GETTING RID OF THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES’ CHAFF

A lot of people criticize the primaries, but I think they are absolutely essential to the education of the President of the United States. ~ Pierre Salinger 

To no one’s surprise we’re being bombarded by never-ending media accounts of the status of the 2016 US Presidential campaigns, primaries and caucuses. Most of this onslaught involves chaff rather than wheat buds. Thus, diminishing returns set in for me a while ago. This blog attempts to unearth more wheat buds rather than chaff.

The challenges facing the Democrats and Republicans – especially the Republicans – have been manifest, especially the fantasy of a “contested” convention in mid-July for Republicans in Cleveland, Ohio. Doesn’t even Cleveland deserve better?

The concept of a contested or brokered convention solely rests on none of the candidates having the requisite number of delegates needed to assure him (or her, perhaps for the Democrats) for the nomination on the first round of votes. For Republicans this magic number of delegates is 1237; for the Democrats, it’s 2382. The voting procedures and delegate rules for each political party are obscure and byzantine – probably initiated during the Crusades. Virtually no one seems to understand these rules, probably just the way each party wants it.

Currently, (Mar 31, 2016) Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Repubs, has 736 pledged delegates (501 short of the magic number). He has greatly benefited by nearly $2 billion in free media exposure so far; $400 million just in February, which is about as much as Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz received together. Hillary Clinton, the Dems front-runner has 1243 pledged delegates (1139 short of the magic number, not including the Dems’ super-delegates, who may be some politico-combination of Superman and Batman as near as I can tell, although I haven’t yet seen “Dawn of Justice,” so I remain uninformed.

My take on all the machinations surrounding the alleged Olympian importance of delegate counts and up-coming possibilities for the conventions is that they’re mostly chaff-like self-aggrandizing activities designed to promote the Dems and Repubs, the candidates, and of course the media itself.

But I’ve decided that a straightforward summation of each remaining candidate’s delegates by state can be improved to be a more insightful indicator, a wheat bud if you will, of the eventually November election. If you’re listening only to the media the election seems imminent, but it’s actually 221 days from now.

Table 1 shows the basic delegate numbers by state and candidate that I will modify below.

TABLE 1: DELEGATE COUNTS for 2016 US Presidential Election

		Number of Delegates (as of 3/30/16)**
		Democrats		Republicans
State	2012 Election Winner*	CLINTON	SANDERS	TRUMP	CRUZ	KASICH
Alabama	R	44	9	36	13	0
Alaska	R	3	13	14	0	0
Arizona	5-10R	44	30	58	0	0
Arkansas	R	22	10	16	15	0
California	D
Colorado	5-10D	28	38
Connecticut	D
Delaware	D
Washington, DC	D			0	0	9
Florida	U5D	141	70	99	0	0
Georgia	5-10R	73	29	42	18	0
Hawaii	D	8	17	11	7	0
Idaho	R	5	17	12	20	0
Illinois	D	76	73	53	9	5
Indiana	R
Iowa	5-10D	23	21	7	8	1
Kansas	R	9	24	9	24	1
Kentucky	R			17	15	7
Louisiana	R	37	14	18	18	0
Maine	D	9	16	9	12	2
Maryland	D
Massachusetts	D	46	45	22	4	8
Michigan	5-10D	63	67	25	17	17
Minnesota	D	31	46	8	13	0
Mississippi	R	32	4	24	13	0
Missouri	5-10R	34	34	25	15	0
Montana	R
Nebraska	R	10	15
Nevada	5-10D	20	15	14	6	1
New Hampshire	5-10D	9	15	11	3	4
New Jersey	D
New Mexico	D
New York	D
North Carolina	U5R	59	45	29	27	9
North Dakota	R
Ohio	U5D	81	62	0	0	66
Oklahoma	R	17	21	13	15	0
Oregon	D
Pennsylvania	5-10D
Rhode Island	D
South Carolina	R	39	14	50	0	0
South Dakota	R
Tennessee	R	44	23	33	16	0
Texas	R	147	75	48	104	0
Utah	R	6	26	0	40	0
Vermont	D	0	16	8	0	8
Virginia	U5D	62	33	17	8	5
Washington	D	9	25
West Virginia
Wyoming
Total Delegates		1231	962	728	440	143
**Winner of primary shown in bold italic.
*D=Democratic win in 2012 presidential vote; U5D=under 5% Democratic win in 2012; 5-10D=between 5 to 10% Democratic win in 2012. R=Republican win in 2012 presidential vote; U5R=under 5% Republican win in 2012; 5-10R=between 5 to 10% Republican win in 2012.
Sources: RealClearPolitics and Wikipedia.

The total delegate counts shown in the above table for each candidate are not the same as the official counts. That’s because for reasons of geographic and political efficiency I haven’t included the delegate allocations from primaries in the Northern Marianas Islands, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands. I offer consolation to you islanders, but we can certainly get the general drift of which of the 5 remaining candidates are doing well or not at this point without these geographically far-flung primaries. As further justification for these places’ omission, no resident of these areas can actually vote in the US presidential election. Go figure.

In case you’re wondering, the Northern Mariana Islands had their presidential primary on March 15, where the winners were Clinton and Trump. These 15 islands are officially known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI; Chamorro: Sankattan Siha Na Islas Mariånas) and is one of 5 inhabited American insular areas. It is one of two territories with US "commonwealth" status; the other is debt-ridden Puerto Rico. With Guam (to the South), these islands comprise the Mariana Islands archipelago, in the north-western Pacific Ocean. The capital, Saipan, is 5700 miles from San Francisco. From SFO, it takes a mere 25 hours of flying and 2 stops, to get to Saipan’s beaches. The 2010 US Census counted 53,833 people in the CNMI. So now you know.

But back to the mainland primaries. Using the information in Table 1, I ran a scenario to see how robust each party’s candidates’ delegate votes are; to mimic an actual open election. I assigned a likelihood of each of the current candidates actually receiving election-day votes in each state, based on the 2012 Presidential election results shown in the table’s second column. In this way, I weighted the delegate counts by the 2012 election outcomes to provide a clearer, wheatier sense of how close (or far) each party’s candidates are from one another.

Here are my assigned weights. I gave full weight to delegates earned by candidates in the party that won the state by more than a 10% margin in 2012, labelled D or R in the 2nd column. If the 2012 vote margin of victory was between 5% and 10% (labelled 5-10D or 5-10R), I gave a 90% weight to the winning party’s 2016 delegates and a 67% weight to the 2012 losing party’s delegates. If the 2012 vote margin was less than 5% (labelled U5D or U5R), I gave the winning party’s delegates a 95% weight and an 85 % weight to the 2012 losing party’s 2016 delegates.

Even though Hillary Clinton decisively won the Mar 1 Democratic primary in Alabama (she won 44 delegates versus Bernie Sanders’ 9 delegates), because the Democrats categorically lost Alabama’s 2012 Presidential election (by over 20%), I counted neither Clinton’s nor Sanders’ delegates in their weighted total delegate counts for Alabama. Similarly, I didn’t count Trump’s, Cruz’s or Kasich’s delegates in Hawaii, a reliably blue/Democratic state. Now look at Florida. In 2012 Florida voters gave Barack Obama a win, but the margin of victory was under 5%, so I gave a 95% weight to Clinton’s and Sander’s 2015 delegates, and an 85% weight for Trump’s, Cruz’s and Kasich’s delegates. This weighting protocol emphasizes winning delegates for the party’s candidates in states where it won (or nearly won) the 2012 election. Despite its limitations this weighting serves to “un-primary” the results and makes sense if you want to simulate possible general election results by using primary contest outcomes.

So what happens to total delegate counts for each candidate using this weighting scheme? Table 2 shows the total unweighted delegates (from Table 1) and the total weighted delegates for each candidate, using the above protocol. [If you have an alternative weighting scheme, let me know and I’ll run it in my model. It’s very easy to examine alternative weights.]

TABLE 2: TOTAL DELEGATE COUNTS for 2016 US Presidential Election

	Number of Delegates (as of 3/30/16)
	Democrats		Republicans
Total Delegates	CLINTON	SANDERS	TRUMP	CRUZ	KASICH
Unweighted	1231	962	728	440	143
Weighted	729	636	567	378	92
Difference (%)	41%	34%	22%	14%	35%

Table 2 shows that Hillary Clinton is most affected by the weighting, losing 41% of her pledged delegates. The least affected candidate is Ted Cruz, who lost just 14% of his pledged delegates. This result is mostly due to Sec. Clinton’s primary victories in 10 states that were won by Mitt Romney in 2012, the largest delegate trove from Texas. In contrast to Sec. Clinton, Sen. Sanders won primaries in 6 much less delegate-rich states that Romney won. In fact, the total delegates he won from all 6 of these states (UT, OK, NE, KS, ID and AK) represent less than 80% of the delegates Sec. Clinton won in just Texas. Thus, what seems good for gaining the nomination may not be useful for the election.

In contrast, Sen. Cruz has won delegates in states that voted overwhelmingly for his now-consort Milt Romney, so he is the least affected candidate by the weighting. His primary victory in Maine is an anomaly. The most affected Republican candidate is John Kasich for the straightforward reason that 46% of his pledged delegates to date, and his only victory, come from his home state Ohio, which voted for President Obama in 2012. Donald Trump’s total delegate count is not that affected, a 22% loss, again mostly due to his appeal in blue states and states where the 2012 election win for Pres. Obama came from a fairly small margin. Perhaps this provides some basis for his campaign’s declarations of his broader, beyond traditional GOPers’ appeal. Then again, his campaign (and certainly the candidate himself) makes so many fallacious, ever-changing assertions that it’s now impossible to believe any of them. But that’s another realm.

Based on this sensitivity assessment of the candidate’s delegates, I’d say Sec. Clinton may be most exposed and now needs to focus more on winning convincingly in blue-ish states, something Sen. Sanders has been doing since day 0 in his campaign. Gov. Kasich, who’s mischaracterizing himself as a “moderate,” needs to return to Columbus and spend some quality time watching the Buckeyes play baseball and softball. Sen. Cruz needs to keep doing his very cherry red-state thing, and not expect any victory travel to Cleveland. Let the games continue…

UPDATE to my March 31, 2016 Blog.

Shown below is the updated, May 5 version of Table 2, Total Delegate Counts by candidate that includes primary results since Apr 5 (WI, WY, NY, MD, CT, DE, PA, RI and IN).

TABLE 2B: TOTAL DELEGATE COUNTS for the 2016 Presidential Primaries

	Number of Delegates (as of 5/5/16)
	Democrats		Republicans
Total Delegates	CLINTON	SANDERS	TRUMP	CRUZ	KASICH
Unweighted	1657	1314	989	513	152
Weighted	1100	931	635	401	92
Difference (%)	34%	29%	36%	22%	39%

Sec. Clinton is now within 30% of the (unweighted) delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot, despite Sen. Sander’s win in Indiana. Compared to the original Mar 31 Table 2, Sec. Clinton has widened her lead in weighted delegates over Sen. Sanders as well as reduced the percent difference between the unweighted and weighted delegates, indicating she has won proportionally more delegates in states that were either won or almost won by President Obama in 2012. After Indiana and the departures of both Sen. Cruz and Gov. Kasich from the race, Donald Trump has now become the Republican’s purported candidate for President. Oh my.