The Louisiana state GOP announced the current estimated delegate breakdown: Ted Cruz and Donald Trump both get 18, Marco Rubio gets 5. How is this possible, when Trump got more votes? Well, the popular vote count statewide was effectively a two-man race, as only Trump and Cruz got above 20%. Those at-large delegates (28 total) went 12 for Trump, 11 for Cruz, 5 unbound. But! Louisiana has 6 Congressional Districts, and each gets 3 delegates (18 total). In five of those districts the state GOP is unofficially calling it as Cruz, Rubio, and Trump all getting 1 delegate… except in LA-05, where Cruz gets 2 and Trump gets 1. Thus, the current score is 18-18, with 5 for Rubio and the other 5 officially unaffiliated*. All of this, by the way, will be the subject of much vigorous debate and discussion in Louisiana political circles over the next week, which probably means that there’s going to be a brawl at the upcoming state convention.

Still: if you thought that Donald Trump’s awful, no-good night was at least over for him, rest assured: it’s not. The universe itself conspires to come back to the tableau* of his humiliation and dump one last small, yet stinking, dollop of embarrassment on his head. As it stands now, the guy didn’t even win the delegate count in Louisiana. He could only manage to tie with Ted Cruz, a man who Trump just recently described as “L-I-E-N.” Perhaps he meant “lion?” It’s so hard to tell, with that particular dude.

Moe Lane

PS: If you were ever wondering what good a professional campaign organization can do for a candidate, it’s this: it can take a state where the polls had a candidate down by 15 points on Election Day, and turn it into a state where the candidate tied for first in the delegate count. And perfectly ethically, too! The rules are the rules, and they’re perfectly reasonable ones; it’s nobody’s fault except Trump and his campaign’s if they didn’t actually read them, and Ted Cruz’s people did. Welcome to the big leagues…

*The Republican party doesn’t really use super-delegates to the override-the-will-of-the-voters extent that the Democrats do, but the party has a few.

**Well, you know. Louisiana. French. It seemed like a good word to use, under the circumstances.