Downhill for Trump
Having won close to 48 percent of delegates per election night previously, he has to up that to almost 60 percent. Donald Trump has a problem called math. Ask Donald Trump's supporters about Trump's ceiling and they will laugh it off and point to Massachusetts, a state where Trump came closest to getting 50 percent of the vote. Massachusetts, by the way, is solidly Democratic for the general election.
Even with Massachusetts, however, Trump has been averaging about 35 percent of the vote. In fact, his loss in Wisconsin was not much of a deviation from his first win in New Hampshire. With 17 people in the race, Trump could get by with 35 percent. He cannot now.
In addition to his vote averages, Trump has only averaged about 48 percent of the delegate wins each election night so far. The delegates are what matters. The reason everyone talks about 1,237 delegates needed is because that is a majority of the total delegates to the Republican convention in July. If Trump does not have a majority of the delegates, he cannot be the nominee of the Republican Party. This is a 156-year-old rule for the Republican Party and one every party from the Libertarians to the Greens to the Democrats adheres to. If Trump wants on the ballots of the 50 states as the nominee of the Republican Party, he must get a majority vote of the delegates at the party's convention. That is 1,237 delegates at a minimum.
With Trump only averaging 48 percent of the delegates so far, he will need to up that to almost 60 percent after Wisconsin to get to 1,237. Otherwise the Republicans will have a contested convention. Polling, none of which has taken into account Cruz's win in Wisconsin, shows that Trump will win New York, his home state. But even that does not look as good for Trump as at first glance. A win in New York of more than 50 percent would only give Trump 14 delegates statewide. The rest are assigned by congressional district and Cruz looks to be doing better than Trump in several districts.
Likewise, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, which is no guarantee, he would win only 17 delegates as Pennsylvania decided to let its remaining 54 delegates pick their own candidate and not be bound by the election night vote. That favors Ted Cruz who, unlike Trump, has been aggressively going state by state steering his supporters into delegate positions within the Republican Party.
That is another problem for Trump. Most delegate selection processes for the Cleveland convention, including here in Georgia, favor long-time members of the Republican Party. In many places, potential delegates submit a resumé outlining their work on behalf of the GOP over time. Most of Trump's supporters are new voters to the Republican Party, not the lifelong Republicans favored to go to Cleveland. Between Republicans actually being delegates to the Republican convention and Cruz working to make sure those delegates support him, if Donald Trump cannot get 1,237 delegates to support him on the first ballot, he probably is finished.
There are lots of talking points that Cruz needs to win something like 90 percent of the remaining delegates to win. That is true if Cruz wants to get to 1,237. But Cruz, unlike Trump, has recognized that in 156 years of Republican Party nominations, delegates matter consistently. While working to win states, he is working to win delegates. All he has to do now is keep Trump from gaining more momentum. He has an excellent helper helping him do that named Donald Trump.
Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor and radio talk show host in Atlanta.
This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 6:58 PM with the headline "Downhill for Trump ."