Sure, the popular vote is a big deal in presidential primaries. But veteran campaigners know it’s all about winning the often overlooked delegates headed to the national conventions.
And the biggest single number of delegates will be up for grabs on March 1 — or Super Tuesday — when Georgia and 12 other states hold their presidential nominating contests.
Georgia’s complicated system for awarding delegates heavily favors frontrunners and makes it difficult for second-tier candidates to pick up traction. On the Republican side, for instance, candidates must capture at least 20 percent of the vote to begin to collect statewide delegates. In a new Channel 2 Action News poll, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Ben Carson all fell below that threshold.
Two storylines have emerged. Fresh off his decisive victory in South Carolina’s GOP primary, Donald Trump has six times as many delegates as his nearest rival heading into the Super Tuesday primaries. Will the New York billionaire continue to steamroll them, causing more to drop out like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush just did? Or will the others pick off enough delegates to fight another day?
Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton — with a victory in the Nevada Democratic caucuses under her belt — has amassed a commanding 502-70 lead over Bernie Sanders in delegates. Can she deliver another punishing blow in the South, where black and Hispanic votes are plentiful? Or can Sanders pull off what he is predicting will be “one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States”?
Both parties in Georgia draw up their own system for divvying up delegates, who include party activists, elected officials and others.
The Republican delegates
To win the GOP nomination, a candidate must win a majority of the 2,472 delegates to the Republican National Convention, set for July 18-21 in Cleveland. Of those delegates, about a quarter are up for grabs on March 1.
In Georgia, there is a “winners-take-most” model for how Republicans award their 76 delegates.
So, who benefits from these rules? Trump is leading the pack with 31 percent of the vote in Georgia, and Marco Rubio is now at 23 percent, the first time he has surpassed Cruz — at 18.7 percent — in the Peach State, according to a Channel 2 Action News poll conducted Sunday. The rest of the field is polling below 10 percent.
Sam Wang, who founded the Princeton Election Consortium blog, is predicting Trump will walk away with between 40 and 50 delegates from Georgia.
“Basically,” said Wang, who also teaches neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University, “it’s like the Ben Franklin saying: By not hanging together, the establishment candidates will all hang separately.”
Cruz could also do well in Georgia because it is home to many conservative voters, said Josh Putnam, who teaches political science at the University of Georgia and who writes the Frontloading HQ blog.
But it’s also possible, Putnam said, that if one of the establishment candidates like Rubio emerges as a clear favorite in that group, he could walk away with about a third of Georgia’s vote.
“If you are one of these so-called establishment types,” Putnam said, “you are hoping for the field to winnow in that establishment lane as it were and that Cruz and Trump end up splitting the conservative vote in the state.”
The Democratic delegates
To get the Democratic nomination, a candidate must win a majority of the 4,763 delegates to the Democratic Convention, scheduled for July 25-28 in Philadelphia. Of those delegates, 865 – or nearly a fifth — are at stake on March 1.
There are 117 Democratic delegates at stake in Georgia. Most are awarded proportionally.
Clinton is polling at 72 percent in Georgia. Wang is predicting the former secretary of state will leave Georgia with about that number of the state’s delegates. Putnam is also predicting Clinton will do well in Georgia. At the same time, Sanders is polling above the 15 percent threshold, so he could pick off some Georgia delegates.
“I would suspect that Sanders would do probably better than what we are seeing in the polls — how much we don’t really know,” Putnam said. As for Clinton, “it would be in her campaign’s interest to run up the score to the extent they can to squeeze out as many delegates as they can. The better they can do that across the South, the more pressure they can put on Sanders to head for the exits.”
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