Newt Gingrich seems to be making decent sense, in terms of
apparent logic, in saying that by staying in the race he can help
rack up enough delegates to keep Mitt Romney from winning on the
first ballot at the GOP national convention. Sometimes, though,
that which seems to make sense does not actually work in practice.
Nomination arithmetic is different from normal arithmetic. And no,
I am not talking about how he alters the “impressions
game” by splitting the conservative vote and thus either handing
pluralities to Romney or narrowing the margins of victory for
Santorum. That is a very good argument, but that’s not at issue
here. What I’m talking about here is exactly the sort of “delegate
math” to which Gingrich claims to be appealing.
Here’s how it works: By staying in the race, Gingrich actually
helps the second-place candidate in many states
(which we will assume will be Romney, for purposes of illustration)
gain more delegates, even with a lower total
percentage of the vote. This is counterintuitive, but it is 100%,
incontrovertibly accurate. Why?
Because a number of states award a huge bloc of delegates
“at-large” statewide according to the proportion of the vote each
candidate wins statewide — except in a case where
one candidate wins an absolute majority of the statewide vote. In
that case, the candidate would be awarded every single one of the
at-large delegates in a “winner-take-all” system
rather than proportionally.
Consider the
rules in Alabama on Tuesday, which are similar to those in
a number of other states (with my emphases bolded):
All delegates from the State at Large shall be
awarded to a presidential candidate
who receives a majority of the votes in the Republican presidential
preference primary election in the state. If
no presidential candidate receives a majority of the votes in the
state, then the allocation shall be as follows: Based on the
relationship that the number of votes received by each
presidential candidate bears to the total number of votes cast for
candidates receiving at least 20 percent of the vote cast in
the Republican presidential primary election in the
entire State, the Steering Committee of the Alabama Republican
Executive Committee shall apportion pro rata the number of
delegates from the State at Large.
If there are only two major candidates (or, in this case, even
with Ron Paul pulling something like a minor 5% of the vote), then
the likelihood is very high that the “winning” candidate will
actually earn a majority, rather than a mere plurality, of the
statewide vote. So if Gingrich were not in the race, then the
winner (in this case Santorum) would win not 35-30 (or whatever the
final numbers were), but, say, 50.5 to 45.5. (And that is assuming
that the Gingrich vote would split precisely evenly. Nobody, of
course, makes such an assumption in real life; the more likely
outcome, backed by several polls (one had it at 57-27), is that
Santorum would earn two “Gingrich” voters for every one “Gingrich
voter” that goes to Romney.
So how would this have played out in Alabama? Well, with
Gingrich in the race, Santorum looks like he will win 10 of the
at-large delegates, with Gingrich and Romney each winning eight.
Romney would get those eight delegates for earning about 29% or 30%
of the vote. But if Gingrich were not in the race and
Santorum won the state over Romney 51-42-7 (a very reasonable
assumption, actually rather generous to Romney, with Santorum
getting 16 of Gingrich’s 30 percent, Romney getting 12 of it, and
Paul getting a two percent boost), then Santorum would get
all 26 at-large delegates and Romney would get zero.
Yes, read that again: Romney’s percentage of the vote would go
from 30 to 42, but his delegate count would drop from 8 to zero.
(And Santorum would move up from 10 delegates to 26,
at-large.)
The simple arithmetic is that the way to deny Romney a
first-ballot win is not to concentrate on how many
delegates other people win; the way to deny him is to
keep Romney himself from winning more delegates. What matters in
this game is Romney’s delegate count in relation to
the target majority of 1,144. The only way to slow him down is to
give a conservative challenger a chance not just to win more
proportional delegates, but to win more via “winner-take-all” rules
which deny any new delegates at all to Romney.
(Granted, the risk is that if Romney comes out ahead in a
certain state, this math would work in reverse, in his favor — but
since he’s already ahead anyway, the only way to stop him is to at
least have the chance to make up the gap in larger
chunks.)
In short, for all those states with rules like Alabama’s, a
Gingrich candidacy enables Romney to move inexorably closer to a
first-ballot nomination victory. Only a Gingrich withdrawal can
stop that march.
Now this is not to say whether Romney ought to be stopped or
not. This is just to say that if Gingrich’s goal is stopping
Romney, Gingrich’s continuation in the race is directly
counterproductive.
