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Larry Sabato: Real GOP Test Coming In Winner-Take-All States March 15
Monday, February 29, 2016 11:23 AM
By: Sandy Fitzgerald
This week's "Super Tuesday" primaries will prove that it will be difficult for Donald Trump's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination to catch him, but the real test will come on March 15, when candidates will vie for winner-take-all states such as Florida and Ohio, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Monday.
"If it's going to be done, it's going to be done then, and even then it's going to be difficult," Sabato told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program. "It will not really be tomorrow through proportional representation."
The difference is, in winner-take-take all states, the candidate who wins the overall vote gains all that state's delegates, while in proportional states, the delegates are divided by the votes the candidates get, among other factors.
There are only eight winner-take-all contests in the United States, reports The Hill, and their primary elections take place later in the race. The first two of those states to hold primaries are on March 15, but coincidentally, are the home states of two of Trump's rivals, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
A candidate needs 1,237 delegates to wrap up the nomination. The winner of the Ohio race will get 66 delegates, while Florida's winner gets 99. Overall, the eight winner-take-all states represent 391 of the delegates, or approximately one-third.
Meanwhile, the 11 states in the Super Tuesday primaries represent about a quarter of the outstanding delegates available, and Trump leads in polls for eight of the 11 states and remains close in rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's home state.
Cruz and Rubio are splitting the votes in many of the early states, with Trump slightly ahead, but Sabato said that voters should not forget about Kasich and Ben Carson, who are "additional elements" who are not getting many votes but are "making it difficult to catch Cruz."
"Even if he [Cruz] dropped out, it doesn't mean his support will move on past Rubio," Sabato said Monday. "Trump will get a decent proportion of those votes. You can't move percentages from category to category, it's never that simple."
