Assessing Trump’s Path to 1,237

A look at the remaining contests shows how he could get there



About a month ago, after Donald Trump won the South Carolina primary and all of its delegates, we headlined a piece “The Hour is Growing Late to Stop Trump.” Well, the hour has grown later, and we have to ask the question: Has Trump been stopped?

Certainly not. And a look ahead at the remaining contests calls into question the ability of the other candidates, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, to prevent him from winning the requisite number of delegates to clinch or come close to clinching the Republican nomination.

The magic number is 1,237 delegates, and our own rough calculations show Trump just getting over the hump with 1,239. But that involves Trump winning the lion’s share of the delegates in places as diverse as Wisconsin, New York, Indiana, West Virginia, New Jersey, and California. Table 1 shows these projections, which represent our best guess as to the state of the race right now.


Table 1: Crystal Ball Republican delegate projections for remaining contests

Note: “Other” is made up of delegates committed to candidates who have now exited the race, expressly uncommitted delegates, and delegates who will remain technically unbound.



These projections are based off a few different factors, such as racial/ethnic demographics, voting history, religious populations, and regional primary voting so far, where available. The post-March 22 delegate starting point is based on The GreenPapers’ calculations.

In Wisconsin, Trump may benefit from a Cruz-Kasich split and also may hold the advantage in a number of congressional districts that have lower percentages of college graduates and lower median incomes. We see Kasich potentially winning a couple of districts with higher median incomes that performed strongly for Romney in the 2012 GOP primary. We also handed Cruz the heavily Republican Fifth District, as he has performed better among stalwart conservatives, and the Sixth District next door.

For upcoming Northeastern primaries, we used the primary vote in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont as a marker. We averaged the three candidates’ vote percentages from those states, then took the remaining vote (for the withdrawn candidates) and apportioned 50% of it to Kasich and 25% to both Cruz and Trump, resulting in Trump 47.5%, Kasich 35.0%, and Cruz 17.5%. In part, this was to see what would happen if Trump fell short of a majority in primaries outside of his home state of New York. In Connecticut, we said Trump would win every congressional district, but that Kasich would pick up six delegates via the state’s proportional method for allocating statewide delegates. Next door in Rhode Island, the heavily proportional statewide and district delegates work out to Trump winning eight of the 19 delegates in the Ocean State. In New York, we figured that Trump would get a slight home-state bump to win a majority statewide, and we also gave him a majority in about half the state’s districts, keeping him under in 14 seats to give Kasich 14 delegates from the Empire State. In Delaware, any Trump plurality would earn him all 16 delegates, which we foresee as likely in the First State. And in Pennsylvania, Kasich may give Trump a run for his money and do better than 35%, but we still see Trump as a slight favorite to win the 17 statewide delegates up for grabs on April 26.

Moving to May, we again looked at individual district data to help forge a projection in Indiana. With Trump’s success in Kentucky and the Appalachian parts of lower Ohio, we see him having the edge in most of the state’s four more southern districts. We also think it’s possible he can win the First District as it holds some similarities to districts in Illinois where his delegates found success. We handed Kasich the highly-educated suburban Fifth District, as well as the Third, which borders northern Ohio, and we gave Cruz the Second and Fourth Districts. On May 10, West Virginia, could very likely wind up being a winner-take-all state for Trump, which is how we projected it in this scenario. Considering his success in other parts of the Great Plains, we gave Cruz the winner-take-all state of Nebraska that same day.

The Pacific Northwest is harder to gauge, so we gave Trump narrow wins at 39% statewide in proportional Oregon and Washington, with Cruz and Kasich defeating Trump in a few congressional districts in the Evergreen State. Trump could very well win more than 40% in those states — or dip lower than we are projecting.

The June 7 contests push Trump over the top. We gave Cruz winner-take-all statewide wins in Montana and South Dakota, but that would be insufficient to hold back Trump. Based off an average of the Arizona and Texas primary vote, New Mexico would narrowly go to Trump, though the proportional system in the Land of Enchantment would award both Cruz and Trump 10 delegates (and Kasich four). But to reach 1,237 delegates, California is the key for Trump. Looking at district demographics, party registration, and GOP performance in the state’s 2014 all-party gubernatorial primary (looking at Republicans Neel Kashkari and Tim Donnelly), we ended up giving Trump the statewide win and the advantage in 32 congressional districts. Cruz won 18 districts and Kasich won three.

Will reality work out exactly like this? Surely not. Still, readers can refer back to this table throughout the primary season and track Trump’s progress. If he’s matching or exceeding these projections, he’s on his way. If he’s falling short, the chances of a contested convention rise. What is clear is that Trump cannot pass the threshold until the June 7 contests are completed.

Despite Trump’s growing lead, there may be just enough time for Cruz and/or Kasich to improve their standing and slow down Trump — to keep him enough below the magic number so that he may not be able to coax enough uncommitted delegates into his column for a first-ballot victory. Few would disagree that the anti-Trump forces have the tougher task at this stage of the nominating battle.

We realize that this is primarily a math game: Trump either gets to 1,237, or he doesn’t, and in the latter instance either the contest is resolved in the six weeks between the end of the primaries and the opening of the convention, or it goes all the way to the convention and perhaps to multiple ballots, something that hasn’t happened in most people’s lifetimes (1948 saw the GOP’s last multi-ballot convention). But it’s not entirely a math game. It’s also a perception game.

If Trump finishes, say, less than 100 delegates short, but he is still comfortably leading national polls of Republicans and wins statewide victories in places like California and New Jersey on the final day of voting (June 7), it’s hard to see how, practically, he wouldn’t be the nominee. Trump would have far more delegates than his rivals, and he would also be heading into the pre-convention period with major statewide victories. Only if Trump finishes 100 or more delegates short does the contested convention become a more prominent possibility. As we’ve previously stressed, there are a small number of unpledged delegates as well as delegates from other candidates that Trump may or may not able to win over in the interim from June 7 through the opening of the convention on July 18.

We are starting to get the distinct sense that many Republicans, including some in leadership, may not have the stomach to fight Trump all the way to the convention. As some Republicans put it to us earlier this week, they prefer the Twitter hashtag #NeverClinton rather than #NeverTrump. In other words, they’d rather the party unify behind Trump than allow Hillary Clinton to be president. Rallying behind the polarizing Trump may very well deliver the White House to Clinton anyway, though, and there is a real possibility that a credible third-party anti-Trump Republican will emerge at some point.

As this cycle has demonstrated anew, however, a lot can change. The barbaric attacks in Belgium on Tuesday hammer home that we don’t know what the future holds. At this point, we don’t expect the attacks to change the race all that much. The Paris attacks in November and Trump’s later proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country have likely strengthened his prospects, and Trump has been beating the drum for waterboarding in the two days since Brussels. We doubt there will be much outcry from GOP voters over Cruz’s post-Belgium plan to more heavily police Muslim neighborhoods, either, whatever one might think of it.

For anti-Trump forces, the urgent necessity of the moment is that Cruz and/or Kasich need to start pulling upsets against Trump and blunting his delegate edge if they are to have a realistic chance to defeat him.




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