With New York playing a pivotal role in the Presidential Primaries for the first time in a generation, how and where the candidates campaign in New York is dictated in large part by the arcane rules for how delegates will be awarded.
Republican delegates are awarded mostly by Congressional district. So the South Bronx Congressional district, with just over 13,000 registered Republicans, is just as valuable as the 27th Congressional district upstate, with 177,000.
"So it’s worth campaigning in the Bronx, and if you hit the real Republican activists who go to the polls to vote, you could pick up maybe, let’s say nine delegates there just by talking to the right people," said State Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox.
Altogether, there are 95 Republican delegates up for grabs, three each in the state’s 27 Congressional districts. Within each district, if the winner breaks 50 percent of the vote, you wins all three. If not, you get 2; second place gets one. Fourteen at-large delegates all go to the statewide winner if the winner breaks 50 percent; otherwise, they’re divided up proportionally.
So for Cruz and John Kasich, keeping front-runner Donald Trump under 50 percent in any district denies him much-needed delegates.
On the Democratic side, much of the focus will likely be on the statewide vote and whether Sanders can pull off what would be a huge upset of Clinton here in her adopted home state. But when it comes to awarding Democratic delegates, while New York, like other states, is often described as having a proportional system, in fact, the math is a bit more complicated, and could work in Sanders’ favor.
For Democrats, there are 247 pledged delegates total. Between 5 and 7 are awarded in each Congressional district. But the way the math works, in districts with six delegates, a candidate needs just 42 percent of the vote to win three of the six, meaning in many places, Sanders could lose 58 to 42, and still wind up with just as many delegates as Clinton.
His campaign says Sanders, who’s so far appeared only in the Bronx, has an upstate swing planned for next week.
"You have to compete statewide, which we consider an advantage for us," said Robert Becker, a spokesperson for the Sanders campaign. "The one thing we have coming in to this is tens of thousands of volunteers that have been self-organizing for eight, nine months."
On the downside, another 84 pledged delegates all go to the Democratic winner, a valuable windfall for Clinton should she come out ahead.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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