Of late, the GOP nomination process has favored those on their second try: Reagan failed in 1976 before winning in ’80; George H. W. Bush failed in 1980 before winning in ’88; Dole failed in 1988 before winning in 1996; McCain failed in 2000 before winning in ’08; and Romney failed in 2008 before winning in ’12. (We’ll come back to George W. Bush, the exception that proves the rule, in a moment.) But we shouldn’t be too hard on the GOP nominees failing the first time around because the process depends heavily on understanding the power of the GOP’s rotten boroughs.

To win the GOP nomination, a candidate must win a majority of the 2,472 delegates, which are allocated through a complicated series of formulas. The biggest problem is that these formulas create rotten boroughs, where a relative handful of voters in liberal parts of the country control more delegates than larger numbers of conservative voters elsewhere.

Let’s use an absurd hypothetical to demonstrate the actual absurdity of the 2016 nomination process. Let’s say the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller wins every delegate in every state that Barack Obama carried in 2012, while the reanimated corpse of Barry Goldwater wins every delegate in every state that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. Rockefeller would win the Republican nomination with 1,231 delegates to Goldwater’s 1,166 (these don’t quite total 2,472 total delegates at stake in 2016 because I’m not counting the territories like Guam and Puerto Rico, but given that they tend to vote Democratic, they’ll likely wind up with Rockefeller rather than Goldwater). In other words, the blue states outweigh the red states when picking the nominee. The Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Henry Olsen likes to make the point that somewhat conservative and moderate Republicans have a dominant role to play in the nomination process, and the rotten borough effect is a significant reason why. Some actual numbers might help illustrate what’s happening.