This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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Wyoming allocated delegates in a two stage process. 12 were determined back on March 12th. At that point the count was Cruz 9, Rubio 1, Trump 1. One uncommitted delegate was elected as well. He appears to still be uncommitted.
On April 16th Wyoming completed their process, allocating their remaining 14 “normal” delegates at their state convention. All 14 delegates went to Cruz. There are three more delegate slots for party leaders. They have not yet expressed their preferences.
This once again appears to be a case of the Trump team not even bothering to “play” in Wyoming and just letting Cruz clean up essentially unopposed. This in a race where Trump needs every delegate.
In addition, since my last post there was an update in North Carolina that resulted in moving one delegate from the Trump column to the Carson column of all places. So the net change in the last week is Cruz +14, Carson +1, Trump -1.
This obviously represents less than the 57.07% of delegates Trump needed to be on pace for a win.
Time to look at some charts:
Looking at the raw delegate count, Cruz looks like he is catching up quickly. And he has been doing extremely well recently. But there is a problem. It is very late in the process.
Cruz’s win streak has succeeded in lowering his % of remaining delegates needed to win, but not by a lot. It has dropped from 83.68% to 82.80%. This is still a number that Cruz can not realistically reach.
So Trump. His 57.07% increased to 58.17%.
New York is next. Trump is expected to do very well in New York. But the specific line to watch is the 58.17% line. Translated into delegates, this means to be on track to get to a delegate majority, he needs at least 56 of the 95 delegates. The expectation seems to be that he will exceed this bar, probably by a significant margin.
Even if Trump got all 95 delegates though, it still wouldn’t completely undo the damage of Cruz’s winning streak. In that case Trump would need 52.69% of the remaining delegates. Trump had been down to 52.22% before his string of losses. So shutting everybody out in New York wouldn’t quite get him back there. Close though.
After New York, there are quite a few more states where Trump is expected to do very well and some of them are winner take all. We’re still right on the edge between an outright Trump win and a contested convention. Anybody who says either of those two outcomes is certain at this point is premature.
We’ll see what happens in New York shortly, and the “narrative” of the race will almost certainly turn again. In the meantime, let me update the comparisons to 2008 and 2012 that I did back on March 13th.
First of all just the % of delegates won:
Then the more important “% of remaining delegates needed to win”:
It is still possible for Trump to win outright. Barely. But it is very very clear that his path is dramatically different than the McCain or Romney patterns. In both of those cases, by this point the frontrunners were clearly the presumptive nominees, even though they hadn’t quite wrapped it up mathematically yet.
This year Trump still has a minority of the delegates, and he hadn’t even been trending in the right direction. We’re not in the “wrapping things up” stage, instead, we clearly still have a fight going on.
Which of course makes this all much more fun to watch than 2008 or 2012 were. :-)
[Update 2016-04-20 01:27 UTC: New delegate estimate from Georgia nets Cruz +1, Trump -1. This does not change the analysis above.]
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.
Clinton and Sanders left the Wyoming caucuses with a 7 to 7 delegate tie.
In the mean time, since Wisconsin Sanders has been winning the superdelegate race. The net change over that time has been Sanders +7, Clinton +2. This actually includes one delegate that actually did indeed switch from Clinton to Sanders (with a couple days as uncommitted in between). So far, that has been a very rare event. Perhaps it is the beginning of a trend? If so, I will of course note it here.
Adding up the changes since Wisconsin, we get Sanders +14, Clinton +9. This means Sanders has gotten an impressive 60.87% of recent delegates…
…which is not enough. Sanders needed to get better than 67.76% of the delegates to be on pace to catch up and win.
The percentage of the remaining delegates Sanders needs to win is now 67.84%. There have been some ups and downs, but basically Sanders had been able to keep things at 67.xx% since March 17th. This represents Sanders’ string of wins. Those wins have prevented Sanders’ situation from getting much worse, but critically he has not succeeded in actually bending his line downward to start heading to an actual win.
Clinton only needs 32.27% of the remaining delegates (including superdelegates) in order to win. This is not a high bar. To be absolutely clear here, this means Sanders could win every remaining contest by an absolutely stunning margin… and Clinton would still win the nomination because it wouldn’t be enough to catch up.
Of course, the Sanders argument is that if he did indeed continue winning almost every contest, the superdelegates would finally start coming to his side in large numbers, and would change those dynamics. Maybe. He has to actually do that first. And make sure that his efforts to sway the superdelegates don’t backfire and make them even more strongly committed to Clinton than they were before.
New York is up next of course. Clinton is currently leading the RCP poll average there by 14%. There are 247 delegates at stake. If the delegates in New York split according to current polls, then as a rough estimate Clinton will get 142 delegates and Sanders will get 105. That would leave Sanders needing 71.76% of the remaining delegates to catch up, and Clinton only needing 28.37% to get to the magic number and wrap things up.
The Sanders folks are tenacious, but actually winning the nomination would still take something catastrophic happening to Clinton’s campaign. The reason for Sanders to continue at this point is primarily to influence Clinton and pull her toward Sanders’ positions presumably. Unless the Sanders camp really is just hoping that Clinton will indeed implode at some point.
We will see.
[Update 2016-04-13 15:08 UTC – Superdelegate scan nets Clinton +4, Sanders +1. In addition an adjustment from Colorado yields Sanders +1, Clinton -1. Net for today’s changes, Clinton +3, Sanders +2.]
[Update 2016-04-17 02:20 UTC – Update from Colorado Democratic State Convention today. Net change: Sanders +2, Clinton -2.]
[Update 2016-04-17 14:19 UTC – Superdelegate scan nets Sanders +1, Clinton -1.]
[Update 2016-04-20 01:20 UTC – Superdelegate scan net: Clinton -2.]
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.
Saturday brought Republican results for DC, Guam and Wyoming. The number of delegates coming out of this was small, turnout was tiny, and there had been no polling. But the results were surprisingly bad for Trump. Between these three we ended up with:
Rubio +11, Cruz +10, Kasich +9, Trump +1
This by the way is much worse for Trump than the model in my last post predicted, since it used national polls in the absence of actual polls for these three places.
There were also 9 “uncommitted” delegates selected yesterday. These people essentially become like the Democratic superdelegates, in that they are free agents at the convention. If I find out their preferences, I’ll assign them to the candidate they support, but for now they remain TBD. With all the contests so far there are actually 22 of these now. It will be interesting to see if they make a difference.
In any case, with only 1 of 30 delegates from Saturday, or 3.33%, Trump fell very far short of the 54.39% of the delegates he needed to be on the path to an outright win instead of a contested convention.
Trump now needs 55.49% of the remaining delegates to win outright. This number is getting high. And the gap between what Trump has done so far (42.96% of delegates) is getting larger. Nobody else got what they needed either of course, so everybody’s numbers got worse, not just Trump’s.
Of course, we still have some big winner take all and winner take most states coming up, so time to refresh the poll based predictions for Tuesday and see what they look like now. As usual, using RCP poll averages and delegate distribution rules from Green Papers.
Florida – 99 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 41.4%, Rubio 23.3%, Cruz 19.7%, Kasich 9.6%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 99
North Carolina – 72 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 35.6%, Cruz 23.8%, Rubio 13.0%, Kasich 10.4%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 31, Cruz 21, Rubio 11, Kasich 9
Illinois – 69 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Trump 34.3%, Cruz 25.3%, Kasich 18.3%, Rubio 14.8%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 35, Cruz 15, Kasich 11, Rubio 8
Ohio – 66 delegates – March 15th:
- Poll averages: Kasich 35.3%, Trump 33.3%, Cruz 20.0%, Rubio 5.8%
- Delegate estimate: Kasich 66
Missouri – 52 delegates – March 15th:
- Using only recent poll: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 29.0%, Rubio 9.0%, Kasich 8.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 52
Northern Marianas – 9 delegates – March 15th:
- No polls, using national avg: Trump 36.0%, Cruz 21.8%, Rubio 18.0%, Kasich 12.0%
- Delegate estimate: Trump 9
The main difference from the estimate a few days ago is that now Kasich is ahead in Ohio, and wins the 66 delegates there. This makes a big difference.
Adding these up:
Trump +226, Kasich +86, Cruz +36, Rubio +19
Trump would get 61.6% of the delegates on Tuesday. Which even without Ohio would be above the 55.49% he needs to be tracking toward a clean win.
The new totals would be:
Trump 690, Cruz 408, Rubio 185, Kasich 149, Others 15
Trump would have 47.7% of the delegates. Still not a majority.
When you do all the math at the end of all that, Trump would need 53.37% of the remaining delegates to cleanly win a majority of the delegates. That would still be a substantial improvement from what he had been doing so far.
But there would be more winner take all states coming up. And Cruz, Rubio and Kasich would be so far behind that the scenarios where they would catch up would be extremely far fetched. None of them can win outright. At best they can block Trump. Do all three of them stay in? Do their donors continue to support them in a bid where the only real goal is a contested convention? Can they really keep blocking him from getting a majority of the delegates through a long slog from now until June 7th?
The “Trump wins Florida, but loses Ohio” scenario is the one where it would be premature to say either “Trump will win this outright”, or “Contested Convention”. Instead, we’ll still be hovering between those possibilities, waiting for more states to weigh in.
This might go on awhile.
Finally, as I did with the Democrats earlier, a quick look back, comparing Trump today with Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008.
First, just looking at the percent of delegates they had as the race progressed:
You can see that Trump is behind where either McCain or Romney were at about the same point in the race. But as I’ve said many times, percentages of delegates so far is the wrong way to look at things. Instead, you want to look at the % of the remaining delegates that are needed:
You can see that at this point in the race, both Romney and McCain needed less than 50% of the remaining delegates to win. Trump is way behind that pace. But it was also not until right around now in the races that McCain and Romney really started to pull away. Trump has a harder road here, but with a handful of big winner take all states it is not too late for him to start a downward dive to a flat out win.
But if his line doesn’t manage a full on turn downward, eventually it will curve up, and we’ll end up at the contested convention.
Ohio is close. We will have to wait until Tuesday to see how this thing is going…
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 22:17 UTC to add sentence about other candidate’s numbers getting worse, not just Trump’s.]
[Edit 22:32 UTC to add link to the post on the Democrats.]
Once again the headline out of a state is Trump winning. In Nevada the delegate count was:
14 Trump, 7 Rubio, 6 Cruz, 2 Carson, 1 Kasich
To be on the glide path for a 1st ballot victory though, Trump needed 15 of the 30 delegates. So he fell slightly short.
Now, don’t misunderstand. This is still an impressive victory, and looking at the upcoming states he has a clearer path to victory than anybody else. His margins were higher in Nevada than many people expected. But if today’s performance was replicated in all of the other states, Trump would come to the convention with more delegates than anybody else, but not the majority needed to win outright. Of course as we continue more people will drop out, and the amount with which states give bonuses to the winners increases, so that still seems like an unlikely final outcome.
Right now Trump continues to do everything he needs to do to win. Lets look at some of the graphs, then we’ll do a quick look at the March 1st “Super Tuesday” states.
The overall delegate count is now:
81 Trump, 17 Cruz, 17 Rubio, 6 Kasich, 5 Carson, and 7 for people who have dropped out
Trump continues to dominate. Lets look at this as percentages:
The “winners” here were actually Cruz, Rubio and Carson. Each of them improved their proportion of delegates with Nevada’s results. Trump actually went down. He doesn’t have to worry too much about that though. He still has a majority of the delegates allocated so far, and he is far far ahead of any of his opponents.
Finally, lets look at the “% of remaining delegates needed to win”, which I argue is the single most important thing to look at to understand where the race really is:
Because Trump got 14 delegates instead of 15 delegates, his line goes up a little bit. (Remember, on this chart down is good, up is bad.) The red line goes from needing 49.39% of the remaining delegates to needing 49.42%. This is a relatively trivial difference though. It is basically flat. Trump’s situation is very close to unchanged.
Meanwhile, the other lines keep going up at a decent pace. Kasich and Carson add about 0.6% to their numbers. Cruz and Rubio add about 0.4%.
This should be obvious, but the more they lose, the harder it is to catch up.
Many people are still talking about how as consolidation happens, the remaining non-Trumps will do better and the picture will change. Maybe, but nobody new announced they were dropping out after the Nevada results (yet anyway). So it looks like we may still go into March 1st with a five person race.
Lets run a hypothetical using current polling on the Super Tuesday states and see where we end up using RCP poll averages for the five remaining candidates. We’ll make delegate estimates based on the specific delegate allocation rules in each state.
Texas (155 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 37.3% Cruz, 28.0% Trump, 11.7% Rubio, 4.7% Carson, 3.0% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 99 Cruz, 56 Trump
Georgia (76 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 35.0% Trump, 22.7% Cruz, 19.3% Rubio, 7.3% Carson, 6.3% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 50 Trump, 26 Cruz
Tennessee (58 delegates)
- Last poll from November so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 37 Trump, 21 Cruz
Alabama (50 delegates)
- Last poll from December so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 32 Trump, 18 Cruz
Virginia (49 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 28% Trump, 22% Rubio, 19% Cruz, 7% Kasich, 7% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 17 Trump, 13 Rubio, 11 Cruz, 4 Kasich, 4 Carson
Oklahoma (43 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 32.5% Trump, 25.0% Cruz, 15.5% Rubio, 7.0% Carson, 0.0% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 17 Trump, 15 Cruz, 11 Rubio
Massachusetts (42 delegates)
- Current poll averages: 41.0% Trump, 17.0% Rubio, 10.0% Cruz, 7.5% Kasich, 3.5% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 23 Trump, 9 Rubio, 6 Cruz, 4 Kasich
Arkansas (40 delegates)
- Using only February poll: 27% Cruz, 23% Trump, 23% Rubio, 11% Carson, 4% Kasich
- Delegate estimates: 18 Cruz, 13 Rubio, 9 Trump (giving Rubio the 2nd place finish breaking 23% tie by alphabetical order)
Minnesota (38 delegates)
- Last poll from January so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 18 Trump, 11 Cruz, 9 Rubio
Wyoming (29 delegates)
- No polls at all, using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 12 Trump, 7 Cruz, 5 Rubio, 3 Kasich, 2 Carson
Alaska (28 delegates)
- Last poll from January so using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 13 Trump, 8 Cruz, 7 Rubio
Vermont (16 delegates)
- No polls at all, using national average: 33.6% Trump, 20.4% Cruz, 16.4% Rubio, 9.8% Kasich, 7.4% Carson
- Delegate estimates: 10 Trump, 6 Cruz
OK, that’s it. Adding all that up…
Estimated Super Tuesday delegate totals: 294 Trump, 246 Cruz, 67 Rubio, 11 Kasich, 6 Carson
That gives Trump 47.1% of the super Tuesday delegates, Cruz 39.4%, and everyone else much less.
Trump needs 49.4% of the delegates to be on the path to an outright win though! So 47.1% would be in the realm where heading to a contested convention might be possible! Still unlikely, as the additional states in March will add up fast, and more candidates are likely to drop out. Still though, possible!
Adding in the existing delegates, we’d have a post-Super Tuesday race that looks like this:
375 Trump, 263 Cruz, 84 Rubio, 17 Kasich, 11 Carson, 7 for candidates who have already dropped out
Now, these are estimates based on current polling, and very few of these states were well polled as of this post, so much of the above is based on one or two polls, or using the national averages rather than state polls. And I had to make the assumption that all congressional districts would mirror state results (which is unlikely to be true). And Wyoming actually elects individual delegates rather than doing things based on candidate preference, so it may be an oddball in the end. And of course things are likely to change further before people actually vote next Tuesday. But… the general outlines of this aren’t likely to be too far off.
If this is even remotely close to where we are on March 2nd, we end up with Trump very close to the 50% of delegate mark. (The above has him EXACTLY at that mark.) He would need just a LITTLE bit more to actually push him over the edge to a clean win.
The flip side of that though is the combination of all the anti-Trumps would need just a LITTLE bit more in order to have this be on the path to a contested convention. I mentioned earlier that this is still an unlikely outcome. It is. After March 1st, the disproportionality of delegates given to the winner increases, and after March 15th we have pure winner take all states as well. If Trump remains in the overall lead, even with a plurality, then that is all it takes to push him over the edge.
If the anti-Trumps want to have any hope here at all, they need to be in a position by mid-March that they can win not just a few, but many states of the winner-take-most and winner-take-all variety. And frankly, the most likely scenario even then is just forcing a contested convention where Trump still has the most delegates, not someone else winning outright.
The anti-Trumps would have a hard road to get to an outright win. Cruz would need 56.8% of the remaining delegates to catch up and win after March 1st if things played out like my estimates above.
If you had to make a guess based on what we know now, a Trump nomination is far more likely than any other… and with an outright delegate majority on the first ballot, not after a contested convention.
6 days until Super Tuesday. We’ll see how close my estimates above turn out to be.
Update 2016-02-26 07:17 UTC – On February 22nd New Hampshire certified the results of their primary. In the final tally Trump had one more delegate than previous estimates, and Rubio one less. This did not seem worthy of a separate post, but a note here seemed appropriate. The totals on ElectionGraphs.com have been updates appropriately. This does not substantively change any of the analysis above.
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 16:28 UTC to correct math on % of remaining Cruz would need after Super Tuesday, I’d originally shown a higher number around 61%.]
[Edit 2016-02-27 17:06 UTC to fix place where Kasich had been autocorrected to Quash.]
[Edit 2016-02-28 22:03 UTC to add dropped out candidates to the after Super Tuesday estimate.]
|
Romney |
Obama |
| Romney Best Case |
294 |
244 |
| Current Status |
206 |
332 |
| Obama Best Case |
190 |
348 |
No states were called between 01:45 UTC and 02:00 UTC, but a ton were called between 02:00 UTC and 02:15 UTC:
- Romney: KS, LA, NE-All, NE-1, ND, SD, TX, WY, MS
- Obama: MI, NY, NJ
All of these were no brainer expected states, except for Michigan. Michigan is the first state of the night to be called where the margin was less than 5% in the polls, so winning this state made a difference between the “best cases” that I present. Obama was ahead here by 4.5%, so a win here was predicted, but it was a close state and one that Romney really needed.
As of the final update I made on election day, Michigan was the tipping point state. That means Romney had to win all the states he was doing better in than Michigan PLUS Michigan in order to win. He just lost Michigan, which means he now needs a state he was further behind in that Michigan in order to win.
This is very bad news to Romney. His path to victory is now not quite impossible, but very close. Let’s look:
With all the states he has already won, plus the uncalled states where Romney was ahead by more than 5%, he had 190 electoral votes. Then the areas he was ahead in:
- Nebraska 2nd (1): 3.8% Romney lead
- North Carolina (15): 1.4% Romney lead
That gets Romney to 206. He needs 63 more electoral votes. Looking at the remaining states that haven’t yet been called:
- Iowa (6): 2.0% Obama lead
- Florida (29): 2.3% Obama lead
- Colorado (9): 2.4% Obama lead
- New Hampshire (4): 2.8% Obama lead
- Maine 2nd (1): 2.8% Obama lead
- Virginia (13): 3.6% Obama lead
- Pennsylvania (20): 4.8% Obama lead
- Nevada (6): 4.8% Obama lead
If Romney wins all of those through Pennsylvania, it gets him to 288 electoral votes, which wins him the Presidency. If he doesn’t win Pennsylvania to win, he needs every other one of those states, including Nevada, which would get him to 274. If he does win Pennsylvania, then he could afford to lose Virginia, New Hampshire and Maine’s 2nd (and Nevada).
But that is a very tall order! And there will be another update coming soon…
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have clinched the nomination. If they get above 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. The first chart is by date, the second is by “% of Delegates Already Allocated”. These numbers include estimates of the eventual results of multi-stage caucus processes which will be refined as the later stages occur.
Very shortly after my update yesterday, Green Papers updated their Wyoming soft count numbers again. They had been Romney 22, Santorum 2, Paul 1, and 4 TBD. They are now Romney 23, Santorum 2, Paul 1, and 3 TBD. So one of the uncommitted delegates moved to the Romney column. So Romney +1 delegate for the day. Very minor change.
In terms of “% of remaining needed to win”:
- Romney: 40.85% -> 40.80%
- Santorum: 77.61% -> 77.68%
- Gingrich: 86.85% -> 86.92%
- Paul: 94.16% -> 94.25%
- Other: 99.65% -> 99.74%
I believe there are also two New York superdelegates that have come out for Romney that have been tracked by DCW that Green Papers hasn’t added to their totals yet. Since Green Papers now incorporates the DCW numbers, I don’t add them separately as I did in the early days. If I did I’d have to do a lot of extra tracking to avoid double counting, so I’ll wait for Green Papers to add them to their master soft count, which I expect will happen soon.
Charts from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have clinched the nomination. If they get above 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. The first chart is by date, the second is by “% of Delegates Already Allocated”. These numbers include estimates of the eventual results of multi-stage caucus processes which will be refined as the later stages occur.
Wyoming and Colorado both have caucus type delegate allocation systems, where local caucuses earlier in the year are actually just the start of multi-month multi-stage processes. Both Colorado and Wyoming had their state conventions this weekend finishing off the delegate selection in those states.
Compared to the earlier estimates based on caucus results, the non-Romneys got crushed. Romney gained delegates. Everybody else lost delegates.
This is not surprising. It is common for the “clear winner” to end up taking far more delegates in the end than it looked like they would given the “straw poll” results at the first stage.
Looking more specifically…
- Colorado: The estimates after the caucuses were Santorum 13, Romney 12, Gingrich 4, Paul 4, and 3 uncommitted. This now becomes Romney 13, Santorum 6, and 17 uncommitted. All 36 delegates from Colorado are officially uncommitted, but using the current stated preferences of the delegates we have a net today from Colorado of Romney +1, Gingrich -4, Paul -4, Santorum -7.
- Wyoming: The estimates after the caucuses were Romney 11, Santorum 8, Paul 6, Gingrich 2, and 2 uncommitted. This now becomes Romney 22, Santorum 2, Paul 1, and 4 uncommitted. In Wyoming the delegates are bound. The net for the day in Wyoming is Romney +11, Gingrich -2, Paul -5, Santorum -6
Totaling the day we have Romney +12, Gingrich -6, Paul -9, Santorum -13. This does not look like a good day for the non-Romneys. Especially for Santorum. I guess dropping out of the race doesn’t help one’s ability to compete for delegates.
Notice though that we actually lost 16 delegates from the totals as some delegates that were predicted to go for specific candidates ended up uncommitted to any candidate. This actually increases the pool of potentially available delegates. In theory this improves the situation slightly for Gingrich and Paul, because, hey, they might still convince those uncommitted delegates to vote for them. (And indeed, some reports say many of those uncommitted delegates aren’t ready to support anybody else yet, but are not for Romney at this point either.) Santorum lost enough delegates that his situation actually gets worse anyway.
In terms of “% of remaining delegates needed to win”:
- Romney: 42.49% -> 40.85%
- Santorum: 77.56% -> 77.61%
- Gingrich: 87.54% -> 86.85%
- Paul: 94.70% -> 94.16%
I should also mention, that having these additional 16 delegates not committed brings the total number of delegates allocated by the estimates we use (the Green Papers soft count) back under 50% of the total number of delegates. Which actually means that the candidates with no delegates right now (Bachman, Huntsman, Perry, random others) are now no longer mathematically eliminated, and could catch up and win by capturing 99.65% of the remaining delegates. If they were actually on the ballot on all of the remaining states. Which they are not. :-)
So, uh, anyway… Romney still wins.
Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. Rather than the date on the x-axis, we show the “% of Delegates Already Allocated” as this better represents the progress through the race. Note that these numbers include estimates of the eventual results of multi-stage caucus processes which will be refined as the later stages occur.
So, first of all, that final congressional district in Michigan went for Santorum, so 2 more delegates for Santorum, making the final Michigan numbers 15 for Romney and 15 for Santorum, which was an exact match for my Scenario 2 in the post gaming out Arizona and Michigan.
Secondly, we have Wyoming. It is very important with Wyoming (as with similar caucuses previously) to point out that no national delegates were actually allocated in Wyoming yet. There was a straw poll, which doesn’t matter, and local delegates were selected for the next stage in the caucus process that will eventually select delegates to the national conventions. Ideally, each local delegate who was selected would be polled for their presidential preferences, and that would be used to predict results at the next level, etc. But that would be a ton of work, and nobody is doing that. Our source for these things, The Green Papers is doing the estimating by using the straw poll numbers for all candidates who got more than 5%. These estimates WILL change (perhaps significantly!) when the later caucus stages happen, but for now that is what we have. Green Papers estimates Wyoming as: Romney 10, Santorum 8, Paul 6, Gingrich 2.
And so when we pump this into the grinder and look at the “% of remaining needed to win” charts that I argue are the best way to see what is really happening… we find out… EVERYBODY LOSES. All four candidates in the race got delegates since my last update yesterday, but none of them got the delegates at the rate they would need to in order to get to 1144. Romney of course came closest. He got 10 out of 28 delegates today, or 35.7% of the delegates. But he needed to get 49.3% of the delegates (at least 14 of today’s 28) to actually be on pace to get to 1144.
Romney is still way ahead though. Right now he needs 49.5% of the remaining delegates to win. Santorum is in second needing 55.2% of the remaining delegates to win.
We are still fundamentally in a state where if Romney continues the way he has been, he will get to 1144, but very very late in the process… but with the possibility of the non-Romney’s blocking him still real. The non-Romney’s only have to do a little better than they have been to block Romney. One of the non-Romney’s actually catching up and winning gets to be an increasingly remote possibility as we move on though. Still not impossible. Just getting very hard. You would basically need consolidation around one non-Romney at the same time that Romney himself lost a significant amount of support.
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