John McCormack:
The March 15 Republican primaries will be the most important contests to date in determining who the GOP presidential nominee will be. Donald Trump would be in a strong position if he sweeps Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and Missouri on Tuesday. But mixed results for Trump could make it difficult for him to get the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination. A look at the calendar shows that Trump’s path to a majority isn’t certain even if he does pull off a clean sweep on Tuesday.
What to look for on March 15?
You can pretty much ignore North Carolina, which has 72 delegates up for grabs but awards them on a proportional basis. The difference between coming in first place at 40 percent in North Carolina and second place at 30 percent is 7 extra delegates.
In pure winner-take-all contests of Florida (99 delegates) and Ohio (66 delegates), the candidate who finishes in first place will get all of the delegates.
It is also possible to rack up a lot of delegates in Missouri (52 delegates) and Illinois (69 delegates). Both states award a little more than one-fifth of their delegates to the winner of the statewide vote. Most of their delegates are awarded by congressional district to the candidate who gets the most district-wide votes.
Voters in different congressional districts may pick different candidates, but unless the race is very close it’s more likely that one candidate will sweep most of each state’s congressional districts. In South Carolina, which also used a hybrid winner-take-all system, Donald Trump was able to win every congressional district and thus all of that state’s delegates even though he only won 32.5 percent of the statewide popular vote, 10 points ahead of Marco Rubio.
So March 15 could yield several different scenarios. A surprisingly poor showing for Trump in which he loses Florida, Ohio, and Missouri would make it very difficult for him to get 1,237 delegates. If Trump takes Florida and Illinois, but John Kasich wins Ohio and Ted Cruz wins Missouri, it would be a serious challenge for Trump to get a majority.
If Trump sweeps up almost all of the delegates on March 15, we’re almost certainly heading to a two-man race between Trump and Ted Cruz, in which Cruz would have a narrow but plausible path to stopping Trump from winning a majority of delegates.
In one scenario, Trump could sweep all four big primaries on March 15, then go on to win 11 of the 19 states remaining in the GOP race, and still be 78 delegates short of a majority.
In this scenario, Trump would go on to win Arizona, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Oregon, New Jersey, and New Mexico. But he would lose Utah, Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Washington, California, Montana, and South Dakota. In the race so far, Trump has been stronger in the East and weaker in the Midwest and the West.
If Trump gets close to a majority, he would still have a shot at winning the nomination on the first ballot if he could get enough unbound delegates. But in light of Trump’s increasingly divisive behavior, unbound delegates are increasingly unlikely to back him. If he falls short of 1,237 delegates on the first ballot, the convention must continue voting until someone gets a majority of delegates.
