What Would the GOP Primary Look Like If It Were Winner-Take-All?

Despite the common complaint that proportional delegate allocation is to blame for this year's drawn-out GOP primary, winner-take-all wouldn't have made much of a difference.

Political pundits have offered no shortage of explanations for why the Republican primary has dragged on as long as it has. One that arises with some frequency is the Republican National Committee’s requirement that any state holding its primary or caucus before April 1 must award its delegates proportionally, rather than winner-take-all. The assumption is that since Mitt Romney has won the most states, his delegate lead with a winner-take-all allocation would be much higher than it is with the proportional allocation required by the new RNC rules. A little math puts the lie to this theory.

First, a few caveats. Anyone who’s noticed the conflicting delegate counts offered by various news outlets knows that any delegate projection is subject to numerous exceptions and qualifications. The biggest discrepancy is between the Associated Press’s delegate estimate (which includes unbound delegates, based on caucus results) and the RNC’s estimate (which includes only bound delegates). But even the AP estimates vary. Some publications, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, include superdelegates; other publications, like USA Today and the Financial Times, do not. Since the superdelegates are not allocated based on the state’s primary or caucus results, the numbers used below exclude the superdelegates. (Unpledged delegates are also excluded.) Finally, since the Maine caucus results are still up in the air, Maine is excluded from these counts.

Delegate count under the current proportional allocation:

Romney: 381

Santorum: 174

Gingrich: 101

Paul: 35

Delegate count had all states been winner-take-all:

Romney: 407

Santorum: 200

Gingrich: 86

Paul: 0

So, under proportional allocation, Romney has 207 more delegates than second-place Santorum. And under a winner-take-all allocation, Romney would have, yes, 207 more delegates than second-place Santorum. Gingrich would be slightly worse off. But Ron Paul would be the big loser; he’d have a whopping zero.

The question, I suppose, is whether Paul would have dropped out by now, since he’d have virtually no chance of securing any delegates in the months leading up to the convention. Among the Republican candidates, Ron Paul is sui generis, so it’s difficult to guess where his supporters would go if he weren’t in the race. None of the other three candidates support his anti-war, isolationist foreign policy. Nor do they support his libertarian approach to social issues. On the economic side, Gingrich probably comes closest to Paul’s low-tax, zero-regulation free market ideology. But Romney is probably the least offensive on the social side. Santorum is the most hawkish, most fiscally profligate, and least socially libertarian. So the Paul vote probably goes mostly to Romney, with an appreciable portion going to Gingrich.

Let’s say Paul dropped out on February 6, after getting less than 20% of the vote in the Nevada caucus. Without Paul in the race, Romney might have won Colorado, assuming he could have gotten the majority of the Paul vote. So let’s give Colorado to Romney. Paul got less than 10% of the vote in Oklahoma; Romney could have beat Santorum in Oklahoma if he got almost all of the Paul vote, but Gingrich could just as easily have won. We’ll keep Oklahoma in Santorum’s column. Paul got 28% of the vote in North Dakota; if Romney picks off 3/5 of that, he wins North Dakota. Let’s give Romney North Dakota. Now our delegate count is:

Romney: 462

Santorum: 145

Gingrich: 86

Romney’s path to the nomination is certainly much clearer, but it still doesn’t look inevitable. And with Intrade, the prediction market, projecting Romney to win only two of this month’s six remaining contests, a winner-take-all allocation would only encourage Santorum (and probably Gingrich) to stay in the race.

As the race heads into April, when several states favorable to Mitt Romney hold their contests—some of which are actually winner-take-all, as allowed by the RNC rules—Romney should gain a big enough delegate lead to once again be the inevitable candidate.

But you can’t blame proportional delegate allocation for dragging the primary race out that long. To mangle an infamous phrase: It’s the candidates, stupid.