The 2016 Republican Primary and How a Field of Seventeen Became One

Seventeen. Count them on your fingers and you run out of fingers. When the 2016 Republican presidential race began in earnest, there were seventeen serious candidates: sitting and former governors, sitting senators, a retired neurosurgeon, a former corporate chief executive, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, and a real estate developer and television star whom most of the political class assumed would get bored and go home by autumn. A field that size had never been seen in the party's history. Within about five months of the first vote, it was down to one.

How does that happen? Not by magic and not, as people in both parties like to say,, because of one clever trick. It happened because of rules, calendars and arithmetic. Let me walk you through them, because these mechanics will decide the next Republican primary just as surely as they decided that one. I will stay on the process and leave the personalities to the biographies.

The field, in the order they came in

The launch dates are a good way to see how crowded the stage became. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced on March 23, 2015, at Liberty University. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky followed on April 7, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida on April 13. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush made it official on June 15. The next day, June 16, Donald Trump came down an escalator at Trump Tower in New York and declared. Ohio governor John Kasich entered in July.

The full list of the seventeen: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump and Scott Walker. Several of them dropped out before a single vote was cast. The ones who stayed in faced a problem that sounds like a luxury and is actually a trap: too many competitors.

The debates: a stage too small

The first debate came on August 6, 2015, in Cleveland, hosted by a cable news network. There were too many candidates to fit on one stage, so the host used national polling averages to pick ten for the prime-time slot and sent the others to an earlier debate. Think about what that did. The system rewarded name recognition above everything. The candidates with the lowest numbers were pushed into a lower-profile debate, which made their numbers even lower. Whatever you think of that design, the effect was to freeze the existing order in place early.

The debates mattered for another reason. They were free airtime, and a candidate who could dominate a debate stage did not need a campaign war chest. That helped the candidate with the most name recognition, and in 2016 that candidate was Donald Trump. It also showed something the party's professionals had not fully absorbed: voters were not just choosing a résumé, they were choosing a mood.

The party leadership had its own problems with the debate format. After a debate in October 2015 on a business cable channel that campaigns complained was poorly run, the Republican National Committee dropped one of its planned debate partners, and the campaigns bargained over format demands among themselves. That fight, fought out in public, did nothing to bring the field together.

The rules: how you actually win

Here is where the arithmetic comes in. A candidate wins the Republican nomination by collecting a majority of the delegates to the national convention. In 2016 there were 2,472 delegates, so the magic number was 1,237. That is a majority: half of 2,472 is 1,236, and one more makes 1,237.

How do delegates get assigned? By state, under rules that are partly set by the national party and partly by state law and state parties. The national party's rules said that contests held before March 15 had to award delegates proportionally, that is, roughly in proportion to a candidate's vote. Contests held on or after March 15 could be winner-take-all. A few states used winner-take-all-by-district, or winner-take-most formulas. The details are in the party's convention rules, which are published and worth reading; you can learn more in how delegates are chosen and what they really do at a national convention.

Now think about what those rules do in a crowded field. Here is a hypothetical, labeled as one. Suppose a winner-take-all state has 100 voters and four candidates. Candidate A gets 35 votes. Candidate B gets 25. Candidate C gets 20 and Candidate D gets 20. Total: 35 + 25 + 20 + 20 = 100. A wins every delegate in the state with only 35 percent, though 65 voters preferred someone else. The 65 are split four ways. In a winner-take-all system, a divided opposition is a gift to the front-runner.

In a proportional state the same hypothetical would split the delegates roughly 35, 25, 20, 20. The front-runner would not gain much from the divided opposition, but also would not lose much from it, and the contest would stretch on. Either way, the field's size matters. A divided field helps whoever leads, and the longer it stays divided, the more it helps.

Iowa, New Hampshire and the early states

The voting began on February 1, 2016, with the Iowa caucuses. Ted Cruz won, Donald Trump finished second, and Marco Rubio was a close third. It was a victory for the Cruz organization, built on evangelical voters and a strong ground game. Iowa has a long record of picking winners who do not become nominees: Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Ted Cruz in 2016 each won the state and not the nomination. We cover the calendar in How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses.

New Hampshire came eight days later, on February 9, and Trump won it, with Kasich in second. That was the first sign that the establishment candidates had a problem: their votes were splitting across Kasich, Bush, Rubio and Christie, so no one candidate got big enough to challenge the leader. South Carolina followed on February 20, and Trump won it again. Jeb Bush, who had started the race as the favorite of many party leaders and donors, suspended his campaign that night. Nevada's caucuses on February 23 went to Trump as well.

Notice what was happening. Each early state narrowed the field, but it narrowed it in an uneven way. The candidates who had won the "invisible primary" of donors and endorsements were falling away. And the candidates who remained were still splitting the non-Trump vote at least three ways.

Super Tuesday and the middle of March

Super Tuesday, March 1, was the biggest single day. Eleven states voted. Trump won most of them, while Cruz took Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska, and Rubio took the Minnesota caucuses. Cruz's win in his home state of Texas kept his campaign alive. Because many of those states allocated delegates proportionally, nobody got eliminated outright, but Trump's lead in delegates grew.

Then came March 15, the date after which winner-take-all contests were allowed under the party rules. Two of the largest were Florida and Ohio. Florida was Marco Rubio's home state, and Ohio was John Kasich's. Trump won Florida and Rubio suspended his campaign that night. Kasich won Ohio, the only state he would win, which kept him in the race. From that point on it was Trump, Cruz and Kasich.

Think about that for a moment. A winner-take-all primary in a candidate's home state is a make-or-break event. The rule gave a whole state's delegates to the winner. Because Florida's delegates all went to Trump, the effect was far larger than the popular vote margin suggested. That is what winner-take-all does.

April: the question becomes mathematical

April was the month of arithmetic. Cruz won Wisconsin on April 5, and for a moment it seemed that a contested convention might be possible. If no candidate reached 1,237 delegates on the first ballot, delegates would be freed from their pledges on later ballots, and the party would face a real convention fight of the kind not seen since 1976. We tell that story in The 1976 Kansas City Convention and the Last Real Fight Over the Nomination.

Then New York voted on April 19, and Trump won by a wide margin and took most of the delegates. A week later, on April 26, five Northeastern states voted and Trump won all five. By then, the contested-convention scenario required Trump to fall short of 1,237 by a narrow margin, and the delegate math was running against that.

Cruz and Kasich tried a joint strategy, in which each would avoid campaigning in states where the other was stronger. It did not hold. A strategy of that kind has a basic problem: voters are not delegates of a campaign and do not follow orders from their candidates.

May 3: Indiana

Indiana voted on Tuesday, May 3, 2016. Trump won it. Cruz had been counting on Indiana as the state that could stop him, and when it went the other way, Cruz suspended his campaign that night. Kasich ended his campaign the following day. That same evening the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, posted publicly that Donald Trump would be the party's presumptive nominee and that it was time to unite.

The Associated Press later counted Trump past the 1,237 mark, in late May. Trump had won a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote across the primaries; the exact share is in the published results, and I invite you to look. What he had was something the rules reward: a first-place finish in most states, and a winner-take-all system that turned first place into far more delegates than his share of the vote.

Cleveland

The Republican National Convention met in Cleveland, July 18 to 21, 2016, at what was then called Quicken Loans Arena. Opponents of Trump among the delegates made an effort on the first day to force a recorded vote on the convention rules, and the chair ruled that the voice vote had carried. Trump was formally nominated in the roll call on July 19. Indiana governor Mike Pence was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. Ted Cruz spoke on the second night and famously did not endorse the nominee, a moment worth studying for what it says about the tension between a candidate's loyalty to his supporters and his loyalty to his party.

The steelman and the answer

Here is the strongest version of the argument that the process was unfair, stated as its critics would say it. One: the party's elites tilted the early process through debates, endorsements and money. Two: the party's primary rules were hard for outsiders to understand. Three: a large plurality of Republican voters in many states voted for someone other than the nominee. Therefore, they conclude, the system did not produce the will of the party.

And here is the answer, stated just as strongly. One: the rules were published in advance, and every campaign could read them. Two: the candidate who won, won in more states than anyone else, by the usual route of earning more votes than any single opponent. Three: if the "will of the party" was to have a different nominee, the opponents of that nominee had five months and sixteen alternatives to consolidate behind one. They did not. The failure to consolidate was a failure of the candidates and their donors, and I would argue not of the rules.

A fair conservative should take both halves seriously. A winner-take-all rule adopted for good reasons, such as ending the primary season sooner, helps whoever leads. If you dislike that, argue for changing the rules before the next race, not after it. The national party's rules are rewritten at each convention, and delegates, not pundits, decide them.

What the 2016 field teaches about the next one

First, the field size matters. If you are a supporter of a candidate in a large field, ask whether your candidate has a path that does not depend on the other candidates dropping out on schedule. Second, learn the calendar and the allocation rules in your state. Third, remember that the debates, the money and the endorsements all matter, but the delegate math ultimately decides. Fourth, if you want a say, vote in your state's primary or caucus. Our guides on Caucus, primary or convention, how Republicans actually pick a nominee and Can I vote in the Republican primary? Your registration questions answered explain how. And the general-election side of the story is in How Donald Trump won the three states Republicans had lost for a generation. You can follow the party in the next cycle on the site's elections page.

The bottom line

• A field of seventeen was cut to one in about five months because of delegate rules, a calendar that front-loaded the contests, and a front-runner who finished first in most states.
• Winner-take-all rules turn a plurality into a majority of delegates. In a divided field, that is a large advantage for the leader. Do the arithmetic before you argue about fairness.
• If you want a different result, change the rules at the convention, build a coalition early, and vote in the primary. Complaining after the filing deadline is too late.
• Know your state's rules. They are published on your state party's website and the Republican National Committee's website. Read them before the next race starts.
• Whoever wins, the party's job is to win in November. Unite when the nominee is chosen, and hold him to his promises.