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Trump may be 85 delegates short of a lock [Greg Laden's Blog]
Using a combination of polling data and information in this discussion at FiveThirtyEight by Nate Silver, I’ve estimated Donald Trump’s delegate take for the remaining primaries. He currently has 845 pledged delegates, and will need 1237 pledged delegates to “lock” the convention, meaning, that he will automatically win the nomination plus/minus as yet unspecified shenanigans.
My estimate puts him at 1152 delegates, or 85 delegates short. Here’s the data:
I highlighted Pennsylvania because it is fairly large and has, possibly, the most uncertainty. This estimate may be higher than it should be. The states set at zero are winner take all states where Trump is simply not favored, but if he ends up winning in one or two of those states, this would bring him closer to the required threshold. However, overall this series of estimates is either probably pretty close or relatively optimistic.
Even though 85 is not a large number, it will be difficult for Trump to close this gap. Throughout the primary season, Trump has not played the ground game, and Cruz has. That’s why I picked the “Trump shooting himself in the head” picture for the top of the post.
Here’s what I mean by that. Say a state awards 10 pledged delegates to you, and 12 to your opponent. Your opponent. Your opponent is a really great guy, I mean, really great, everybody loves him, and he knows, really knows, how to close a deal. So he figures he’s closed the deal and moves on to the next primary. But you, being a more experienced politician with a ground game, start making calls. You got a 10-12 split, and that will be reflected at the convention when this state casts the first ballot, but after that, the delegates at the convention will be to some degree able to change their vote on the next ballot. So you make these calls, and make sure that all of your own supporters show up at the right time and place to position themselves as national convention delegates. So when the national convention happens, you have 18 people who like you and your opponent has only 4. That does not matter for the first ballot, but it give you a win in that state for the second and beyond ballots.
It is not quite that simple, and the lack of simplicity makes your ground game stronger. There are rules that vary somewhat across states that say that only some of the delegates are free to choose on the second ballot. There are also unpledged delegates from most states, and they vary in number and they vary in how much influence you may have over them. So you expend your resources efficiently to maximally bring delegates, both pledged and unpledged, into your fold. At the end of the day, you win the nomination. And maybe your name is Ted.
I don’t think anybody outside the campaigns has a good idea of what might happen on the second ballot. Even within the campaigns there has to to be a lot of uncertainty. It will be an interesting convention!
A bit of discussion on this on the Rachel Maddow Show:
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/04/20/trump-may-be-85-delegates-short-of-a-lock/
