Sorting the Winners by the Delegate Process

WASHINGTON — Who's winning?

Depends on whom you ask, how you count and which way the winds of momentum are blowing.

In most presidential election years, the nominations come into pretty clear focus a few primaries and caucuses into the process.

But this year, we've reached that point and nothing is clear. And that means the battle for delegates, which is what this is all about, matters more than it has in years in which a string of victories clarified the races long before anybody started counting delegates.

The delegate selection process involves mystical math, different rules in each state and, frequently, different rules for each party in each state.

"Who's winning at this point?" said Daniel Shea, an Allegheny College political scientist and student of the nomination process. "It's difficult to say. Usually you get a bounce out of the early contests and that leads to continued victories and demoralized opponents. Fundraising dries up. Who wants to contribute to candidates on their way out? Media expectations build around a candidate and all the forces come together."

"What we see this time is that just hasn't happened," said Shea, whose Pennsylvania college, with the New York Times Knowledge Network, is planning a Feb. 13 conference to launch a two-year project aimed at trying to figure out if there is a better way to pick presidential nominees.

A look at the results so far this year under the current patchwork process fails to offer much clarity on who's winning.

On the GOP side, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has amassed the most votes and has won three of the six contests, though two (Wyoming and Nevada) were tainted by lack of real competition and the third (Michigan) was in the state where he grew up.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has the second most votes and two wins, including the most recent contest in South Carolina, which put momentum, at least temporarily, at his back.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won Iowa and has third highest vote total in the contests to date.

On the Democratic side, there have been contests in four states. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton got the most support in all save one. But there's a tainting characteristic to her wins in Michigan, where Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards yanked their names from the ballot, and in Nevada, where Clinton got the most caucus support but, thanks to delegate-calculation vagaries, got one delegate fewer than Obama.

Total vote-wise, Clinton has received 436,000, Obama 105,000 and Edwards 49,000. But that doesn't mean Obama and Edwards are second and third. "Uncommitted" is second, having picked up 238,000 in Michigan, where Edwards and Obama did not run because the Democratic National Committee stripped Michigan of its 156 delegates for moving its primary to an early date.

The Democratic parties in Iowa and Nevada did not release vote totals from the caucuses. Instead, using complex formulas, they released extrapolated numbers of convention delegates that each candidate will get.

To get the Democratic nomination, a candidate must amass 2,205 delegates. The GOP magic number is 1,191.

The awarding of delegates differs by state and by party within each state. In many states, it is a proportional battle, with delegates awarded in proportion to votes (or caucus support) by congressional district. Other states have winner-take-all systems, some by district and some statewide (as in the Jan. 29 Florida primaries).

On top of that are what the Democrats call "superdelegates" and what the GOP calls unpledged delegates.

Democratic superdelegates – there are 796 – are elected and party officials. The GOP's 463 unpledged delegates include 123 Republican National Committee members. The rest are selected in primaries and caucuses but don't have to pledge to a candidate.

When it gets down to the delegate count, some victories – such as Obama's big win in Iowa – are not as big as they seem. His much-ballyhooed victory there garnered him one more delegate that Clinton and two more than Edwards (and that's despite the fact that Edwards finished second and Clinton third).

Here's what the numbers show, according to results and news organizations' surveys of Democratic superdelegates and the GOP's so-called unpledged delegates expressing a candidate preference:

Among Democrats, Clinton leads with 236 delegates (including 200 superdelegates). Obama is second with 149 and Edwards is third with 50.

On the GOP side, Romney leads with 59 delegates, Huckabee is second with 40 and McCain is third with 36. Fred Thompson, who dropped out Tuesday, is next with five. Ron Paul has four and Rudy Giuliani picked up one in Nevada.

Confusing and headache-inducing? Yes.

The best way to pick the leader of the free world? That's something that Shea and others will work on at the Feb. 13 conference and subsequent study.

"By most accounts, the nomination process, which seems to be in free-fall, will not endure another election," said a release about the event.

Said Shea of the current state of the races: "We're not used to sorting through this mess."

But he's done enough sorting to know what it could mean for his 2,100-student college in a state with an April 22 primary, which once seemed hopelessly late in the process.

Shea recently scrambled to reserve a campus auditorium for April 19.

"This thing could come down to Pennsylvania on April 22. Nobody is thinking about a presidential debate before the Pennsylvania primary. Why not Allegheny?" Shea said.