Washpo: Trump is well on his way to the 1,237 delegates he needs to be GOP nominee

[link to www.washingtonpost.com (secure)]

Presidential politics is, at its core, all about math. Nowhere is that more true than in the fight for delegates to this summer’s Republican National Convention. And the delegate math on the verge of the Super Tuesday vote is near-conclusive: Donald Trump will be extremely close to the 1,237 delegates he needs to formally claim the party’s nomination by the end of the primary process.

Let us do the math — or, rather, let us do the math forwarded to me by a Republican number-cruncher who counts himself as a card-carrying member of the GOP establishment but who also regards Trump’s nomination as nearly inevitable.


Through four states, Trump has 79 delegates as compared with 16 for Ted Cruz, 15 for Marco Rubio, five for John Kasich and three for Ben Carson.

That’s our starting point.

The biggest chunk of delegates, about 55 percent (1,360 delegates), is doled out proportionally. Assuming that past is prologue, let us give Trump 30 percent of these delegates, which totals 408.

Sixteen percent of the delegates will be doled out on a winner-take-all basis, meaning that if you win the state, you win all of its delegates. The two biggest prizes in the winner-take-all states, which, under Republican National Committee rules, cannot hold a presidential vote until March 15, are Ohio and Florida. The former allocates 66 delegates, the latter 99. Connecticut, which allocates 25 delegates, is a somewhat special case, but, for the moment, let us leave it in the winner-take-all category. (More on Connecticut below.) Given Trump’s dominance in polling in these winner-take-all states, give him all 396 delegates available.

There are 618 delegates (25 percent of the total) who are given out in some sort of hybrid process — a combination of winner-take-all and proportional allocation. Give Trump half of the winner-take-all and 30 percent of the proportionals. (As we said earlier, this is a rough calculation.) That adds up to 412 delegates.


An additional four percent of delegates are allocated by conventions and caucuses. Again, assume Trump gets 30 percent, which makes for 30 more delegates. Seven percent of delegates are RNC members. It’s hard to imagine Trump winning any of these. So, zero in that category.

Add it all up and you have Trump at 1,246 delegates — or nine more than he would need to be the Republican Party’s official nominee at its convention in Cleveland in July.