UNLESS SOMEONE GETS TO 1,237 DELEGATES, THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION IS GOING TO BE A GIANT MESS

Trump only has 44.8 percent of the delegates that have been awarded up to this point.

2016 is turning out to be the strangest election season that we have seen in decades, and it may soon get far stranger.

At this point, most people assume that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee, and without a doubt he has had a tremendous amount of success. But because most of the states so far have apportioned delegates proportionally, Trump only has 44.8 percent of the delegates that have been awarded up to this point. So Trump is going to have to do significantly better through the rest of the process in order to get to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, especially since not all of the delegates are awarded through the primaries and caucuses. As Real Clear Politics has detailed, every state “is awarded so-called ‘RNC delegates,’ who are party officials with automatic credentials to the convention“.

Right now, more than 40 percent of all the delegates to the convention have already been awarded, and Trump is sitting at just 458. To get to 1,237, he is going to have to do really well in the upcoming winner-take-all states. That is why there is so much focus on Florida and Ohio on March 15th. If Trump wins both of them, he will have a path to 1,237 delegates. If he doesn’t, that is where things get tricky.

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