No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

McCain inevitable? I think not. (UPDATE – Yes)

by @ 13:27 on February 4, 2008. Filed under Politics - National.

Revisions/extensions (1:30 pm 2/6/2008) – McCain is now inevitable. “Thank” you RNC, rank-and-file, and “conservatives” who refused to back and ultimately coalesce around a conservative candidate.

Flip has been doing a bang-up job on keeping track of the delegate counts. Indeed, I’m going to, er, borrow his GOP Primary Scoreboard – Maine Edition
Sorry, I blew up my pics folder
Flip also ran the math on what Mitt Romney would need post-Super-Duper Tuesday to get the nomination based on what he gets on SDT. He figures that, for any candidate to remain viable after SDT, the candidate would have to need no more than 2/3rds of the delegates unspoken for by SDT. In Romney’s case, that would mean he would need to get at least 34% of the delegates in SDT.

Because I’m not satisfied by looking at just the latest candidate the LeftStreamMedia is trying to dump out of the race, I decided to resynthesize the viability factors for the remainder of the candidates, taking each through the full gamut of 0% of the SDT delegates (or the percentage a particular candidate would need just to remain mathematically in it without taking from one of the other 4) to 100%. Of particular note, I also ran a set for John McCain that assumed he would get all of Mike Huckabee’s delegates after SDT, and that Huckabee would have 165 delegates coming out of tomorrow (in short, his percentage of delegates now). First, the chart for McCain and Romney:

Note that, if McCain does not get Huckabee’s delegates, he will need to get 34% of the SDT delegates to remain “effectively viable”, that is, he needs to get no more than 2/3rds of the remaining delegates. That is the same (give or take rounding) as what Romney needs. Similarily, for McCain to become “effectively inevitable”, that is, he would need no more than 1/3rd of the remaining delegates, he would have to get 69% of the SDT delegates, compared to Romney’s 70%.

Where it gets interesting is when one adds Huckabee’s delegates to McCain’s. I’ll ignore the “effectively viable” number I originally calculated, as an 18% showing would make McCain anything but viable. However, if McCain and Huckabee got a combined 66% of the SDT delegates (the example in my chart has McCain getting 53% and Huckabee 13%), and all of Huckabee’s delegates went to McCain (or vice versa if you’re a Huckster), he would become effectively inevitable. Also, even if McCain and Huckabee took every delegate on Tuesday, their combined delegate count would not be enough to mathematically lock up the nomination.

Next up, the surviving also-rans, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul:

In order to remain “effectively viable”, both Huckabee and Paul would need to get at least 40% of the delegates on SDT. Morever, while both could theoretically be mathematically eliminated, only Paul is in serious danger of that. He would need to more than double his average delegate performance in order to have any shot whatsoever.

(Extension) Now that Super-Duper Tuesday is over, let’s go back to Flip for an analysis of the numbers. He does assume that McCain got all of California’s delegates because he won every county, while Jim Geraghty says that Romney will end up winning between 2 and 4 of California’s Congressional districts and thus between 6 and 12 delegates. There are also currently a few anomalies between plugging the percentages into the above analysis and the current Flip analysis that I cannot currently explain.

What is clear by any metric that includes California is that McCain has somewhere more than 60% of the delegates he needs to get the nomination on the first ballot. Worse, specifically for those hoping for a brokered convention, there already has been a deal cut between McCain and Huckabee, specifically in the West Virginia convention, where the McCain delegates flipped to Huckabee en masse on the second ballot. If the inverse holds true, McCain would have roughly 75% of the delegates he needs.

The road is all-but-impossible for Romney. Most if the states and territories up in the next 2 weeks, including Wisconsin, use by-district WTA schemes, and I expect McCain to take both of the “state”wide WTA contests (the largest prize of Virginia and the District of Columbia) as he is the Beltway and veteran candidate.

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