The Southernization of the GOP

Conservatives are hysterical over possibility of Mike Huckabee winning the Republican nomination. (Read about it here, here, here, and here.) I'll spare the schadenfreude for now, but I would like to point out how the GOP's delegate allocation rules help Huckabee. Because the party awards bonus delegates to states that support Republican candidates, the South gets a major boost at the Republican convention. For 2008, the Republicans allocated a total of 483 bonus delegates. Of these, 219 (45 percent) went to 13 Southern states (the 11 states of the Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky). The other 37 states, DC, and various territories received only 264 bonus delegates.