The new delegate math: Entering last night, Mitt Romney needed to win 47.8 percent of remaining delegates to hit his magic number. Now he needs to win 48.4 percent. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
The new delegate math: Entering last night, Mitt Romney needed to win 47.8 percent of remaining delegates to hit his magic number. Now he needs to win 48.4 percent. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
Mitt Romney, while acknowledging defeat in Mississippi and Alabama, nonetheless
declares victory in the larger battle:
I am pleased that we will be increasing our delegate count in a very substantial way after tonight. [...] With the delegates won tonight, we are even closer to the nomination.
This argument isn't inherently foolish, though if you don't know the mechanics of the process it might sound like it. Given Mitt Romney's delegate lead, the argument goes, he doesn't need to win as many delegates as Rick Santorum does to reach the magic number of 1,144. Therefore, as long as he's adding delegates, Romney is winning—even if he's losing, because he's approaching 1,144 more quickly than Santorum.
There's two problems with that argument, however:
- As Nate Silver has documented, roughly one-quarter of delegates are unbound, and if Romney rides a big losing streak into Tampa, he's at risk of losing support from those delegates; and
- Even if he holds all his unbound delegates, the question isn't whether Romney is winning delegates at a faster pace than Santorum or Gingrich, it's whether he's winning delegates at a fast enough pace to reach the magic number of 1,144.
Delegate counts are imprecise, but using RealClearPolitics tally, Mitt Romney had won 439 delegates heading into last night's contests—50 percent of the delegates that had been available so far—leaving him 705 delegates short of his magic number of 1,144.
What that means is that as of last night, if Mitt Romney were to win just 47.8 percent of the remaining delegates (including not just future contests but unallocated delegates from earlier contests), he would clinch the nomination. Thanks to his early lead, Romney would win even if Rick Santorum were to win a bare majority of the remaining delegates.
At least on paper, therefore, a winning by losing strategy was (and is) plausible. But as I mentioned above, one of the problems with that strategy is that if you're losing, you risk losing unbound delegates—and if that happens, your math suddenly falls apart.
But even if you set that possibility aside, Mitt Romney still didn't win enough delegates last night to satisfy his winning by losing strategy. According to RCP's count, Romney won 34 percent of the delegates available last night. That's more than Rick Santorum (29 percent) or Newt Gingrich (21 percent), but he needed to win 47.8 percent to continue on his winning by losing strategy.
Even though Romney's strategy is to win despite losing, you could argue that last night he lost despite winning, at least as far as delegates go. Clearly, losing the big prizes of Alabama and Mississippi is a bad for his campaign narrative, but thanks to victories in the Hawaiian and American Somoan caucuses, he did win more delegates on the evening than either Santorum or Gingrich. But as I wrote above, he didn't win at the pace that he needed to.
Mitt Romney's winning by losing strategy is risky, and last night it simply didn't work. He entered the evening needing to win just 47.8 percent of remaining delegates, but after yesterday's contests that number has now crept up to 48.4 percent. So even though he crept closer to his goal of 1,144 delegates in absolute terms, he actually took a step backwards in terms of the share of the remaining delegates that he needs to win.
And that's just math, whether Mitt Romney likes it or not.
7:23 AM PT: Just for giggles, I ran the same numbers using the AP's delegate totals via WSJ. According to those numbers, entering yesterday, Romney needed 46.9 percent of remaining delegates; by the end of the day he needed 47.7 percent. However, AP doesn't appear to be giving Romney the 9 delegates he won in American Somoa, which lowers his target to 47.4 percent. Still, he headed in the wrong direction yesterday. Obviously, Romney can recover, but it wasn't a good day for him. If he doesn't improve from yesterday's pace, he won't win.
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