5. Northern states decide: The corollary to this, however, is that Northern states with more moderate electorates will decide who the nominee will be. You can see a good discussion of this from Dave Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight here. This is similar to the phenomenon that Sean discussed in 2011: These late states are better suited for establishment candidates, so unless an insurgent candidate opens a huge delegate lead in the early states, the establishment would have a good chance at mounting a comeback.
Many of the Northern states are winner-take-all, meaning that the establishment candidates can close the gap quickly. For example, Florida’s delegates (and let’s be honest, Florida is an honorary Northern state these days) are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. This might work to the advantage of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio (depending on the trajectory you expect for Donald Trump’s campaign). Ohio will award its delegates the same day, and so forth. In general, we tended to find that the surviving campaigns had only a couple hundred delegates by the time we got to mid-March, but by the time April rolled around there were usually one or two campaigns in the 500-600 range. (To win the nomination, 1,236 are needed.) At the same time, we note that the popularity of awarding delegates by congressional district means that many states that are thought to be winner-take-all, such as California, really are not.
This provides interesting incentives for campaigns. Mike Murphy alluded to this in a controversial interview with Bloomberg Politics, where he predicted that a campaign that had failed to win a single state could suddenly become the delegate leader in March. We could – and we emphasize could – therefore see a surprising number of campaigns attempting to soldier through the early states in hopes of posting big wins in mid-March.
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