There are 13 Republican contests a week from today but none looms larger than Texas. Texas has 155 delegates, or 6 percent of the total number of delegates. Even if Ted Cruz won’t, we have no problem saying it--he has to win here. Although he might hope that a getting a decent share of delegates can keep him alive, the perception that he couldn’t win his home state would doom his candidacy.
The Cruz campaign’s hedging might be based on what “winning Texas” means: Is a win getting more votes or taking home more delegates?
Let’s review the rules. Texas will award 47 at large delegates proportionally to everyone who receives 20% of the vote, unless someone gets 50% of the vote. Given a four-candidate field, someone getting half of all votes seems exceptionally unlikely. The most interesting question here is whether Marco Rubio people will be able to get to 20%. If not, he will be completely shut out of this group of 47 delegates. (Just to show Texas’ importance, if the Texas at large delegates were a Super Tuesday state themselves they would be the sixth largest state for delegate totals.)
At first blush, this an easy call and Rubio should make it. Rubio got 23% in Iowa and 22% in South Carolina. Bush no longer torments him. The first poll we have seen post South Carolina has him at 23% and finishing second in Georgia, just eight points back of Trump.
What this misses in Texas is the traditional home state effect that candidates get. All one needs to do is go back and look at past primaries--Gingrich in Georgia in 2012, Obama in Illinois in 2008, and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas in 2008--to see that they all outperformed what otherwise would have been expected of them. Georgia was gave about 20% more to Gingrich than similar states. Or consider Clinton’s 2008 performance in New York, where she overall performed solidly though not spectacularly. New York African Americans voted for Obama 61-38, while New Jersey African Americans voted for Obama 82-14. Being from New York meant something.
Rubio seems to acknowledge the danger he faces in Texas and has both a Wednesday and Friday event scheduled there in addition to Thursday’s debate. Getting to threshold will probably happen for him but it will not be easy.
The remaining 108 Texas delegates things are even tougher.
Each of Texas’s 36 Congressional districts get three delegates. Anyone who gets 50% of the vote in a district would win all three; otherwise the winner gets two and the runner up gets one. This is where Cruz and Trump are really slugging it out. Winning more districts is much more important delegate-wise than getting the most votes. Each 2.1% of statewide vote is worth approximately one delegate.(A caveat: non-viable candidate’s votes are re-allocated so i might be a bit more depending on how many candidates don’t get to threshold.) This compares to every win in a district, which is worth two delegates. Because winning districts and getting more votes are related, there will not be a large gap between districts won and state vote share. Still, it is possible to to win delegate race and lose the popular vote.
Rubio is likely to find it to be struggle to get second place district finishes when up against the two titans of Cruz and Trump. Breaking through for second anywhere is going to be a challenge. A place to look for Rubio seconds is the districts where comparative establishment candidates did well in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Texas has seen it fair share of Establishment versus Right-Wing Battles. A look at the map shows no real keys to where second place finishes might come for Rubio.
For Cruz the goal is simple: first place in every district. For Trump a win or two in some districts, combined with solid seconds most everywhere else, will gain his campaign a respectable number of delegates. For Rubio it is all about reaching the Threshold and adding a few second place finishes. It is hard to get people to focus on anything but obvious wins and losses. But the question of whether Rubio gets to 20% in Texas could easily be far more important than who wins in Virginia.
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The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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