Update 21 February: Bush has “suspended” his campaign. This changes the figures a bit but has less effect on Trump and more on Cruz, Rubio & Kasich.

I have updated and revised my predictions. Please see this new article for details.

For weeks I’ve been trying to understand what is going on in the Republican Presidential nominating contest. The rise of Donald Trump turned what appeared ready to be a smooth coronation of Jeb Bush into a chaotic mess but the candidates within that chaos didn’t appear to be acting very rationally.

Specifically they didn’t go on the offensive against Trump. Aside from a few cursorial pokes in debates the other candidates and the SuperPACs that back them were busy spending a lot of money and effort bashing each other and avoiding bashing Trump. Meanwhile, starting in October, Trump’s poll numbers exploded and he went from ~25% support to ~35% support and became the clear frontrunner.

Data from fivethirtyeight.com:

The race at the end of September

The race in mid-February

This is exactly the opposite of what strategy would normally suggest the candidates should be doing. Letting one person break from the peloton risks giving up the nomination as that candidate builds up a huge advantage in pledged delegates and momentum. All the other candidates should be focusing their fire on Trump and pulling him back to the pack.

But they aren’t.

These Men Are Not Stupid

No matter what memes may be circulating, none of these candidates are dumb and they are not surrounded by dumb advisors. These are the masters of campaigning in the United States and they know what they are doing. One or two might chase a phantasm or engage in self-delusion but not all of them at the same time. So if they’re ALL acting contrary to logic the flaw must be with the logic not with the campaigns.

The flaw is thinking that this year’s contest is like the previous campaigns and that the way you win the nomination is by winning state by state until you have a majority of the delegates.

The problem is that in 2012 Mitt Romney wasted a lot of time and a lot of money and took a lot of damage from being chased by a pack of wanna-be candidates who never ever ever had a chance to win the nomination much less win in November. So the GOP changed the rules.

Here’s what they say about the changes:

Following the 2012 presidential election, we recognized the need to avoid a drawn out primary process and together have worked to change our primary calendar to shorten the process and accommodate an earlier convention.

This is the Republican Party’s description of the process for the nominating contests.

What happened is that states were encouraged to hold their primary or caucus in a group with other states creating “regional clusters” and the calendar of the primaries was shortened with the last batch happening on June 7th (compared to June 26th in 2012). The idea was to force candidates to compete in large geographic areas rather than picking single states to fight in and win some delegates while denying the front-runner a clear majority until very late in the process. Romney, the 2012 nominee did not get his majority until May 29th.

However at the same time the Republicans made another rule change that is going to have lasting effects on the 2016 contest. By policy every state holding a primary or caucus before 15 March except South Carolina has to allocate its delegates proportionately. This was done to ensure that the compressed schedule would not let a single candidate get an unbeatable lead too quickly before the natural “vetting process” of the primaries winnow out weak or compromised candidates.

Here’s the entire primary schedule.

Traditional theory is that all candidates are basically equal in their potential and that as the voters get comfortable with the “best” candidate that person would just keep increasing their lead until they are winning lopsidedly. Even in the contests decided proportionally a run-away favorite should be amassing a lot of committed delegates.

Then Trump happened.

Who are These Delegates

Before doing the math to show that Trump cannot win, let’s look at the way the Republicans allocate delegates.

There are three pools of delegates. Each state and 6 non-states (American Samoa, Guam, the Marianas, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Washington DC) contributes delegates to the final tally.

Each state and territory gets 3 “RNC” delegates. These are party insiders, the equivalent of the Democratic Party’s “Superdelegates”.

Each state gets 10 “At Large” delegates. The states get additional “At Large” delegates based on factors related to how successful the party is in that state (holding statewide offices, holding a majority in houses of the state legislature, etc.) The territories may get more or less than 10 delegates ad hoc.

Each state also gets delegates related to how many Congressional Districts the state has. Each state gets 3 delegates per Congressional District.

Add them all up and you get 2,472 delegates. To win the nomination outright a candidate thus needs 1,236 delegates to vote for them.

How Are They Awarded

The 168 “RNC” delegates are free to vote for whomever they wish.

The other delegates are required to vote for specific candidates on the first nominating ballot based on primaries, caucuses and state party rules. There are basically two systems:

Proportional Representation

Some states award their delegates in proportion to how well candidates do during their primary or caucus.

Of those states some have rules that require a candidate to get a minimum threshold of votes to qualify for any delegates. In those states the ratio of delegates to candidates is refactored after non-qualifying candidates are dropped from the calculation so there’s not a perfect 1:1 match between proportion of the vote and delegates awarded.

Some of the states have a “winner take all” threshold. If a candidate exceeds this threshold, they use the “winner take all” system instead of proportional allocation.

Winner Take All

In these states all the delegates are pledged to whichever candidate gets the plurality of the votes in the caucus or primary.

No Contest

A handful of states don’t have a caucus or a primary. Delegates will be determined at a statewide party convention in a variety of methods which boil down to classic back-room deals and smoke-filled rooms.

Hybrids

A few states allocate some of their delegates with one system, and other delegates with other systems. For example in Illinois, the “At Large” delegates will be awarded proportionately based on the primary, and the District Delegates are determined by a different process.

This makes it very difficult to accurately assess how many delegates a candidate will have after the outcome of each state’s nominating event. However, we can get a close approximation for most of the delegates and only worry about the really weird cases if it appears the assigned delegates won’t clearly produce a nominee.

Why Trump Cannot Win

I believe that Trump has a “ceiling” for the amount of support he can win in any given state and that ceiling is ~35% +/- 5%. This reflects his performance in the polls, his strong negatives, and the results in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. After South Carolina this Saturday we’ll have another data point but I am virtually certain Trump will get less than 40% of that vote.

Exit polls pretty clearly show who the Trump voters are. They are well-segmented. And there just aren’t enough of them to get Trump a majority of the delegates.

I generated an estimate of how many delegates Trump will get if he wins 35% of the vote in the rest of the nominating contests, assuming he wins them all (which is itself unlikely). In that scenario he wins all the delegates in the Winner Take All states.

My calculations show that he will receive ~1,177 delegates pledged to vote for him under this scenario, with a total of 123 delegates unaccounted for (the hybrid and strange case states). For various reasons it is unlikely that he gets more than a third of those delegates (41) which gives him a total of ~1,218 delegates. He’ll be short 18 delegates.

I do not believe ANY of the RNC delegates or the delegates determined in back room deals will vote for Trump unless a deal is done beforehand of some kind (very unlikely) or there’s so much pressure on the insiders to coronate Trump that they have to give him the nod or risk destroying the party. And even then, they still might refuse. The pressure on the RNC delegates from EVERY OTHER REPUBLICAN running for office in 2016 to not let Trump on the ballot will be enormous.

Here’s my math.

And this is the most optimistic scenario. If Trump does not win a few of the Winner Take All contests he’ll be even more short. Florida will be extraordinarily hard for him to win even if Rubio and Bush split the voting. Ohio is Kasich’s state (he’s the sitting governor) and a Trump win is doubtful. Texas is Cruz’ home state and he’s extremely popular with GOP voters there; Texas is not going to award Winner Take All delegates unless a candidate gets 50% of the vote, but if Cruz outperforms Trump that won’t matter and Cruz could win outright.

The further from 1,236 Trump is the less likely the RNC delegates hold their nose and vote for him.

It’s almost mathematically impossible for Trump to get to 1,236 delegates before the convention.

The Convention Will Be Chaos

For the first time in modern political history one of the major parties is going to actually select a nominee through voting at its nominating convention rather than just running a beauty pageant and some speeches nobody really listens to. When Trump fails to get a majority on the first ballot, all the delegates are “released” and from that point onward they can vote for whomever they want.

The delegates are not even required to vote for anyone who got any votes at all in the nominating contests. They could, for example, draft Mitt Romney to run again. Or anyone else they think is likely to bring order out of chaos.

Trump and his supporters are going to have a real temptation to walk out of the convention if Trump isn’t the nominee. Trump has the money to mount a 3rd party candidacy. This is what happened in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt stormed out of the GOP to form the “Bull Moose Party”, split the vote with the Republican nominee Taft and allowed Wilson to win with less than 42% of the popular vote.

But unlike 1912 where TR engaged in a three-way struggle, Trump might run right into Michael Bloomberg doing the same thing to the Democrats creating a four-way scrum. And the much more wealthy Bloomberg could buy Trump 10 times over. While there might be some room to find a voting bloc “in the middle” between the two parties there’s virtually no chance two candidates pursuing that bloc don’t split it and fail.

The Tea Partiers are going to similarly revolt if their guy, Ted Cruz, isn’t the nominee. They already think the party is corrupt to its core and incapable of reform. The most hated man in the Senate might decide to just become the most hated man in Republican politics and hold a gun to the heads of the party until he is either nominated or ejected.

Meanwhile you’ll see a chorus of “moderates” running hither and yon trying to find a compromise candidate that can unite the party and end the madness. They will keep emphasizing the need to “win in November”, basically saying anyone who doesn’t split the party is better than a re-run of 1912

The Logic of 2016

This is what the campaigns of Cruz, Rubio, and Bush have figured out and why they’re acting like they are acting. Kasich is in the mix because his strategy of doing well in New Hampshire paid off but he has money problems and needs a good 2nd place showing in a contest quickly to keep up funding momentum. He can’t win anything but he can keep Cruz, Rubio and Bush “honest” (i.e. not let them think they could cut a deal with Trump and/or each other to decide the nomination.)

Cruz, Rubio and Bush have the kind of money it will take to stay in the campaign all the way to the convention. And after it becomes clear to the public (likely after the 15 March events) that Trump cannot win the nomination, suddenly they’re going to be positioned to make delegates excited even if they’re not winning nominating contests. If everyone knows that nobody will be the pre-ordained nominee than just getting to the convention means that you as a delegate will get to make history. And who knows what crazy offers and backroom deals you may have dangled in front of you for your vote?

The Cruz, Rubio & Bush campaigns clearly are going to jockey for position at the convention now. They don’t care about Trump so long as he doesn’t find a way to break out of that 35% constraint (and if everyone knows he can’t win, he might find himself drifting back closer to 20%). What they’re worried about is two of the three making a deal to quit and turn the race into a 3-way contest, in which case Trump might figure out ways to get over 50% of the nominating delegates. In other words, they would all prefer to lose together than have any one of them go 1:1 vs Trump.

If Cruz for example manages to knock out Bush & Kasich after South Carolina, and quickly grows his support up to 40% (assuming he and Rubio don’t split the former support for the 2 departed candidates), he could amass 1240 delegates and win. So both the Rubio and Bush campaigns have an incentive to keep fighting even if they’re only getting a small portion of the votes. Keeping Trump or Cruz from the magic number means they both have a chance to win a brokered deal at the convention and they’ll have some leverage in terms of delegates who are there to represent them (even if they’re free to vote for whomever they wish after the 1st ballot). Given the egos involved and the logic involved it’s almost inconceivable that Bush or Rubio will quit.

Trump will not win. We will have an open convention.

It’s going to be the best civics lesson since the Watergate hearings. And it may purge the Republicans of a lot of problematic voters that are keeping them from moving forward on an agenda including civil rights, immigration, entitlement reform and criminal justice. While 2016 might be chaotic, it might also be the year that reforges the Republican Party into something great again.