Basic Income: A Cure-All or Misstep?

Buddy, can you spare 120,000 dimes? 

Basic Income (BI) is a type of publicly-funded economic security system. Other terms for BI include universal basic income, universal demogrant and citizen’s income. BI is considered by some as a mechanism that can lead to a more equitable, just and utopian society. Ideally, BI provides all citizens with a regular, unconditional sum of money from the government, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, literary utopias began with Plato's Republic, where he described a communal society that eliminates poverty and enjoys an equitable distribution of income and resources for its citizens, with no lawyers. What’s not to love about this Republic? In 1516 Sir Thomas More’s Utopia first coined the term and was the “modern” primogenitor of all utopian considerations. Unfortunately, whenever any group – and there have been many – has attempted to actually create and live in such a setting, it’s ultimately been a fraught, generally futile process that appeals to few people (e.g., Twin Oaks in Virginia, Icaria in Illinois and New Harmony, Indiana).

Nevertheless, more contemporary believers in idyllic possibilities have considered BI as a way of getting to a larger-scale Eden. There have been several implementations of BI-like policies that have enjoyed some success including one in Alaska (of all places) and another in Brazil.

The Permanent Fund of Alaska [PFA], established in 1976, is seen more as a re-distribution program funded by North Slope petroleum tax revenues, rather than a basic income program. Nevertheless, several aspects of the PFA illustrate its close ties to BI. In 2015, the PFA provided Alaskan residents with $2,072, the highest yearly payment ever. These payments to Alaska’s more than 710,000 citizens represented 2.9% of its Gross State Product in 2015. Such large payments are not likely to be forthcoming this year or for as long as the price of oil remains relatively low. [The price of West Texas Intermediate– the US benchmark oil price – was $48.03/bbl on June 28; 1 year ago it was $61.70; 2 years ago it was $91.81.]

For the first time in decades, Alaska had a fiscal deficit last year due to dramatic drops in world oil prices. Because of the deficit, Alaska politicians are now considering using PFA funds to help balance their state budget rather than only directly paying residents – something that Alaska voters aren’t at all pleased about.

Brazil’s much-praised Bolsa Familia program, started in 2003, is not unconditional or universal but is fairly broadly offered. Payments are provided to over 13 million Brazilian poor families (about 26% of Brazil’s population), based on income criteria. To receive payments families must have their kids vaccinated and must send them to school. Average monthly payments are 70 reals ($21); average per capita GDP in Brazil is $993/mo. The Bolsa Familia program costs about $19 billion annually, roughly 0.6% of Brazil’s GDP.

The proponents of BI, who include left-leaning folks, argue that it’s the right solution to the ever-increasing problems of income inequality and poverty. Income inequality has become a prominent issue in American political discussions. [So pervasive has the “inequality” issue become in the media that last week The Atlantic posted a story under the headline, “Why lightning disproportionately kills the poor.” What’s one to do but contact Thor and Xolotl (respectively, the Norse god of thunder and lightning and the Aztec god of lightning) and beseech them to change their ways, reduce lightning inequality and abide by a lower Gini Index.]

But enough about unequal lightning and back to BI.

There are now debates in France, the Netherlands and Finland about how to begin Basic Income pilot programs. The Swiss held a BI referendum this month that was strongly defeated. The Swiss Basic Income Initiative received 76.9% “no” votes. The unstated but expected BI monthly payment was to be about 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,560) per adult, with a smaller subsidy for children, without regard to employment, education, disability, age or wealth. Small-scale BI projects have been instituted in Namibia, India and Iran.

Several Americans have proposed BI pilots in the US, including Sam Altman a wealthy, Bay Area tech entrepreneur. In May he proposed that his startup incubator, Y-Combinator, will run a “short-term” BI study in Oakland, CA with the purpose of learning “how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.” that could lead to a long-term study. Predictably, his announcement received much publicity. But conspicuously absent from this proclamation were any actual details about the proposed study, such as when it would begin, its size, how long it would last and perhaps most critical, how much the payments would be. As such, it was an impressive but empty statement; it lacked any substantive details or actual commitment.

It’s beyond rare that a potential pilot BI program mentions the income payments that would be offered. This is probably by design since once a payment level is stated costs could be calculated and there would be protests about its inappropriateness – both too high and too low.

Nevertheless, here is my payment suggestion as a thought experiment for US BI income levels designed to reduce inequality and eliminate “official” poverty; $1,000/mo for 1 person ($12,000/yr), $1,700/mo ($20,400/yr) for a family of 3. BI-like programs, such as Bolsa Familia, do not have this substantial objective; instead they provide smaller, supplemental payments to ease poverty.

My suggestion is based on the official federal government-determined poverty-level incomes that are established each year, based on household size. The 2016 federal poverty “guidelines” are $11,880/yr for 1 person and $20,160 for a family of 3 people. The guidelines’ income levels for family sizes range from 1 person to over 8 people.

For some perspective, the current legal minimum wage in California is $10/hr or $20,800/yr with full-time work. In San Francisco the minimum wage will be $13/hr in July (about $27,000/yr).

I was interested to see how my suggested poverty-purging BI’s compared with proposed and much-discussed (but not implemented) living wage levels. [A living wage is an income level that approximates the costs of a person’s/family’s basic living expenses such as food, clothing, housing and medical care.] Using MIT’s handy living wage calculator for US states and localities, the 2015 living wage for Alameda County, CA is $13.35/hr for a single adult or $27,800/yr with full-time work. If the household has 1 adult and 2 children, the living wage is $32.09/hr or $66,700/yr. Thus, even my substantial BI’s represent only 30% of a living-wage based income for a family of 3.

Interestingly, the median household income in Alameda County is $67,169, which is almost the same income level that the MIT living-wage based income level is for a family of 3. As you recall, median income represents the income level that divides the distribution of income (here, for Alameda County) into two equivalent parts. This illustrates the practical fantasy of considering changing minimum wage levels to family-sized living wage levels. The living-wage minimum is almost equal to the median income level, meaning virtually 50% of the population’s income would need to be increased, which would be a political impossibility because it would be a very expensive effort.

Predictably, the strongest criticism of BI programs centers on their substantial costs.

Even if my suggested BI program is limited to providing $12,000 per year only to citizens 21 years and older, it could cost $2.78 trillion (T) per year or about 15% of our GDP and require the vast majority of federal tax revenues. This BI program would be much more expensive – greater than 3 times more – than merely offering tuition-free public university education.

The total FY2015 federal budget is $3.8T and total federal tax revenues last year were $2.96T. Because my BI program thus represents 94% of all tax revenues, the federal government couldn’t spend anything for much else except the BI program. With virtually any BI program, taxes would need to increase substantially, and not only for the rich and wealthy.

If my BI payments are cut to $2,000, which wouldn’t come close to clearing the poverty line (but would be as much as the Alaska Permanent Fund provided last year), the program would  cost $463 billion per year, representing 80% of what CY2015 defense expenditures are and over 15% of total federal tax revenues.

A BI program not only is wildly expensive, but many critics also state that such government-provided income can diminish folks’ incentives for seeking paid employment as well as lowering the motivation of workers displaced by robots (or far, far more likely, by other workers) from participating in skill-enhancement and -training programs. Potential alternatives to ameliorating poverty and labor displacement more cost-effectively include increasing the well-regarded, existing federal Earned Income Tax Credit, broadening government-funded job retraining programs or even creating a low-wage employment subsidization system.

As professor Laurence Summers stated, “A universal basic income is one of those ideas that the longer you look at it, the less enthusiastic you become.” Nationally implementing even a modest BI program would be an expensive misstep. Basic Income is a misplaced idea whose time hasn’t come. It’s time for Biexit.

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. 

MANUFACTURING THE PAST. WHY IT CAN’T BE 1953 AGAIN

You cannot step twice into the same river. ~ Heraclitus

Rumors of the demise of the US manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated. ~ Elon Musk

In every political season, including this one, much talk from political candidates centers on making our nation “great again,” “ending inequality” and “getting everyone back to work.” Such discourse always serves as a useful foundation for party platforms and voter expectations. It also involves a substantial amount of fantasy. Bringing back what politicians imagine as the US’s golden age of manufacturing is impossible, despite what they say. More importantly, the US has never produced as much manufactured output as it does now. 

First, it’s by no means certain that elected federal officials – like the president or members of Congress – actually have that much direct short-term influence on our $18.2 trillion economy. Sure, the economy eventually responds to changes in various policies, but although politicians are always happy to take full credit for recoveries (and utterly dismiss any responsibilities for declines) our macroeconomy is simply too large and multifaceted for any single change to have much overall effect. Second, every such proposed policy will have unintended consequences, even some that may countervail the policy’s stated goal.

Despite having the lowest unemployment rate in 8 years (5.0% in March 2016), Republican presidential candidates have inaccurately obsessed about falling employment – Donald Trump stated in February that the “real” unemployment rate likely was 42% [the BLS published rate was 4.9%]. Continuing with such fictional facts, he stated, “I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. Remember that.” Hopefully, voters in November will allow us to not remember that even though he somehow has apparently captured the Republican nomination.

Nevertheless, such wild claims include his and other candidates’ worthy-sounding goal to bring back manufacturing to America. Starting in the late 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing has been a key ingredient in the US’s and many other nations’ long-term economic growth. Industrial production thus holds a special place in the hearts of workers, businesses and politicians.  

The post-WWII Golden Age of US manufacturing spans a 5-decade period starting in 1950. It is important to distinguish between the nation’s manufacturing output and manufacturing employment, something no politician ever does. To politicians, manufacturing only refers to workers who make stuff. Manufacturing employment, as a percent of total employment, has been declining for a very long time. The US reached its peak in manufacturing employment in 1953, during the Eisenhower administration. This decline has been especially steep after 2000, during the Bush I administration.

Despite fewer workers, manufacturing output has steadily increased throughout the past 6 decades. In fact, American manufacturing output is now at the highest level in history; something you might not realize if you listen only to politicians’ wailings. From an output perspective, we’ve already brought back manufacturing; it never left, it’s just changed. US manufacturers like General Motors, Del Monte Foods, Caterpillar, Boeing and thousands of smaller manufacturers, produce and export more world-class products than ever before using new technologies with fewer but more highly-trained and -skilled workers. Exceptional states like Indiana have persevered in sustaining fairly large, diverse manufacturing output that accounts for about 17% of total state employment and 28% of state GDP.

These 2 very divergent trends in manufacturing output and employment are illustrated in the following chart.

US Manufacturing Jobs and Output, 1950-2008

 The chart shows manufacturing jobs’ steadily declining since 1953 and manufacturing output steadily growing. This result follows from impressive gains in manufacturing efficiency and productivity, estimated to be 218% higher since 1987. The root causes of this divergence include not only productivity advances that have substituted capital machinery (e.g., advanced, additive automation) for lower-skilled labor, but also international trade and the continual rise of services. I’ve written before about consequences of services growth that have displaced industrial production as the dominant share of our macroeconomy. Domestic production of services now accounts for 86% of our labor force. Jobs in manufacturing now account for only 9% of the US workforce. 

Here’s an illuminating example provided by New York Times’ columnist Eduardo Porter of the increase in US manufacturing productivity, albeit in a sector that probably wouldn’t first come to mind as manufacturing. Half a century ago, harvesting California’s 2.2 million tons of tomatoes for ketchup required as many as 45,000 workers or barely 49 tons per worker. In the 1960s, scientists and engineers at the University of California – Davis, developed an oblong tomato that lent itself to being machine-picked and an efficient mechanical harvester to do the job in one pass through a field. By 2000, only 5,000 harvest workers were employed in California to pick and sort what was by then a 12-million-ton crop of tomatoes. That’s roughly 2,400 tons per worker, a 49 times increase in productivity over 5 decades.

No one, not even the president, Christopher Lloyd or Captain America, can turn the clock back to the economic environment of 1953 when manufacturing employment reached its maximum of 32% of total non-farm employment. Tariffs won’t stop manufacturing employment from dropping; neither can imaginary walls, nor unneeded tax cuts for multi-millionaires. But proper policies, including systematic training of displaced workers and vocational training in high schools and community colleges, may allow manufacturers using skilled workers to continue increasing high-value output. 

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.