Brad Todd:
Sometime around 10 p.m. last night, from the gaudy lobby of his namesake skyscraper, Donald J. Trump stood behind a podium and professed his love for the people of the five Northeastern states that held primaries yesterday, capping a three-week stretch in which his campaign was one long rant about how the Republican nomination rules are “rigged” or “crooked.” He’s been half right. The system is rigged — but it’s rigged for his benefit and against his opponents.
Trump came out of yesterday’s election sweep with 944 delegates. His quest for the magic number of 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination before the Cleveland convention this July is dependent on his ability to win in Indiana next week and post solid victories in California and New Jersey on June 7.
Before yesterday, Trump had won a majority of the votes in only one state — his home state of New York. He’d only gotten close in Massachusetts, Mississippi, and the retiree havens of Florida, Nevada, and Arizona.
Before the campaign moved to his home region of the Acela corridor, Trump’s average vote performance was 36 percent — yet he had 46 percent of the delegates awarded. Precisely because of the bias in the Republican process, Trump spent all spring picking up delegates he did not deserve based on his portion of the popular vote.
Unlike the Democratic rules, the GOP rules place extra value on winning each state’s primary. Some states allow the statewide winner to grab the entire state delegation — Trump did that in Arizona and Florida. Other states enable the winner to grab a disproportionate share of delegates based on their victories in congressional districts. In Missouri, Trump used that quirk in the rules to get 37 delegates to Cruz’s meager 15, even through Trump bested Cruz by only 2,000 votes out of 900,000 cast there.
The Republican process is notable also for what it lacks: the unelected “super-delegates” that have propped up Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side even in the face of an avalanche of primary losses. These unbound delegates are the emergency brake in the Democratic engine to stop a runaway renegade nomination, and they are performing exactly that function against Senator Bernie Sanders.
Democrats allocate 14.9 percent of their total delegate haul to these insiders. If Republicans did likewise, the GOP pool for earned delegates would be reduced by 368. From Trump’s weak performance attracting the support of elected officials — he has but one GOP Senator, Senator Jeff Sessions, behind his bid — it’s safe to assume he’d have few of those if they were part of the GOP system.
Coming out of yesterday’s East Coast primaries, Trump had 944 earned delegates. But if the 2,472 Republican delegates had been allocated in a manner similar to the that of Democratic system, with proportional allocations, he would be sitting somewhere around 707 delegates.
