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Can Donald Trump Lock the Nomination? [Greg Laden's Blog]
There is almost no way that Donald trump will get to the Republican National Convention with anything less than a fairly strong majority of pledged delegates. But can he get there with the 1237 delegates needed to lock the nomination on the first ballot?
I made a list of upcoming contests and estimated for some of them. Trump’s delegate take using the oversimplified method of multiplying the percentage of available delegates with Trump’s percentage according to the most recent available polls. This slightly underestimates the number of delegates since the actual percentages are broken down to the exclusion of “undecided” and minor candidates who were in the polls but not the context, etc. However, it can be more inaccurate because many of these contests are not exactly proportional but kind of.
Some states don’t have usable polling data, so I put Trump’s percentage at 40, which is the average for all the cases where there are polling data.
Five upcoming states are winner take all. Given the fact that Trump seems to win a lot, and will campaign his New York Vallues Ass off in those states, I assume he will win in every case (this might be wildly wrong, but he is generally ahead, so I’m sticking to that story). So in those states he earns 100% of the available delegates.
When I add this all up, and add in the delegates already assigned, Trump ends up with 1158.46 pledged delegates, or 78.54 short of a lock.
That is a shade over 10% of the remaining delegates. If Cruz or Kasich pull do better than expected, this would clearly put Trump too far away from the 1237 number, but if either stumbles and/or Trump does really great things, I mean, great things, and believe me he can do those great things, he’s always doing great things, in some of the upcoming deals, I mean, primaries, he can probably close that gap.
My money is on him not closing the gap, but it is absolutely in the range of possibilities.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/04/18/can-donald-trump-lock-the-nomination/
