WHAT HAPPENED? The demise of Hillary Clinton

Success consists of going from failure to failure without lose of enthusiasm. ~ Winston Churchill

This was not an exciting “election cycle”; there was no hope involved, only accusations and denigrations. We were politically exhausted by Nov. 8, and the turnout data have confirmed this. Voter turnout for all 50 states was 58.0% of eligible voters; in 2012 it was 58.6%; in 2008 it was 62.2%. This means more than 97 million eligible voters did not vote last week.

Too many Democratic voters simply stayed home. California had the 4th lowest state voter turnout of any state, just 51.8%. State turnout rates ranged from 74.0% (Minn.) to a trifling 34.0% (Hawaii). Although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with a 1% margin, she will garner only 228 Electoral College (EC) electors. Donald Trump will win with 290. Many liberal-progressive Democrats understandably remain distraught and upset. I certainly empathize.

Although Republicans intimidated certain voters, and created deceitful barriers to reduce or eliminate likely Democrat voters from casting ballots, that is not the only reason she lost. More importantly, the Trump voter turnout was unexpectedly much stronger and broader than anticipated. Hillary Clinton’s loss wasn’t merely caused by what the Republicans did. It was also due to what the Democrats didn’t do.

First, the Democrats couldn’t hold together Obama’s 2012 coalition, and didn’t spend any real effort to peel away much of a sliver of white middle-class and lower-middle class voters who Trump focused on.

In my last blog, “Voter Turnout,” I mentioned that Clinton’s grand challenge for this election was to persuade more Hispanics, Blacks, women, millennials and college graduates to actually vote for her than they did for President Obama. Her campaign failed this challenge. Only 12% more women voted for Clinton than Trump; only 18% more millennials voted for her. Other published voter turnout analyses have stated that Trump won 53% of the white women’s vote. At this point, so soon after the actual election, there is a fair amount of conflicting information about the characteristics of voters and who they voted for. These discrepancies probably arise from differences between specific exit polls’ sampling methods and analysis. Nevertheless, the results are woeful.

The efforts Democrats undertook to entice Hispanics, Blacks, millennials and other pro-Democrat voters to vote for Clinton did not raise their turnout. In fact, initial turnout analysis indicates that Clinton’s support margins (the difference between people who voted for her and who voted for Obama in 2012) declined for Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, as well as for men and people who earn less than $50,000 per year.

In past elections, two key demographic categories for the Democrats – Hispanics and millennials - have been difficult to lure into voting booths. Again this time they didn’t vote enough or give her sufficient margins for her to win on Tuesday.

Nationally, only 11% of votes cast on Nov. 8 were by Hispanics, the same turnout as in 2012. No other turnout data are yet available regarding ethnicity/racial voter participation, but when they are I doubt they will show anything that speaks of a successful turn-out-the-vote effort for Clinton.

Second, Clinton’s campaign seemed to have forgotten the importance of the archaic, but elemental Electoral College. In close elections like this one, the EC can provide additional importance for the smaller-population states that Trump won.

She overwhelmingly won urban-dwellers (by a 24% margin), but lost small-city and rural voters (by a 28% margin). Guess what; the states away from America’s coasts with lots of small cities outnumber the fewer states with very large cities.

This is one reason why this election’s state-by-state results’ map resembles a landscape with  blue-tinged boarders (all of the west coast and the northern part of the east coast) and a very wide, red middle, with just 4 blue exceptions (CO, NM, MN and IL). It’s been a long time since the red middle has been as wide. Trump won 30 states, Clinton just 21, including Washington, DC. This landscape became the election victory for Mr. Trump, at Sec. Clinton’s expense.

The electoral bottom line: Clinton couldn’t get enough of her targeted voters in enough states to vote for her to win. Trump’s dark, nefarious, emotion-based appeal to “the forgotten” middle-class won the day, and is now changing the political panorama of the nation. 

VOTER TURNOUT: EVERY POLITICIAN’S CHALLENGE

It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting. ~ Tom Stoppard

Breathe a sigh of relief, it’s almost over. There are only two days left before this year’s election; can you count that low?

Seemingly forever, the media have been flooding us with a tsunami of election ads and information, including wayward stories about what young teenage girls’ views are of the election and the candidates. Really? I feel a deep sense of relief that November 8 is almost upon us. Despite feeling this bit of relief from “the election cycle” almost reaching its proverbial high noon, the anxiety accompanying the result more than whelms my passing feelings of reprieve.

And it’s not just me. Therapists across the country have reported a growing number of people seeking assistance from election-induced fatigue and trauma syndrome (EIFTS). I suggest you take this handy, insightful and quick quiz to determine if you’re suffering from EIFTS. Should your quiz score indicate you qualify for EIFTS assistance, don’t forget to thank Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly, along with The Donald and Hillary, among others.

More seriously, probably the most crucial challenge facing every politician in every election, including this one, is voter turnout. Getting people to actually vote, and vote for you, is of ultimate, prime importance. At this point the candidates and their surrogates still remain busy hoarsely making public speeches. Like Donald Trump’s mystifying decision to speechify in Albuquerque, New Mexico last week, a solidly-blue state this time around. But beneath the lecterns, their campaigns are franticly focused on nudging and cajoling likely voters to the polls. Far more concerning are some nativist Republican Trumpophiles who are erecting deceitful barriers to reduce or eliminate likely Democrat voters from casting ballots. Perhaps we should send them to jail.

It’s been a while since US voters have been so unexcited about casting ballots in a presidential election. What happened to Hope? In 2012’s presidential election just under 219 million people, accounting for 57.5% of eligible voters, cast their ballots, down from 62.3% in 2008. This modest voter participation/turnout rate ranks the US 31st out of the 35 developed democracies comprising the OECD.

The chart below illustrates the participation by voters’ racial/ethnic characteristics in the past 4 presidential elections. As shown, white and black voters participate more by a noteworthy margin over Hispanics and Asians. Despite significant efforts, getting Hispanics and Asians to actually vote has long been a dispiriting quandary. Hopefully the Democrats’ efforts over the past several weeks will be more successful this time.

Since 2000, a maximum of just 49% (in 2008) of Hispanics voted in any presidential election. In contrast, 66% of eligible black voters and 65% of eligible white voters on average participated in the past two presidential elections. Uniquely among the four racial/ethnic groupings shown in the chart, black voters have increased their voter participation consistently since 2000.

Percent of eligible electors who voted in presidential elections, 2000-2012 

Source:  New York Times

The relatively small voter participation rate for Hispanics is a particular challenge for Hillary Clinton, because they represent a growing, core constituency for Democrats.

Another constituency that has been targeted by Sec. Clinton’s campaign is millennials, who like Hispanics have a diminutive record of voting. In two of the media-designated “most important” swing states - North Carolina and Florida – less than one in five millennials voted in this year’s primaries; 15% in Florida, 18% in North Carolina. Hopefully far more millennials will vote rationally on Tuesday.

These disparities in voting participation exist in non-swing states as well. In California, an overwhelmingly blue state, only 17% of eligible Hispanics and Asians voted in the 2014 election. In that year, the California voting electorate was 60% whites and 18% Hispanics, which is far different than the state’s overall demographics. Actual California population demographics are 38% whites and 37.6% Hispanics.

Another important constituency for Sec. Clinton and Democrats has become educated voters. For once the Democrats have an advantage over Republicans. Because the more educated a person is, the more likely she/he will vote, and vote Democratic. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) and the United States Elections Project,  54.9% of all voters nationally in the 2012 election were 60 years or older; just 16.3% were young people aged 18 to 29 years. From CPS data only 17.6% of people with less than a high-school degree voted in the 2012 election and just 29% of high-school graduates voted. In contrast, 59.9% of folks who have an advanced degree turned out to vote in 2012.

Finally there is the gender distinction between voters. In every presidential election since 1980 more women have voted than men. For our last national election in 2012 63.7% of women reported voting versus 59.8% of men. This translates into almost 10 million more women voters than men.

So who are the most reliable voters; voters that need the fewest nudges to get into the voting booth? Simply stated, the most dependable voters are female, older and more educated folks.

The above-cited voter turnout data illustrate why Democrats need larger and more effective get-out-the-voter efforts than Republicans. With the exception of women and college-educated people, Democrats’ target constituencies – people of color, urbanites and young people – don’t vote as reliably as the historically-targeted Republican electorate – white, middle- and upper-middle class suburban folks. Just ask Bernie Sanders.

Nevertheless, the white, non-college educated working-class people who Mr. Trump has apparently captured don’t vote as reliably either. Although it makes no difference for Tuesday’s election, the white working class has noticeably diminished over time. Two demographers have noted that in 1940 82% of Americans 25 and older were whites with no more than a high school education; by 2007, that figure had dwindled to 29%.

The waning prominence of white working-class people is directly linked to the electorate. In 1980 according to exit polls, 63% of the electorate was comprised of voters who were whites without a four-year college education. That had dropped 10 points by 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency. That election marked the last time exit polls would find whites without college degrees to be a majority of voters. By the time Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, just 39% of those who cast ballots were whites without college degrees.

For this and other reasons, white working-class men have reason to feel disremembered. That is until The Donald pledged to focus his ethno-nativist attention on them. As we’ve seen during the past year, some white working-class people remain vocal and motivated by ephemeral Trumpian messages.

My advice for those of you who haven’t yet voted is to make absolutely sure you do. Your vote counts, and can make a very real difference. The resilient, postive destiny of this great country depends on every eligible citizen to vote for Hillary Clinton. She is infinitely more qualified, knowledgeable and capable than her opponent. And unlike her opponent, she will keep our republic from heading over a precipice too fraught to imagine. 

BERNIE WHO?

A revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. ~ Che Guevara 

The Republican and Democratic presidential primaries have finally ended. Whew. So now we’re witnessing the Republicans’ presumptive nominee Donald Trump and the Democrats’ presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton starting to circle each other (near the rope-lines) in the first round of the up-coming election prize fight – only a mere 140 days away. But wait, Bernie (coulda-been-a-contender) Sanders hasn’t yet thrown in his towel and insists he’ll be running for president forever. Really? Meanwhile his most fervent “Bernie or bust” followers had a gathering in Chicago this past weekend to drum up an alternative something, such as finding like-minded candidates to run for office somewhere and sometime. That's all well and good. I’m all for having people with political beliefs organize and seek an enhanced society.

But by not now pledging his support nor endorsing Hillary, Bernie seems myopically oblivious to the dangerous wild elephant now prancing in the political ring – Donald Trump.

Perhaps Bernie wants to continue the high he’s been riding for a while, but the reality of the lows of his actual political performance (based on the number of actual votes his followers managed to provide in California and DC, among other primaries) won’t allow it to continue.

Bernie’s youthful followers have been impressive in their attendance at his rallies, but many of them forgot to actually vote for their leader. Oops. Almost 16 million people voted for Hillary Clinton, 12 million voted for Bernie Sanders. Of the Democratic primary/caucuses held in the United States, he won 22, she won 29. He lost, fair and square.

So what really happened with the much-discussed and pontificated younger voters that Bernie appealed to as a central cohort of his campaign? As I’ll show, the 2016 democratic primary voting patterns for youth participation are not much different from primaries in the past. Younger people simply didn’t vote in sufficient numbers to lift their candidate (this time, Bernie) to victory. It’s a familiar story. So much for the media-hyped “revolution” of Bernie Sanders.

Hillary’s victory was due to many factors, but demography was a key one, just like it was Bernie’s demise. This is illustrated in the table below.

Bernie Sander’s Phantom Revolution (Percent of total voters by age group)

	Voters under 30 years old		40-64 years	45-59 years	65+ years	60+ years
State	2016	2008	2016	2008	2016	2008
Florida	15%	9%	46%	33%	25%	39%
	[64%]
Illinois	17%	15%	46%	32%	22%	23%
	[86%]
North Carolina	18%	14%	49%	34%	20%	26%
	[72%]
New York	18%	15%	45%	33%	19%	30%
	[65%]

Numbers in brackets represent percent of voters under 30 years old who voted for Sanders.Source: USNews.com

This table shows that young voters, here characterized as people under-30 years old based on exit polls, accounted for at most only 18% of all 2016 voters in these 4 states. I did not find age-based primary state voter information except for these states. Nevertheless, they do represent a range of geographic and political characteristics. As you can see, middle-aged and older voters account for far larger proportions of actual voters. Middle-age voters represent between 2.5 and 3 times as many actual voters as young voters. Also illustrated in the table is that despite much media attention to Bernie’s youth “revolution” the percentage of youth voters in 3 of the 4 states didn’t significantly increase in 2016 from 2008. Surprisingly, young voters in Florida, which is usually associated with much older people, almost doubled in 2016.

Sen. Sanders captured very large majorities of youth voters in these states, as shown in the table – from 64% in Florida to an astounding 86% in Illinois. But percent of voters who were young (under 30) who voted for Bernie was very low; ranging from 9.6% in Florida to 14.6% in Illinois because of their low voter participation rates mentioned above. Despite receiving 86% of young voters’ preference in Illinois, he lost the state to Hillary.

It’s always puzzled me why the media, marketers and politicians continuously emphasize the importance of “youth” and seem to neglect older people who have both more resources (aka, money) to spend on stuff and vote far more regularly and reliably. Sure, the vast majority of young people eventually become income-earning adults who exhibit behaviors (like voting) that youth don’t, but as the table shows “middle-age” people substantially out-vote young people.

This important age-based distinction holds even when you normalize by how much of our 2010 population was in each of the 3 age groups shown for 2016 in the table. The ratio of the average share of voters for each of the 3 age-groups in the 4 states’ primaries shown in the table divided by that age group’s share of the US population shows the oldest age group (65+ years old) voted 70% above their population share; the middle-age group (40-64 years old) voted 40% above their share. The under-30 year old group voted only 10% above its population share, which is fine, but hardly noteworthy.

From a media perspective, it comes down to middle-age voters aren’t “revolutionary”; they’re simply once again exercising their constitutional prerogative. Yet when less than one in five young people actually votes, it’s headline worthy.

For Bernie, young people have been very willing to attend rallies with thousands of their cohorts probably as a social event, but not at all interested in actually voting as a political act. In this strange way, perhaps the multitudes of Bernie backers are socialists – with a small “s” – participating solely in an exciting communal social activity believing there was no other obligatory action required (like casting one’s vote on election-day). Go figure.

So why are young people seemingly so reluctant to vote? No one really can explain it, but Russell Dalton (a professor at UC/Irvine) has examined political engagement among various age groups over the past few decades. His assessment concludes that young adults just aren't as engaged as they used to be. Dalton says if politicians want young people to vote, they need to incentivize them. Wow. Conversely, older folks are much more engaged. Dalton portrays this divergence as constructively as possible by referring to millennials’ lack of voting caused by “the long slope of differences by life stage is getting steeper, with less involvement in youth and more involvement in later life.” The long slope of differences by life stage? That makes no sense at all; mostly because the act of voting is neither difficult nor arduous.

So Bernie, you’ve retreated to Burlington and taken a well-deserved rest, perhaps even hiked in the beautiful Green Mountains. Now you need to formally quit your campaign and say good bye to your Secret Service guardians. Finally and most importantly, you need to start actively and unqualifiedly assisting Hillary to defeat The Donald. If you wisely give her campaign the resources she deserves, you’ll get at least one more spotlight’s worth of attention and thanks. If you don’t, it will be “Bernie who?” Oh, he’s the old man who decided not to help when the Democrats needed it.

If you don’t, you will have failed to make Che Guevara’s apple really fall and the 85% of American citizens who are older than 30 will wonder and blame you for why you haven’t taken any action to defeat Donald J. Trump, the insidious threat to our precious democracy. Do the right thing Bernie, and stay relevant. 

July 12, 2016 Addendum, Bernie's endorsement.

Why did this take soooo long? Today, Bernie finally endorsed Hillary.

I’d say it’s taken this long because, to no one's surprise, Bernie’s played-hard-to-get with Hillary. And her weakness as a candidate probably augmented the importance of his endorsement. Her difficulties remain the continued challenge of “explaining” her disastrous email server issue that won’t go away even on Nov 9 when she’s hopefully been elected president.

Her negotiations with Bernie during the past month or so to get his endorsement only really matters to inside-the-beltway Democratic potentates and princesses (P&Ps); and only for the next 16 days, until the Dems’ convention ends.

No other folks except these P&Ps give a damn about what’s in the Dems’ (or the Repubs’) platform. Furthermore, as this blog showed, his core supporters include young “idealistic” people who haven’t ever pulled their voting weight in any national election. It’s not likely that these people, on the margin, are worth that much effort to harvest for Hillary. If I were Hillary, I'd put Bernie solely in charge of this task. 

No one knows how many Bernie backers will vote for Hillary. You get wildly different answers, depending on which poll you cite. On the one hand, “Recent polls show that only a small fraction of them would support her...” But another poll says that “The vast, vast majority of those who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary will support Hillary Clinton in the general election.” Go figure.

In fact, her leftward turn to induce the Bernie or Busters’ reconciliation and votes makes me concerned about her judgement. His most fervent backers seem so “principled” that they feel “betrayed” by Bernie’s endorsement as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s public endorsement of Hillary. These Bernie backers are barely tangentially-related with the real world of politics and political progress. Their disdain for actually casting votes speaks for itself.

As for the fantasy idea that Hillary should offer Bernie a place on the Democrats ticket as vice president, OMG. According to poll fielded in May, “You're going to hear a lot in the days ahead about possible vice presidential candidates, but when it gets right down to it, voters don't place a lot of importance on the person in the number two slot. Most say a presidential candidate's running mate is somewhat important, but just a third of voters rate the vice presidential nominee as Very Important to how they will vote in the upcoming presidential election. The sentiment is generally the same among both Democrats and Republicans.”

Bernie is a failed candidate. His campaign was interesting, provocative and worthy. Now, like all losers in the presidential primary process, he’s mostly forgotten but not yet gone. He’s a loner with a germane but narrow message that appealed to a small part of the electorate that (as my blog demonstrated) doesn’t vote much.

Despite the media’s proclamations, Bernie won’t be much remembered in 4 months, let alone a year from now. His “revolution” wasn’t. Perhaps his endorsement will provide some lift to Democratic pols, but party “unity” seems a much over-sold virtue as far as actual American voters are concerned. Get on with it Hillary, keep campaigning hard and pick a VP who’s not a Senator from a state with a Republican governor (like Elizabeth Warren), who would be replaced by a Republican. 

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.