Trump's Lead at -22%!

Trump's Lead at -22%!
Possibly the most misleading statistic being repeated in the Republican presidential nomination is that Trump is leading by double digits. I'm not talking about analysis of whether his supporters will vote, or whether the polls are biased towards his supporters. I'm referring to the fact that the eventual nominee will need 50% of the delegates. It doesn't matter if he has the most delegates. If he has anything less than 1237 out of the 2472 delegates, it will go to a brokered convention. This is a terribly convoluted process, where promises are made, arms are twisted, animals are sacrificed, and at least one deal with the devil will be made. However, the gist of it is that all of that mad scrambling is done by the "Establishment Republicans," and you can be sure that it would take a miracle for Trump to be the winner in that situation.

Only seven states use a winner-takes-all approach, for a total of 400 delegates. Another 28 states (1347 delegates) use a completely proportional system, or a system which is proportional if no candidate is above a threshold (usually 50%). The rest of the 725 delegates are allocated in some other hybrid approach. Let assume Trump continues to hold at about 28% support (a mildly generous reading of the polls), and is consistently the leader across all of the winner-takes-all states. Then he can expect around to get 400 + 1347*0.28 = 777 of these votes. That means he needs 460 of the 725 delegates (63%) that are awarded in hybrid schemes, a nearly impossible task if he is polling at 28%.

With this kind of allocation, maybe Trump doesn't need to reach a full 50% support to secure the nomination. With some good strategy or a bit of luck, he could make it happen with 40%, but anything less just isn't going to cut it.