The Delegate Fight: 2016

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I have a two part question about states where a candidate has the option to release his delegates to be reallocated among the other candidates.

a) If the candidate decides not to release his delegates, do they remain bound to him on the first ballot (understanding of course that rules may vary on this from state to state)?

b) If the candidate does release his delegates and they are reallocated, are the delegates then bound to their reallocated candidate on the first ballot?

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Updated my tracking of the unpledged delegates.  A full account can be found on the tumblr.  If there's demand, I can also track them in a forum post, as well.

The story at present is that there are 148 unbound delegates at the moment (6% of the total).  29 of these are former Rubio or Bush delegates who have been released due to their candidates' suspensions of their campaigns.

Of those 148 (some of whom have not been chosen yet), 5 have endorsed a candidate: 4 for Cruz and 1 for Kasich.  Keep an eye out for further endorsements for Cruz in Guam and Louisiana, which may net him two additional Rule 40 states.

There can be more unbound delegates if Rubio "withdraws" or releases his delegates, if explicitly Uncommitted delegates are elected at the Colorado or Wyoming conventions, if the West Virginia directly-elected delegates are considered unbound, or if Kasich is not placed in nomination due to Rule 40.

So for purposes of Rule 40, an unbound delegate making a personal endorsement counts toward the required majority? That seems crazy.

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Louisiana confirms Rubio has lost his delegates there, and it is too late for him to get them back.

Why doesn't every state keep delegates bound to a candidate, even after dropping out.  Re-allocating them can help someone to get to 1237 who doesn't deserve it.

Consequences of voting so early, I suppose.

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New York Results

Trump wins the delegate count 90-5.  This is obviously a very good night for him, and ahead of my projections by 6 delegates.  If the result is indicative of what can happen next week, and Trump can win Connecticut with more than 50% of the vote, the path to a first ballot victory is looking a lot easier; a win in Indiana would essentially seal the deal.

On the Democratic side, Hillary comes out with a +31 net gain in delegates.  Sanders' already small path to a victory in pledged delegates gets even slimmer.  He now needs to essentially sweep the remaining 6-delegate districts by large margins (58.3% of the two-way vote, to win them 4-2).  This, to put it mildly, seems impossible, barring the usual death/indictment caveats.

You think the NY result, will push up Trump's numbers elsewhere? I tend to doubt that myself. NY is NY.

Where did he say that? It looks like he's looking at other states through the lens of what happened in New York, not saying the result of New York will affect what happens somewhere else.

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Ah, gotcha. That makes a little more sense. I don't think the results in NY will necessarily predispose voters anywhere else to do one thing or another, but I think they might point toward results being a little better for Trump than had been predicted in the foregoing weeks.

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So if Trump clinches on the 1st ballot but Cruz has a majority on the floor in Cleveland, Cruz effectively gets to set the 2020 delegate rules, right?  And he would obviously consider himself the next-in-line for the nomination.  So look for Texas to have 750 delegates awarded WTA to the statewide winner in 2020, while the all of the Northeast states combined get to elect 200 formally unpledged delegates at conventions, with convention meetings to be held from 1-7 am on a Monday morning in the least populous county in each state?

A lot of those decisions are determined by the state parties and state legislatures/governments, not the national party. He could probably convince Texas to go to WTA, but the stuff in the Northeast won't happen. Also I can't imagine them going away from delegating delegates to each state based on the # of Republican voters.

Except that's not quite how it's done on the Republican side; states are awarded bonuses based on whether they voted for Romney in 2012 (plus a smattering of extras for electing Republican governors, state legislatures, Senators, etc.).  Wisconsin, with a very active GOP base (albeit one that loses Presidential elections narrowly) gets around as many bonus delegates as New York, Massachusetts, or Maryland, where it's not even close.  Wisconsin (1.4 million Romney voters) had 42 delegates, while Maryland (970k Romney voters) had 38 delegates.

Conversely, states that vote narrowly for a candidate get huge bonuses; Oklahoma (890k Romney voters) had 43 delegates.

There's definitely some room to mess around with the formulas, but I don't know how much of an effect it will have; the most overrepresented states are the small Mountain West states where Cruz does well, anyway.  At some point after the primaries are over I may crunch the numbers.

It'll be get even weirder in 2020 when it's based off of the few states that Trump wins this time around--i.e. the deep South and the Mountain West, which (with Trump out of the picture) has a good shot of being Cruz country.

One of the larger, and honestly overlooked, problems with Trump winning the nomination is that we will have to deal with Cruz in 2020.  If Trump lost the nomination and Cruz lost the general, we wouldn't have to deal with either of them next cycle.

From the perspective of trying to win the general, would they be better off adopting a system of giving bonus delegates to states whose presidential margin was within, say, 5 points either way? It seems like folly to tilt the nominating decision so heavily toward the states that are already solidly in the bag.

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So if Trump clinches on the 1st ballot but Cruz has a majority on the floor in Cleveland, Cruz effectively gets to set the 2020 delegate rules, right?  And he would obviously consider himself the next-in-line for the nomination.  So look for Texas to have 750 delegates awarded WTA to the statewide winner in 2020, while the all of the Northeast states combined get to elect 200 formally unpledged delegates at conventions, with convention meetings to be held from 1-7 am on a Monday morning in the least populous county in each state?

In the primary yesterday, Democrats received 66.4% of the vote in  Rhode Island; 66.0% in Maryland; 60.7% in Connecticut; 57.7% in Delaware; and 51.5% in Pennsylvania.

Why should any of the states other than Pennsylvania have any delegates?

Because presumably having GOP operations helps in those states even though they're not winning the presidency. Republicans have won statewide office in all of those other states, but if you cut them out of the process of nominating the president, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't feel at least somewhat demoralized and cast adrift. I don't disagree that solid Democratic states (in a presidential sense) shouldn't have as much of a say, but by that token, neither should solid Republican ones, if their goal is to win. They should be pitching their nominee to who performs best in swing states.

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So if Trump clinches on the 1st ballot but Cruz has a majority on the floor in Cleveland, Cruz effectively gets to set the 2020 delegate rules, right?  And he would obviously consider himself the next-in-line for the nomination.  So look for Texas to have 750 delegates awarded WTA to the statewide winner in 2020, while the all of the Northeast states combined get to elect 200 formally unpledged delegates at conventions, with convention meetings to be held from 1-7 am on a Monday morning in the least populous county in each state?

In the primary yesterday, Democrats received 66.4% of the vote in  Rhode Island; 66.0% in Maryland; 60.7% in Connecticut; 57.7% in Delaware; and 51.5% in Pennsylvania.

Why should any of the states other than Pennsylvania have any delegates?

Because presumably having GOP operations helps in those states even though they're not winning the presidency. Republicans have won statewide office in all of those other states, but if you cut them out of the process of nominating the president, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't feel at least somewhat demoralized and cast adrift. I don't disagree that solid Democratic states (in a presidential sense) shouldn't have as much of a say, but by that token, neither should solid Republican ones, if their goal is to win. They should be pitching their nominee to who performs best in swing states.

But a primary electorate is different from a general election electorate.  The winner of a primary election in Ohio isn't inherently more electable nationally than a primary winner in Illinois, for example.

Also, electability isn't the only thing that matters.  In the exit polls, we're seeing voters favor many other qualities over electability.  Shouldn't a Democrat or Republican living anywhere in the country have a reasonably equal say, if possible, in expressing their preference for their party's nominee, based on whatever criteria they like?

Sure! I'm not saying any one way is more right or more wrong. Just trying to throw out there another possible way of thinking about things, since a discussion seemed to have started about how to allocate delegates to the states in the first place. Right now it seems like allocation is roughly weighted more in favor of safe Republican states. Above, jimrtex seemed to recommend throwing that weighting into overdrive by taking delegates away from more Democratic states entirely. I know electability isn't the only thing, but if it were taken more into account, I'd think that perhaps giving extra delegates to swing states (and making their primaries semi-open) might at least help tilt things more toward candidates that have appeal in states that could help decide the election.

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Right now it seems like allocation is roughly weighted more in favor of safe Republican states.

Well..."weighted more in favor of safe Republican states".  The existing allocation formula is rather screwy, sure, but I should note that if you allocated the delegates to make the electoral power per primary voter equal, you would in fact have more delegates in more Republican states, since there are more Republicans there.  Makes sense that Florida gets more delegates than New York, even though they have similar population.  There are more Republican voters in Florida.  And the reverse for the Dems.  More Dem. voters in New York, so more delegates there for the Dems makes sense.

And actually, the much bigger discrepancy comes with respect to how delegates are allocated within states.  At least the Dems allocate different numbers of delegates to different congressional districts, based on party strength in the CD.  Most of the states on the Republican side give three delegates to every CD, even if there are a tiny number of Republican voters there.  This means that Republicans living in heavily Democratic CDs have vastly more power than those living in Republican CDs.  Harry Enten talks about that here:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-right-that-the-gop-primary-is-unfair-it-favors-him/

Yes, this is certainly true. I completely agree. I don't know that it's necessarily contradicted by anything I said. When I talked about things being weighted in favor of safe Republican states, I meant things like the bonuses for having Republican elected officials, or having voted for the Republican candidate in the last presidential cycle, things like that. When I talked about considering weighting things toward swing states, I certainly didn't mean weighting things to make electoral power per primary voter equal. The system I was floating would absolutely distort things away from that ideal, if indeed you hold it as an ideal.

Basically, I was looking a little more big picture than your responses seem to be geared. If they want the primary to reflect the preferences of the base, then something like the current system tilts things in that direction. If they wanted it to reflect the party as a whole, then allocating delegates to make electoral power per delegate as equal as possible would be the ideal. If they wanted to tilt things more toward electability in the general, then they might consider allocating (relatively to other states) more delegates to states that were close in the previous general election. As long as there is going to be a system of delegates in between the popular vote and the nomination, the way they're allocated is going to be a choice that can be fine-tuned to move toward various ideas of what the primaries should be and what outcome they should work toward.