Looking at the continuing saga of the Democratic party primaries, I was struck by the complexity of the delegate allocation process. The politics behind it has been covered by multiple sources in the past, but I was more curious about the logic/thinking behind it. The shortest way to frame my question would be:
What is the strategy behind delegate allocation per state in democratic primaries?
The purpose behind the process is to select that candidate which has the best chances of winning in the general election. Therefore, it is natural to expect that there should be a strong correlation between the number of delegates assigned from each state, to the number of electoral college votes from the state in the general election. This is easy enough to check — I downloaded the delegate breakdown from Ballotpedia and the electoral college vote count from the National Archives.
For the purpose of this analysis, I am only looking at the total democratic delegates from each state — including pledged and unpledged delegates. In the plot below, each dot represents one of the states.
