Battle for Delegates

Vanadium 50

The new numbers are that Gov. Romney needs 39% of the remaining delegates, and has been getting 57% thus far. So the 13% fall becomes 18% now.

Put another way, Sen. Santorum needs 81% of the remaining delegates to win on the 1st ballot.

Tosh5457

I've seen from many of your posts that you really hate Ron Paul for some reason. Gingrich should drop out too, do you think he has a chance?

jduster

For simplicity sake, I assumed Romney would win all of the western states and the north-eastern states. I assumed Santorum would win the southern states, as well as Middle America.

I looked at the delegate counts and did the math.

Mitt Romney will get 1144 (excess of 28) delegates, but it will take him all the way to the last primary in June to do that. Santorum will get a huge boost in May, and reach up to 777 delegates.

Essentially, Santorum has a very slim chance of winning, but can effectively slow down Mitt Romney.

jduster

Neither have a chance. Both should drop.

Gokul43201

Did you take into account the different rules applied to different states' primaries? For instance, Texas' 155 delegates are awarded proportionally, while California's 170 delegates ALL go to the winner.

Evo

Here is today's tally.

Romney - 652

Santorum - 269

Gingrich - 140

Also running - Paul - 67

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...ate_count.html

turbo

That pretty much wraps things up, IMO. I wonder if Mittens is stupid enough to follow Palin's advice and "go rogue" in his VP choice... I can't see him picking any of his primary adversaries.

Jimmy Snyder

I'm pretty sure that California's system is winner take all on a congressional district level, not state-wide. However, I haven't been able to find a definitive answer to that in my google searches. Perhaps someone can do better than I.

There are a number of places that do not have electoral college votes and yet do have delegates to the Republican convention. I don't know what the logic for that is, but there are two facts concerning this practice that I point out.

1. They get an enormous number of delegates for their size.
Guam - 9
Northern Marianas Islands - 9
American Virgin Islands - 7
American Samoa - 9
Puerto Rico - 23
Washington D.C - 19
Total count 76, 3.3% of the total 2286 delegates. According to the 2010 census, they comprise 4.7 million people out of 308 million total population or approx 1.5%

2. Romney got almost all of the delegates.
Romney - 74
Gingrich - 1
Unallocated - 1

Evo

Sigh, no one reads my posts, it's by district.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...ate_count.html

Jimmy Snyder

Sorry. But don't be so hard on the others. I think I'm the only one.

Evo

Gokul43201

Oops! Okay, that changes my prediction by about 50 delegates.

jduster

I did the math.

For simplicity sake: Romney wins the west, the northeast. Santorum wins the south and middle America.

Santorum will get 777 delegates at most.

Romney gets 1162 delegates (28 above the needed minimum) BUT it would take him to every single state and he would not win until the final state, Utah has had its primary.

Santorum won't win, but he will be successful in dragging out the process to June.

TLDR: Romney will narrowly avoid a brokered convention.

Gokul43201

Not sure what you mean by "wins". Are you splitting the states' delegates by some projection of the results or are you giving all of a state's delegates to the winner? For instance, how many delegates are you giving to Santorum from Texas? All, nearly all, more than half, or about a third?

Recent polling from TX has Romney essentially neck-to-neck with Santorum, each of them getting about a third of the delegates.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...mary-1598.html

Office_Shredder

Here's somebody who seems to have done some real work in figuring this out (in particular knowing all the rules for delegate allocation)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...s-it-over.html

Gokul43201

Nice. So their estimate puts Romney over 1400 when all delegates are pledged and counted. That's a lot higher than my somewhat conservative guess of 1250 from a few days ago.