Alternate delegate apportionment

[catographer]

The current apportionment of delegates by the GOP and Democrats is based on generally how Republican/Democratic the state is and how big the state is. It would make sense to allocate the delegates proportionally based on these two factors. I decided to try my own allocation to check if it was really representative-enough and proportional. What I found was that the allocation is far from exactly proportional, making some states underrepresented in their party's nomination process. A clear example of this would be Wyoming and WV's GOP delegates; both won by Romney by similar margins, Wyoming has less than three times WV's population but has nearly as many delegates (29 to WV's 34).

I decided to try making the apportionment more proportional by looking at 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney's performance in the state as a measure of how Republican the state is. Likewise with Democratic states and Obama's 2012 performance. However, looking at the vote totals of Romney and Obama in each state and putting them in a proportional calculator wouldn't be representative because some states had lower turnout due to their non-competitiveness; I had to control for this. So I took the percentage of the vote Romney and Obama had in each state and multiplied it by the state's population in the 2010 census, the last time congressional reapportionment occurred. This gave me an estimate for fairly comparing the partisanship of each state to each other.

I'll call these 100% turnout estimates, since it's approximately the number of votes the candidates' would've received in each state had the turnout been 100% (of the 2010 population).

I took the 100% turnout estimates and put them into a congressional apportionment calculator (http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/census/tools/apportionment/). The calculator only takes an input of between 400-999 total seats to apportion, yet the total delegates of the 50 US states in each party's primaries equals a 4 digit number (the total delegates, pledged and unpledged, of each of the 50 states not including territories and DC). So I took a divisor of the 4 digit numbers, entered those as the total seats into the calculator, and then took the results for each state and multiplied it by enough to make the total the 4 digit number. Sounds confusing, so here's an example: there are 2394 GOP delegates minus territories and DC, so I divided that by 4, apportioned the delegates, then multiplied each number of delegates per state that the calculator gave by 4, giving my new delegate count.

Here are the results of those calculations:

Republicans


Democrats

[catographer]

Notice that on the GOP side, West Virginia now has over 3 times as many delegates as Wyoming, the same being the case of the states' populations.

[Slander and/or Libel]

I can imagine a scenario whereby the parties wouldn't want the states to weight things as you've done above. If they're at least trying to factor in general election competitiveness, then they might want to weight swing states higher and safe states (for either side) lower, for instance. On the Democratic side, they also have delegate inducements to run primaries at certain times, or along with other nearby states. Those make the system not fully proportional, of course, but I don't know that full proportionality ought to be the goal.