the leader, so we end up with:
14 Trump, 2 Cruz, 2 Kasich, 2 Rubio
And therefore Trump would get 70% of the delegates despite only getting 33.7% of the vote. Trump’s line on the “% needed to win” would go down, while everybody else would go up.
After this hypothetical New Hampshire result, the overall race would be:
21 Trump, 10 Cruz, 9 Rubio, 3 Carson, 3 Kasich, 1 Bush, 1 Paul, 1 Fiorina.
Trump would still only have 42.9% of the delegates, which is not a majority, but Cruz would be way back at 20.4% and you’d have Trump starting to pull away from the pack. Still only 1.98% of delegates allocated at that point though, with lots of room for further changes.
The RCP average on February 3rd is NOT going to look like the actual results on Primary night. This is just an example.
The points to take away:
- The detailed delegate rules matter, you don’t necessarily have to win a popular vote majority to win a delegate majority.
- We’re still so very early, one contest can have a major effect on the delegate totals, and each state is very different, so don’t put much stock in extrapolating Iowa to future contests.
Of course New Hampshire will be here soon enough, and we’ll do this with the real results.
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.
Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans didn’t have years of superdelegates endorsing one candidate or another, so Iowa really was a clean slate. The very first delegates earned in the race for the 2016 Republican nomination. The headlines are of course that Trump underperformed the poll-based expectations letting Cruz slide to a win, while Rubio outperformed his expectations, coming in a close third. This is all true.
But it is also true that only a tiny fraction of the delegates have been allocated so far. None of the candidates got a majority in Iowa either. So nobody is actually yet on a track to overall victory. Cruz may be slightly ahead, but Trump and Rubio are right at his heels. Cruz is not in a dominating position. It really is a three person race.
Looking at the raw delegate graph quickly…
…you immediately notice that we just have a really boring graph with a few straight lines. And Rubio’s line and Trump’s line completely overlap too. As do Bush and Paul’s lines. That’s because this is our first real data point after everyone was just at zero.
All of the graphs are like this. So just this once, lets skip the graphs and look at the summary table instead:
I’ll note here that Green Papers has slightly different numbers. But the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN all agree with the estimates above, so for the moment that is what we’ll go with here.
It is clear that Cruz/Rubio/Trump are in a separate class here than Carson/Bush/Paul. But even these three would need to nearly double their performance to actually be on a track to win, because, well, you have to be getting more than half of the delegates to win outright. 25% to 30% won’t get you there. So at some point, somebody has to start going over the 50% mark if there is going to be a winner.
There is plenty of time for that of course. Nobody is predicting a contested convention quite yet, as much fun as that would be.
We probably won’t see anyone over 50% after New Hampshire either, but how close we get may depend on the viability thresholds. In New Hampshire on the Republican side you need to get 10% of the popular vote to be eligible for delegates. Although this will definitely change in response to the Iowa results, at the moment RCP has Trump at 33.2%, Cruz at 11.5%, Kasich at 11.5%, Bush at 10.3%, and Rubio at 9.5%. The rest are pretty far from 10%. But that is four candidates all within a couple percent of 10%.
Depending on which of those ends up right above or right below the 10% threshold, you could see very different delegate results coming out of New Hampshire. Most likely, we’ll have three or four candidates over 10% and a mix of delegates, but in the extreme case, if all but Trump drops under 10%, then Trump gets all the delegates. So a wide range of things is possible based on really small movements from the current positions in the polls.
Final points here though to the people saying Iowa proves that Trump is done…
- Trump was pretty close in Iowa. A one delegate difference means almost nothing.
- Although the Iowa results may diminish it, Trump starts with a big lead in New Hampshire.
- Only 1.09% of the Republican delegates have been determined so far.
We have a three way race right now. It is not inconceivable that a 4th candidate could do well enough in New Hampshire to join that group. Things are just as up in the air and chaotic on the Republican side as they were before Iowa. Anything could still happen.
Stay tuned.
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.
This is a FAQ for the 2016 Delegate Race portion of ElectionGraphs.com. The FAQ for the Electoral College portion is here.
Why are you doing this?
Fundamentally, because I have fun with it. But in addition I think I’ve added a couple things beyond the usual delegate tracking you find everywhere in the primary season that are useful and interesting.
OK, what are those things?
First up is tracking the percentage of remaining delegates needed to win. I think this gives a better measure of how the race is going than just looking at the delegate totals alone, because it captures how much harder it is to change the outcome as the race progresses and the frontrunners accumulate delegates.
Second is tracking the various metrics against the percentage of delegates allocated so far, rather than against the date. This gives a better understanding of just how far along the process it is than the date does, since the distribution of delegate allocation “events” is very clumpy, not evenly distributed through the primary season. This is also influenced by when delegates not bound by primary and caucus results make their decisions, which doesn’t happen on any particular pre-set timetable.
Third, rather than concentrating completely on the current delegate counts, I also show the progression of these metrics over time, giving a sense of how things are developing. Now, the past is not necessarily directly predictive of the future, there is always the possibility that campaign events occur that dramatically change the direction of the race, but looking at how things have been going so far, more often than not, gives you an idea of the most probable way things are going to continue.
Why are your delegate counts different than those at my favorite media outlet?
Until delegates actually do the roll call vote at the convention, delegate counting has a lot of uncertainty involved.
While some delegates are directly bound and known based on primary and caucus night results, many others are determined in a variety of ways that make them hard to count. In some cases there is a multi stage delegate selection process. Some outlets choose not to count delegates in these multi-stage processes until the final delegates are known at the last stage of that process. Others, like this site, attempt to determine an estimate of what the final outcome of the process will be based on the results of the earlier stages. These are estimates, and will almost certainly change and shift as the process continues.
In addition, other delegates are actually complete free agents and can vote for whoever they feel like, and can change their minds repeatedly until they cast their actual vote at the convention. Often delegates for candidates that drop out end up in this category as well if they are “released”. Where these delegates publicly express their support for a candidate, this can be used to predict how they will vote, but even in these cases the delegate can still change their mind.
All of the above means that different outlets will make different choices of how to estimate the delegate count, and will have slightly different numbers. The general trends should be similar though.
So are you some kind of expert in the delegate selection process to make these estimates?
No. Not at all. Many years ago I was a physics major. These days I work at a Seattle tech company. I have no particular expertise in this other than being an interested amateur. My estimates though are for the most part not made by me trying to directly estimate numbers from my own reporting. I consult a number of different sources of information on delegate outcomes and try to come up with numbers that use the best available information from those sources.
OK, so what are those sources?
As I launch the delegate tracker a little less than a week before Iowa, my primary sources so far have been Green Papers, FiveThirtyEight, Wikipedia, and the sites they link as references. Some other sources have also been consulted though, and as the actual contests get underway, I expect I will find information in a variety of other places. If you really want to dig into the details, I include reference notes in my raw delegate data files for the Democrats and Republicans as updates are added.
Doesn’t the fact some delegates can change their minds invalidate the “% of remaining delegates” metric?
Well, it does mean that it is really “% of remaining delegates if none of the already allocated delegates change their mind or were estimated incorrectly”, but in practice in recent contests, this hasn’t made a huge difference. But yes, it is always the case that there can indeed be changes of this sort, and you can imagine situations where this would end up being quite significant. For instance, if the front runner were to have an unexpected health issue, dropping out of the race and releasing all of their delegates half way through the primary season, then of course everything gets scrambled. But even events like this would be nicely represented in the graphs, with the % of delegates allocated moving backwards, and the “% of remaining needed to win” changing appropriately. Absent a dramatic event of that sort though, delegates changing their minds is a minor secondary effect, and the estimates in multi-stage processes are often “close enough”, so these factors are unlikely to have a huge effect on the charts.
Do you come at this with some sort of political bias?
Well, of course. Everybody has some sort of opinion and I do have feelings on the presidential race, both in the primaries and in the general election. When it comes to Election Graphs and the commentaries I post when I make updates to either the Delegate Race numbers or the Electoral College estimates, I try my best to be objective and talk mostly about the numbers, and the implications of the numbers on the results. If you want to hear my less objective and more opinionated thoughts on what is going on, and what should be going on, listen to the podcast I cohost: Curmudgeon’s Corner. I often talk about the objective analysis there too course, but my cohost Ivan and I are not constrained by that. In my actual charts and graphs though, and on the update commentary blog posts, I try to stick to what the numbers are saying.
How often is the data updated?
I have a day job and a family, so my time is often somewhat constrained, but I will try to at the very least do an update within 24 hours of the results being released after each major primary or caucus. In the 2008 and 2012 cycles I did a daily scan for new delegate updates even when there wasn’t a major contest, and would do a post if any numbers changed. (Often they wouldn’t, but I checked every day.) I can’t commit in advance to that daily cycle. It will be a goal, but if life gets in the way, I may miss some days. But certainly when there are new primary and caucus results, I will try to get them included as quickly as possible. I generally won’t do more than one update per day though. So when results are still in flux on election nights, I may choose to wait a bit to post the update, so as to get the best numbers possible.
You’ve done this before?
I started doing electoral vote and delegate tracking online in 2008. You can check out the results from both 2008 and 2012 here.
This is awesome, I’d like to share this or mention it in my own online space, can I?
All of the Election Graphs pages, as well as my blog post commentaries, are released with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Feel free to reuse this material within those constraints, although I would appreciate a heads up that you are planning to do so.
For other possible uses or to discuss anything else about this site, please contact Election Graphs via Twitter. That is probably the best way to get my attention quickly rather than having an email lost in my inbox or spam folders.
In terms of sharing on social media (or other media)… of course! That would be great! You may also want to follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter, or like the Election Graphs Facebook Page. In fact, please do!
This sucks, what a waste of time, you are obviously just a shill for <insert candidate you don’t like>… How can I tell you how awful you are?
I welcome and would love to hear from people who have constrictive criticism about the site, want to discuss methodology, or just want to chat civilly about the implications of the numbers shown on the site. But if you just want to yell at me… do you really have to? It just wastes everybody’s time. If you don’t like the site, don’t visit. But if you do need to make comments like the above, there are places to do that. The links to Facebook and Twitter are above, and comments are open on abulsme.com as well.
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.
This post gives an overview of the Election Graphs Delegate Race site for 2016, highlighting the major charts, graphs and features of the site, and how to interpret some of that is there. Or just ignore this and go to the site and explore. But if you want an item by item explanation of what you will see there, then read on.
New Overview Page
First of all, while not technically part of the Delegate Race coverage pages, I should mention that with the launch of the Delegate Race, the home page of electiongraphs.com has been changed so that rather than just concentrating on the Electoral College race, it gives thumbnail versions of the most important information on both Delegate Races and the Electoral College for the general election. I won’t go over all the specific elements on this page because everything is covered either here or in the Tour of the Electoral College part of the site published back in 2014. From this starting point you can of course easily get to all of the details on both the Electoral College and Delegate Race sides of the site.
The candidate combination in the center will be the delegate leaders in both parties as soon as both parties actually have delegate leaders. Until then, it shows the best polled candidate combination.
Two Columns
The main structure of the 2016 Delegate Races page is two columns. Democrats on the left, Republicans on the right. (Would you arrange them differently? :-) )
Everything on the page runs in parallel for the two parties, showing the same type of data for each. I will use the Democrats as the examples for the rest of this tour, simply because as of a little over a week before Iowa as this is written, there is actual data for the Democrats because of the super delegates who have already expressed a preference, while there won’t be real delegate data for the Republicans until the Iowa caucus results are known.
Updates and Countdown
The heading should be self-explanatory. :-) A timestamp for the last data update and a count down to the start of the convention.
% of Remaining
This is one of the critical charts I alluded to in the last post.This shows the percentage of the remaining delegates that each candidate needs to get in order to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention. On this kind of chart, going DOWN is good. It means you are so far ahead that you only need a small percentage of the delegates that are left to win.
Once this number goes to 0%, it means you don’t need any more delegates, you have already won.
The flip side of this is that if it goes to 100%, you have been eliminated. You could get every outstanding delegate and it still wouldn’t be enough.
And specifically during the contest, at any given time, this number is the level you need to get on each new delegate contest as it comes up to be “on pace” to win. So, for example, with the state of the chart above, you can see that Sanders would need to get a little over 54% of the delegates in the next context (the Iowa caucuses) to be on track to win the nomination. If he got 52% of the delegates, he might well have “won Iowa”, but not by enough. He would actually be in a worse position going into New Hampshire in terms of the delegate race, needing an even higher percentage to be on pace the next time around.
Now, that is of course in terms of the pure delegate race. Given the psychology involved, if getting 52% in Iowa was perceived as such a huge win that it boosts his likely delegate haul in New Hampshire from 53% to 60% or some such, then even though the Iowa result put him in a worse position short term, it might boost long term prospects. This is the kind of calculus that occurs during the race, but boosts like that only go so far, in the end watch the math and where this chart goes.
Note a situation where ALL candidates go up to 100% rather than one of them heading down to 0%, is exactly the situation that would lead to a so-called “contested convention” where there is no clear winner going into the convention.
Delegate Totals
The raw estimate of the number of delegates supporting the candidate. This is a “soft count” meaning it includes not just delegates who are formally bound to a candidate, but also unbound delegates who have expressed a preference, and in cases of multi-stage processes, estimates of the final numbers based on the results of the earlier stage. As estimates, these numbers can change, going both up and down as the estimates are refined. Delegate numbers can of course also go down when a candidate drops out and releases their delegates.
% of Delegates
This is the percentage of the delegates allocated so far that have supported each candidate. This shows how well the candidate is doing so far. It may or may not be directly reflective of how well they will do in the rest of the race. That can be influenced by many factors, but it is reasonable to think that for there to be a dramatic change in performance, there would have to be dramatic events or dramatic differences in the landscape causing the change.
Now, as an example, the change from the pre-Iowa world where all the delegates are Democratic insiders to post-Iowa where delegates are actually determined by real people voting is an example of a pretty dramatic change. So for instance, a change from Clinton getting 95%+ of the delegates to something lower would not only not be unexpected, but it would be surprising if such a shift did not happen.
This is a second way of looking at how much work a candidate needs to do to win. The percentage of the remaining delegates tells you a lot, but this divides that by how well they have been doing so far, to give a representation of just how much better a candidate has to do in order to catch up and win if they are behind, or how much leeway to do worse a candidate who is on a winning pace has. So, for instance, if so far a candidate has been getting 30% of delegates, but they need 60% of delegates in order to win, then they would need to do 2x better than they have been to win.
This chart it shown with an logarithmic scale due to the large range of values seen.
Summary Table
The site is Election Graphs, and the most important graph is the % remaining graph, so that came first, and I even talked about all the charts lower on the page before mentioning this, but this is the table with all the detailed numbers behind the data, plus some basic numbers around how many delegates have been allocated, how many are left, how many are needed to win, etc.
This covers only a snapshot of the numbers at the current time. Historical data is only available in the charts. (Or in the raw data I provide if someone wants to parse it to recreate the time series data.)
State Delegate Counts
At the bottom of the page is a state by state breakdown of the delegate estimates. The states are listed in order of how many delegates have been allocated so far. The candidate(s) currently leading in each state are highlighted in green. Because of the ways in which delegate allocation works, including the presence of unbound delegates, the delegate leader does not necessarily have to match the winner in the voting reported in primaries and caucuses. And indeed, as seen above, there can be many delegates allocated before any voting takes place at all.
Graphs with a Date Axis
Looking at the delegate race based on % of delegates allocated does give a better real sense of how far along in the process it really is, but sometimes you just want to see things as they look on a more familiar date axis. At the very top of the page there is a “Switch Graphs to Date Axis” link that shifts all the graphs to be date based instead of percent of delegates based.
Once in that mode, you can of course toggle back to the % of delegates view, but you can also toggle between starting the charts whenever the first delegates were logged (so in the case of the Democrats in the 2016 cycle, way back in June 2013) or starting the charts only on the date of the Iowa caucuses (Feb 1st 2016).
Links to Blog Posts
Oh yeah, and in the middle somewhere there, there are three blocks with links to relevant blog posts. The left and right blocks contain only blog posts with analysis of the delegate race for the parties in that column. The middle block also includes articles on the Electoral College race, episodes of the Curmudgeon’s Corner podcast that talk about the election, and digests of posts made by the @ElectionGraphs and @ElecCollPolls twitter accounts.
Notes
Finally, at the very bottom of the page are places to follow Election Graphs, some notes about sources, links to raw data, etc. If you are into those things, enjoy.
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.
[Edit 2016-01-27 03:19 UTC to add final note]
[Edit 2016-01-27 06:59 UTC to update screenshots to retina resolution]
[Edit 2016-01-27 08:06 UTC to update graphs]
[Edit 2016-02-02 11:30 UTC to update section on blog post links to reflect split of Democratic and Republican blocks]
[Edit 2016-02-04 09:45 UTC to update screenshots for overview page and RSS feeds to reflect current structure]
It is just over 7 days until the doors open on the Iowa caucuses for 2016. So it is time to open the Election Graphs delegate tracker.
Long past time actually. At least on the Democratic side, the delegate race actually started long before Iowa. We’ll get into that a bit in a separate post later, but for now, just a quick introduction to what this delegate tracker will and won’t be.
The Election Graphs delegate tracker will be based on “soft counts”. While many delegates do get determined directly based on voting results in primaries or caucuses, many do not. There are “superdelegates” who are free agents and can change their minds at any point. There are also processes where the direct voting just elects delegates to a “second stage” who in turn later vote for “a third stage”, etc, until eventually weeks or months later, the actual convention delegates are elected. The degree to which any of this is deterministic varies by state. Here at election graphs we’ll be using a variety of sources to try to understand the preferences of known superdelegates and officially uncommitted delegates, while trying to estimate what the delegate allocation will eventually be at the end of multi-stage processes.
This all means that estimates are subject to change and revision. Things are not locked in stone when a winner is declared on a primary election night. In practice though, at least in the last couple of election cycles, tracking these “soft counts” is actually pretty stable. The estimates do adjust a bit as time goes on, but you generally have a pretty good picture of what is going on, and it gives you a better picture than looking only at a “hard count” of delegates who are completely bound to a candidate with no ability to change their vote. Looking narrowly at only that part of the delegate count leaves out a big part of the picture.
Lots of places will have delegate counts starting the evening of the Iowa caucuses though, why should you pay attention to the one at Election Graphs?
First and most importantly, I track a couple of statistics I have not seen anywhere else. Namely, the percentage of the remaining delegates each candidate needs to capture in order to win, and how much better (or worse) that is than how they have been doing so far. These tell you much more than a raw delegate count, because they also take into account the dwindling number of remaining delegates as things proceed.
So, for instance, looking at the famous 2008 Clinton vs Obama race with these metrics it was clear by early March that it was very very unlikely that Clinton would be able to catch up with Obama. Not impossible, but very unlikely, requiring Clinton to do better than she ever had before by a large margin to catch up… a margin that got bigger with every passing contest. Meanwhile the frenzy around the 2008 race continued on and on and on… long after it was clear to anyone really watching the math that it was over. So watch these numbers for an early sense of when the picture is really becoming clear.
Second, I also track all of these against the percent of delegates already allocated, not just against the date, which gives you a much better sense of how far along in the process things are, since the delegates available aren’t even remotely close to evenly distributed over time.
Third, while lots of places show current delegate counts, very few show you charts of how the delegate race proceeds over time. As they say “past performance does not guarantee future results”, but at the same time, it does give you an idea of the range of what is likely. Sure, something cataclysmic could happen to cause someone who has been routinely getting 60% of the delegates to suddenly only get 10% for the rest of the race, but it is unlikely. It would have to be a result of a massively disruptive change in the race, not the normal ups and downs of a campaign. So watch the time series charts.
There are a bunch of other little details here and there that politics and numbers geeks might like too.
And of course, it is a chance to support your local neighborhood amateur who does this for fun in their spare time. :-)
This is the first of three posts to introduce the delegate tracker, the next will be a “tour” going over all the new features on the site.
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.
[Edit 2016-01-27 03:18 UTC to add final note]
[Edit 2016-01-27 08:00 UTC to update graph]
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