Having captured delegate pluralities in seven of eleven Super Tuesday states, nobody can deny that GOP frontrunner Donald Trump sits perched atop a yuge wave of momentum almost as tall as the towers which bear his name. Many pundits, for better or worse, have celebrated or lamented the “inevitability” of Trump as the GOP’s 2016 nominee.
However, despite Trump’s position as the frontrunner, his path towards a victorious ascent of the stage in Cleveland remains complicated by his need to secure delegates, not plurality victories.
As the math suggests, Donald Trump can still lose. Here’s how:
Currently, Trump commands a lead in securing delegates, standing at a total of 316 following his Super Tuesday victories. Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio trail with 226 and 106, respectively, while Ohio Governor John Kasich lags far behind the field’s three top contenders with a mere 25 delegates of his own.
Though Trump has secured delegate pluralities in 67% of states decided thus far, he holds only 46% of the pledged delegates – a pace insufficient to guarantee him the nomination in July.
For Trump to cross that all-important threshold of 1237 delegates needed for a first ballot nomination, Trump will need to capture 921 of the remaining 1784 delegates – or 52% – a proportion which currently exceeds his rate of delegate accumulation by 6%.
As the race progresses, Trump’s task in increasing his percentage of delegates won may be aided by the nation’s 17 remaining states maintaining one of two methods of winner-take-all allocation, though Trump’s path remains uncertain and unassured even considering allocation methods widely heralded as favoring the race’s king of pluralities among split fields.
Ten of these states, commanding 400 delegates in total, have adopted a straight winner-take-all allocation, giving all delegates to the state’s plurality winner, including the notable March battlegrounds of Florida (99 delegates), Ohio (66 delegates), and Arizona (58 delegates).
Currently, Trump leads second-place Rubio by 20 points in Florida, which ultimately will be a crucial test of the campaign strength of the state’s home Senator, though Rubio faces an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Trump’s lead over home-state Governor John Kasich sits just above the margin of error, though Trump’s support remains just under one third according to recent polling. With two-thirds of Buckeyes supporting a candidate other than Trump, there exists good reason to believe Trump will lose Ohio should Governor Kasich continue running the same campaign he has thus far. Should Rubio weaken, or anti-Trump sentiment intensify and deliver strategic votes to second-choice candidates, Kasich is well-positioned to win his home state even without receiving a surge of organic momentum or funding.
Though Arizona might seem like a natural win for Trump among voters wearied by the Grand Canyon State’s ongoing border disorder, particularly in light of former Governor Jan Brewer’s recent endorsement of the business tycoon, Trump doesn’t have the state locked up just yet. Though hard preference data remains thin, one recent poll found just 35% support for Trump, who leads Rubio by just 12 points – a deficit which Rubio has nearly succeeded in closing elsewhere. Given the high-stakes nature of this key winner-take-all state, the Rubio campaign and numerous independent expenditure groups are likely to appreciate the value of heavily investing in Arizona as a hill worth dying upon – a challenge which can be overcome when the stakes are winner-take-all.
The importance of strategic resource allocation as this race progresses cannot be understated. Thus far, proportional allocations have rewarded campaigns with broad bases of activity and resource commitment. As both candidates and the stakes of the race become better defined, campaigns and outside groups can afford to shift resources to capture strategic victories in winner-take-all scenarios where every last favorable voter must be turned out and every last persuadable moved away from Trump in contests where no reward exists any vote total one short of a plurality.
The other seven states maintaining a form of winner-take-all assignment, commanding 501 total delegates, allocate delegates to the plurality choice in each of the state’s Congressional districts.
The power of strategic resource allocation becomes more evident in states with winner-take-all Congressional districts, for while Trump may maintain pluralities in most of these Congressional districts, his opponents and the groups supporting them have a better chance of strategically defeating Trump in selected Congressional districts.
Across this district checkerboard, Trump won’t face a singular Waterloo, but rather, a series of targeted battles to wrest selected Congressional districts from his control by focusing on areas most likely to be turned against the toxic tycoon through the power of ground-level organizing and a heavy weight of anti-Trump paid communications.
Organizing entire states is tough, but targeted, district-specific ground efforts can be spun up on shorter notice to greater effect where the likelihood of Trump’s opponents denying him a victory remains the greatest.
At present, Trump lacks the extensive ground game and organizational expertise to out-match oppositional efforts to flip targeted Congressional districts, one by one. Given heavy opposition, opponents present a credible threat of wresting control of a Trump+5 district from the tycoon by abandoning a Trump+10 district where the state’s delegate allocation rules make such an effort worthwhile.
Should Trump win Florida, while losing Ohio and Arizona, he’d need to capture 53% of the remaining delegates to reach the all-important 1237 delegate threshold – a pace 7% above his current performance.
However, if a plurality of immigration-weary Arizona Republicans should opt for a wall even yugerer than ever imagined before, Trump will still need to win 49% of the remaining delegates – a pace still 3% above what he’s achieved through the close of Super Tuesday, and well in excess of his mid-30’s performance among national polls of Republicans.
Though Trump remains the frontrunner, he can’t escape several basic facts.
First, Trump’s current delegate performance substantially exceeds the share of Republicans who prefer him as the GOP’s presidential nominee. To this point, Trump has yet to win a majority, with his plurality victories rarely deviating from a range in the mid to upper 30’s. Nationally, Trump’s support stands at 35.6% according to RCP’s average of polls.
Second, Trump’s performance trails the level necessary to secure the critical 1237 delegate threshold, and there exists no conclusive case to be made that future overperformance is a foregone conclusion. His opponents maintain credible pathways to hold Trump short of the threshold.
Many Republican counter-insurgency resources have remained sidelined in the early days of the race, while commanders keep their powder dry while waiting for a clearer understanding of the Trump phenomenon and those places where it may most easily be countered. Furthermore, many Republican leaders, their networks, and their fundraising power still remain neutral, awaiting a better indication of when, where, and at the hands of whom the Trump phenomenon might finally meet its demise.
Make no mistake: anti-Trump resources have yet to be brought to full bear, and as this race progresses, their entry will most assuredly hinder Trump’s current pace of delegate accumulation which stands 11 points above his share of the national Republican preference.
When resources activate, their goal will be strategically focused around one goal: how to best hold Trump’s future delegate accumulation as close as possible to the 35.6% share of likely primary voters he currently commands nationwide.
That much is clear: if Trump only accumulates delegates in proportion to his current plurality vote share, then he likely emerges as a yuge loser in Cleveland.
Should Trump fall short of the 1237 vote threshold, the Republican National Convention will proceed to a second ballot, where Trump faces the same aforementioned problem: two-thirds of Republicans do not want Donald Trump to be the party’s nominee.
Among the key values of political conventions is their structure, which forces parties to build a majority consensus around a nominee who can unite the party for the election ahead. Currently, Trump is not uniting the party, as he lacks a majority of delegates, and also lacks the support of a supermajority of likely Republican primary voters.
If Trump fails on a ballot after the first, it will be because he lacked a majority consensus among the thousands of Republican delegates elected by their local GOP organizations to represent the will of the party and its base.
That outcome – a brokered convention – was once considered unthinkable in 2016. Donald Trump may be rewriting the rules of political campaigning, but as the delegate math suggests, that revision may ultimately be to his detriment.
