Calculating Super Tuesday Delegates Based on Polls – Here are the Results!

Next Tuesday, March 1, 2016 is a big day in the Republican Primary race. Predicting the winners and losers is not an easy task. But I went by the current polls and used the RCP average where available, or the latest polls from 2016 and applied the proportional delegation math to those polls and came up with a tally.

And pretty much each state has a different means for calculating how many delegates each candidate receives. The rules are a bit complex, but not that difficult to understand after you read the rules.

Some states divide their delegates into several different pools. A number of Tuesday’s primary states allocate 3 delegates per Congressional District with the first place finisher getting 2 delegates per Congressional District won with second place getting 1 delegate. Most have thresholds at 20% or so and some slide it to 15% or less if no one receives 20%.

It is impossible to know in advance who will win each congressional district in advance, so I used the same ratio in the polls to allocate CD wins. That is about the best we can do until the results come in.

And then there are “At Large” delegates assigned in several ways and a handful of what could be called Super Delegates, though most are bound by the vote tally.

So there were a number of assumptions I made, and some of the polls are quite stale and, for instance, show Ben Carson with double digits. That is not going to happen as he has dropped in the latest polls to the low single digits. But as I said, some of the polls are stale.

So here is what the proportional math based on the polls tell us.

Georgia (76 Delegates)

Texas (155 Delegates)

Massachusetts (42)

Minnesota (38 Delegates)

Oklahoma (43 Delegates)

Alabama (60 Delegates)

Arkansas (40 Delegates)

Tennessee (58 Delegates)

Virginia (49 Delegates)

Alaska (28 Delegates)

Vermont (16 Delegates)

Grand Totals