If Democrats Used Winner-Take-All Rules, We’d Be Looking At A Drastically Different Race

Barring any unprecedented developments from left field, Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee. She leads Bernie Sanders by almost 300 pledged delegates, and for him to come back from a deficit this big would be an historical first. But how much of this is because of Democrats’ delegate allocation rules, which are proportional across the board? What would the race look like if Democrats used winner-take-all rules, like some Republican states do?

Answering this question is a herculean task. Every state has different delegate rules, and many of them depend on the results in individual congressional district. Some states, like Florida and Ohio, are winner-take-all. Some are winner-take-most, others are proportional, and a few states don’t even bind their delegates at all.

Thankfully, Daniel Nichanian at FiveThirtyEight has done this yeoman’s work, re-allocating the delegates that have been awarded in the Democratic primary in accordance with the Republican Party’s delegate rules. Nichanian found that, if Democrats adopted the Republican system of delegate allocation, Clinton’s lead over Sanders would triple. For the full article click here 

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