The conventional wisdom about Republican presidential nominations goes something like this: Either (1) a single candidate wins Iowa and New Hampshire, then sweeps the rest of the field; or (2) the winner in Iowa fails to take New Hampshire, and we wait a few weeks for South Carolina and Nevada to figure out who the nominee will be. Either way, the whole thing wraps up early, and the later contests do not matter.
These scenarios have played out, though, when the top candidates have been generally acceptable to the majority of Republicans. Under those circumstances, letting Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada sort out the candidates makes sense: The rest of the party will endorse that selection.
But the two candidates at the top of the heap right now — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — leave a significant swath of the Republican party (if not the voters, then at least the politicians, donors, and consultants who dominate American politics) feeling quite cold. This could mean a lengthy nomination battle that stretches all the way to the California primary in June.
The nomination process is the party’s way of settling on a nominee reasonably acceptable to all major factions (or, at a minimum, the least unacceptable of the candidates). If a powerful bloc doesn’t like any of the leading candidates, chances are they’ll back an alternative. Such contests have most often been Democratic affairs (think Mondale-Hart ’84 and Clinton-Obama ’08), but the Republican party these days is looking as ideologically and socioeconomically disjointed as the Democrats.
If the first four or five contests are unlikely to be decisive, then how does a candidate collect — between the Iowa caucus on February 1 and the California primary on June 7 — the 1,237 convention delegates needed to win the Republican nomination? It’s too early to game each candidate’s possible path to victory. But we do know that the rules of the nomination process will interact with the calendar to determine the winner.
This election cycle, the Republican National Committee compressed its calendar. In 2012, the primary season began in early January; this time around, it starts in February. In 2012, just 72 percent of delegates were allocated by May 8; this time around some 85 percent of all delegates will be allocated as of May 10. Still, not everything has changed: California’s June primary remains the bookend of the process, as it has been for decades.
Importantly, states that hold their primaries or caucuses before March 15 must allocate their delegates proportionally (although they are allowed to mandate a minimum threshold of support). A candidate might therefore rack up a significant number of primary “wins” without building up much of a lead in delegates. That could give the trailing candidates a strong incentive to hang around (assuming they still have enough money to campaign) in the hopes of surging when the contests largely switch to winner-take-all. The opportunity for huge delegate bounties really begins on March 15: At that point, more than half of the delegates will still be unallocated, so a late-breaking candidate could increase his delegate count quickly.
Something else to keep in mind is that some states allocate portions of their delegates as winner-take-all by congressional district. This could be quite important and generate surprising results, in that it effectively gives a boost to Republican voters in heavily Democratic districts, where turnout in GOP primaries is correspondingly low.
The difference between caucuses and primaries is another relevant factor. Caucus states reward organization, and the most serious candidates have built strong operations in Iowa to drive turnout. But what about the other caucus states? The contenders have yet to dedicate much in the way of resources. In those states, a lot might come down to who the most politically engaged citizens support. These participants could have an outsized influence upon the final result. Delegates to the convention are allocated to states based upon population and historic support for Republican presidential candidates, not on past levels of turnout in the nomination process itself. Thus, in a race for delegates, 50,000 caucusgoers in Minnesota can have the same impact as a half-million primary voters in Wisconsin.
The timing of state contests is also important. Since 1988, Southern states have often voted in a bloc on Super Tuesday, to have more influence on the final result. They are doing that again this year — with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia voting on Tuesday, March 1. Louisiana votes the next Saturday, Mississippi the following Tuesday. When South Carolina is factored into the mix, this means that 9 of the 11 states of the old Confederacy will have voted before the winner-take-all deadline.
Meanwhile, most of the Rust Belt will have yet to vote, and the delegate hauls there are substantial, with 69 in Illinois, 66 in Ohio, 42 in Wisconsin, 71 in Pennsylvania, and 57 in Indiana. On top of that, two of the nation’s largest states will vote by some version of winner-take-all: Florida, with 99 delegates, and California, with a whopping 172. California could be decisive this year. Its primary is the last big one of the season; the state has the most delegates to offer; and its allocation formula is a mix of statewide and congressional district winner-take-all. There are a sizable number of California districts that vote overwhelmingly Democratic. It would be bizarre, to say the least, for the handful of Republicans in Maxine Waters’s or Nancy Pelosi’s districts to be the difference-makers — but it is a real possibility.
To appreciate just how important Byzantine nomination rules can be, it’s worth recalling the 2008 Democratic nomination battle. That year, Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton, but the size of his popular vote victory was too small to be decisive. The rules of the nomination process made the difference. Though Obama’s vote lead over Clinton was very narrow, the Democratic party’s rules gave more weight to the average Obama voter than to the average Clinton voter.
Something like this could develop on the GOP side this year. Midwestern voters could be more important than Southern voters; voters in Democratic states or districts could be more valuable than voters in Republican states or districts; and participants in low-turnout caucuses could have more influence than primary voters. As the GOP goes about selecting its nominee, the rules will matter — perhaps a lot.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
