Trump Wins Florida Even If Trump Loses Florida

Trump’s strength is in his opponents’ numbers.

Unlike in the Democratic race, Republican primaries and caucuses use different rules for allocating delegates in different states. Florida is a huge state in which all the delegates go to the guy in first place statewide. Ohio is too, though it’s not quite as big. They both vote tomorrow, March 15th.

The conventional wisdom is that for anybody to stop Donald Trump from winning the nomination, they need for people who are not Trump to win Ohio and especially Florida. John Kasich, Ohio’s current governor, is polling about even with Trump there. Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior senator, is even telling his Ohio supporters to vote for Kasich. But unlike Ohio, Florida does not appear poised to give its delegates to its favorite son. Rubio is polling far behind Trump. But it might not matter whether Trump wins Florida.

Remember that nearly all of Trump’s victories are pluralities, not majorities. That means he gets less than half the votes but more than any one opponent. Polls show any of Rubio, Kasich, or Ted Cruz (who already won his home state of Texas) would be heavily favored in a one-on-one race against Trump by Republicans nationwide. By more than ten points, according to last week’s NBC/WSJ poll. So the anti-Trump wing of the party would be best served by any one (or especially two) of those guys dropping out. Obviously, they also want to deny him a big windfall tomorrow.

So consider the most likely Florida possibilities:

1. Trump wins Florida and Rubio drops out. Because Trump gets all those delegates, the bar is raised for the number of delegates Cruz and Kasich collectively have to win in the remaining states to keep Trump below 51% at the convention. And because they’re still splitting the anti-Trump vote, they’re still letting Trump take disproportionate delegates for winning states by pluralities— even though nearly every state shows most Republicans voting for the other guys. Fewer anti-Trump candidates might make it easier for Cruz or Kasich to prevail in various individual states if they divide the map and stay out of each other’s way, but that’s a big if. Result: Trump widens his delegate lead immediately; anti-Trumps have an outside shot at coalescing a little.
2. Rubio wins Florida and stays in the race. Trump doesn’t get the delegates from Florida, but the non-Trump field is still fractured into three camps, exacerbating the Trump plurality problem seen above. This is a big advantage to Trump going forward. The same advantage that’s given him most of his victories so far. Result: Trump’s delegate lead narrows in the short term but anti-Trumps remain divided, maintaining his advantage for future states.

It’s basically a coin toss. Heads, Trump wins. Tails, everyone else loses.