You don't want to try to understand how states choose their delegates...

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.horsesass.org/?p=4275

Trying to understand this bizarre system hurts the brain, even for someone who follows politics...

And that doesn't even get into the fact that there's both a primary and a caucus there, but while the Republicans apportion half of their delegates from the primary and half from the caucus, the Democrats apportion them all from the caucus (which comes first)... but hold a primary too, even though it means nothing...

Oh, and if you vote at a polling place you can vote in either party's caucus without checking off which party you are a member of, but if you vote by mail (Oregon and Washington have vote-by-mail), your vote won't be counted if you don't check off one of the party-affiliation boxes... and a lot of people forget to check them.

And how about Louisiana, where if nobody gets 50% in the vote, instead of the vote winner getting any delegates, the state convention chooses all of the delegates, all of whom probably go to the national convention unaffiliated? Huckabee only got 43%, so his win there might mean nothing... but his (seeming, it's being contested for good reasons) loss in Washington might end up with him getting the delegates, depending on how the convention goes... (26% McCain, 24% Huckabee, 21% Paul, 16% Romney (who quit), 13% Unaffiliated? What a mess... but it's an all-or-nothing state, unless deals are struck like there was in West Virginia (where McCain and Paul's delegates went over to Huckabee to stop Romney from winning; Paul's got a few delegates for the national convention out of the deal)...

Compared to this the electoral college system looks simple and easy! :D

[DMiller]

It's amazing how complicated it is. This is the first time I've really paid close attention to the primaries, and I never realized before how little we actually know even after a winner has been declared in a state.

[A Black Falcon]

In a lot of states, being declared winner actually means very little... the whole thing is just such a ridiculous mess. Usually, as you say, it doesn't matter because the nominee is decided early and the rest is just ceremonial, but this cycle shows us how messed up it truly is when we've got to actually work through it in contested elections...

[Dark Jaguar]

I knew this whole party mess was overly convoluted... Then again they do run these things like companies and they have to pick their "most likely" in these "blind taste tests" they do at each state to prevent competing with their own products.

I love cynicism. Being cynical fills my heart with sugar gumdrop bears and flying space unicorns!