Trailhead: A campaign blog.

Romney's Big "What If?"

For those Democrats who worry that the protracted primary battle is exposing deep divides in the party’s base, Republican-style winner-take-all primaries are looking more attractive. For at least one Republican, the opposite is true: A Democratic-style primary that awards delegates proportially is looking pretty good right now. His name is Mitt Romney.

Several commentators have pointed out that, if the Democrats played by Republican rules, Hillary Clinton would hold a commanding lead in pledged delegates. (Democratic primaries mete out pledged delegates proportionally based on total votes, while most Republican primaries heap all their delegates on the winner.) Less attention has been given to the opposite question: What if the Republicans awarded their delegates like Democrats do?

To answer that question, Trailhead crunched the numbers from the earlier Republican primaries, back when Romney and Mike Huckabee were still in the race. We assumed that delegates are awarded in rough proportion to the candidates’ overall performance in the state. In reality, this is usually done on a district-by-district basis, but as we have noted on our Delegate Calculator, estimating delegates based on statewide results has a margin of error of only 3 percent.

Between Iowa and Super Tuesday, there were 17 Republican primaries that operated under winner-take-all rules (or something similar). In those states, John McCain won 649 delegates, while Huckabee won 110 and Romney won 105. Note that McCain averaged 36 percent of the popular vote, while Romney averaged 34 percent. The lopsidedness in delegates comes from the fact that McCain won big states like New York and California.

If we postulate a Democratic-style proportional system, McCain would have come out of Feb. 5 with an estimated 336 delegates to Romney’s 291 and Huckabee’s 164.

In the 12 caucuses during that same period, Romney considerably outperformed McCain, netting 188 delegates to McCain’s 55 and Huckabee’s 97.

So here’s the score through Feb. 5—two days before Romney threw in the towel:

If I were Romney, I’d be particularly bitter about California. He won 35 percent of the vote there to McCain’s 42 percent but got only 12 delegates to McCain’s 158. (The winner-take-all system is still done by district, so it appears Romney won at least a plurality in a small number of districts there.)

As the New York Times’ David Brooks wrote yesterday, the Democratic primary has exposed a deep divide in the party between urban, affluent liberals and more rural, working-class Democrats. It’s worth remembering that, just a few months ago, one of the guiding narratives in this election was how deeply divided the Republican party’s various factions were over who to support for their nominee. If the Republicans had a Democratic-style election process, those divides would be bitterly evident. It’s a strong testament to the role of election rules that we are now so focused on the other party’s identity crisis.

The Pledged Delegate Myth

A lot of people have replied to Friday’s “Fuzzy Math” item about the Obama campaign’s claim that if there’s a tie on March 4, Clinton would have to win 75 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to catch up with Obama’s 162-delegate lead. The general feeling was that Plouffe meant to say she would have to win 75 percent of the popular vote rather than 75 percent of pledged delegates.

Two things. First, Plouffe was pretty explicit in the original conference call that he was talking about pledged delegates, which an Obama spokesman later confirmed. Second, and more important, I wanted to clear up a misconception about popular votes vs. delegate percentages.

It’s been conventional wisdom here and elsewhere that the bizarre Democratic delegate-selection system means that in the primaries, large leads in the popular vote often produce small leads in terms of delegates. But if you take a look at the Democratic primary results so far, the percentage of the popular vote a candidate wins is usually within a couple points of the percentage of pledged delegates they win. (Note that this doesn’t include caucuses, where you can only estimate turnout.)

Take CNN’s numbers. (These counts, on the individual state pages, include pledged delegates only.) In Georgia, Clinton won 31 percent of the popular vote; meanwhile, she won 30 percent of the state’s pledged delegates. In California, she won 52 percent of the popular vote and 56 percent of the delegates. In Massachusetts, she won 56 percent of the popular vote and 59 percent of delegates. The numbers in just about every other state follow the same pattern.

In some states, the percentage of delegates won was even larger than the percentage of the popular vote won. In Arkansas, for example, Clinton won 70 percent of the popular vote and 77 percent of the delegates.

I was a little surprised to discover this, given all we’ve seen and heard about how the Democrats’ proportional-allocation system makes it impossible to open up a wide delegate lead. Also, keep in mind that caucuses work differently, so Texas, with its oddball primary/caucus hybrid, is likely to produce different numbers in the popular vote and delegate count. But the general trend debunks claims that Plouffe was talking about popular vote rather than delegate percentages. (Plus, even if he had been, there’s no formula for converting popular vote to pledged delegates anyway.) The fact is, if Clinton won roughly 75 percent of a state’s (or a group of states’) popular vote, she would win roughly that percentage of their delegates, too.