In an unbelievably strange primary season, it seems almost fitting that Ted Cruz’s path to the Republican presidential nomination might go through Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district.
Yes, the primary polls may show a tight race in some upcoming states, like Wisconsin and California. But that doesn’t mean the candidates will all walk away from those states with similar numbers of delegates. And it is falling to the number crunchers to help candidates figure out how to go after every single available delegate in the race to the Cleveland convention.
This coming Tuesday, April 5, Wisconsin voters will cast their ballots for Republican presidential nominee. Of Wisconsin’s forty-two delegates, eighteen will be awarded to the candidate who wins the state. But another three delegates will go to the winner of each of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts.
So if we look at a statewide Wisconsin poll of likely Republican voters showing that the race is neck-and-neck, we’re getting only part of the picture.
Instead, if you want to know how the majority of Wisconsin’s delegates will break down, it’s worthwhile to look at district-by-district polling. 0ptimus, a GOP analytics firm that recently worked for Marco Rubio’s presidential bid, did just that.
In a survey out this week, 0ptimus maps out each of Wisconsin’s eight districts, reminding us that likely Republican voters are not evenly distributed throughout the state. Looking at data describing who is or isn’t likely to vote, one can estimate turnout, and potentially find areas with voters who are up for grabs and have a lot of power.
Take Wisconsin’s 4th District, a heavily Democratic district encompassing much of Milwaukee where there are fewer than 30,000 estimated likely Republican voters. That district will send the same number of delegates to the RNC convention as the neighboring Wisconsin 5th, which is much more upscale, suburban and Republican, and where there are an estimated 155,000 likely Republican voters.
Effectively, a Republican voter in Wisconsin’s 4th has five times as much of an impact on the makeup of Wisconsin’s delegation to the Republican convention.
Why does this matter? It matters because candidates looking to win a delegate here or there can do so by expending a little effort in districts where they are ahead or very close to their opponent.
Take Gov. John Kasich, whose path to the nomination depends exclusively on winning some kind of fight on a convention floor and who will need every delegate he can get. “For Kasich to move up four percent statewide to overtake Trump, he would need to move more voters than if he focused on congressional districts,” Scott Tranter, partner at 0ptimus, told the Washington Examiner. “[In congressional districts] where Kasich is second or a close first, he would have to move fewer voters to maintain those delegate footholds than he would if he tried to move statewide and potentially fail and not get anything.”
Another decisive state coming up for Republicans is California, where each congressional district will send three delegates to the national convention. While polls show Donald Trump ahead by a bit in California, a statewide win isn’t what will net delegates; winning each of the state’s 53 congressional districts will.
California, like Wisconsin, does not have its Republicans evenly spread across the state. A district like California’s 48th, a Newport Beach-area district that broke fairly significantly for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, will send three delegates. Over a hundred thousand voters cast their ballot for Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher there in the last midterm.
Meanwhile, Maxine Waters’ district, California’s 43rd, is a “minority-majority” district where most voters are Latino or African-American, and where fewer than 30,000 votes were cast for her Republican opponent in 2014. This is exactly the kind of district where a candidate could find that small pool of Republican voters, make contact, pick up those votes and convert that into three delegates.
“Many of the majority minority districts are top targets for us due to our ground organization. In fact, Senator Cruz is the only candidate with the volunteer base to contact every single target voter regardless of their location,” Chris Wilson, Cruz’s director of analytics, told the Examiner.
Political pundits love to talk about the national polls of the primary contests, and we’re even occasionally lucky enough to get statewide polling. It is these individual districts, however, where many of these coming delegate battles will still be won and lost.
And if we are truly headed to a fight on the convention floor, where every delegate will count, then it may well be that conservative firebrand Ted Cruz’s path to the Republican nomination runs through some of America’s most liberal California enclaves — a fitting twist in an already historically strange election year.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for The Washington Examiner and author of “The Selfie Vote.”
