El recuento de delegados, según Team Santorum

ABC News:

Rick Santorum’s number crunchers are under no illusions that they are facing a tooth-and-nail fight with Mitt Romney over delegates, but their calculations show a significantly narrower gap between the two contenders than most estimates.

The Santorum campaign offered ABC News a sneak peek at their in-house delegate tally, which still shows the former Pennsylvania senator trailing Romney but in a much better position to catch him.

“There is the Romney way of going about the counting and then there is the real way of going about the counting,” John Yob, Santorum’s delegate strategist, said in an interview on Monday.

Here’s how the Santorum campaign sees the standings in the race for delegates:

Romney: 435

Santorum: 311

Gingrich: 158

Paul: 91

The Santorum campaign’s version of the count puts them 124 delegates shy of Romney. By comparison, the ABC News delegate estimate shows Santorum 268 delegates behind Romney.

(...) According to the Santorum team’s count, Romney has 86 fewer delegates than in ABC’s estimate; Santorum has 58 more; Newt Gingrich has 22 more; and Ron Paul has 41 more.

So, where does Yob, who played a similar delegate strategy role for John McCain in 2008, come up with the 144 delegate difference?

Their delegate equation largely rests on two key assumptions: First, that Arizona and Florida will eventually allocate their delegates proportionally rather than using their current winner-take-all scheme. Second, that delegate tallies in Iowa, Missouri and Washington State should be estimated based upon the preliminary results of ongoing county and district conventions, not on the initial “beauty contest” votes.

The Santorum campaign believes they will receive the vast majority of the delegates in Iowa and Missouri and they are seeing signs of encouragement in Washington State. In King County, which held legislative district caucuses this weekend to choose delegates to send to the state convention later this spring, Santorum netted four delegates, compared to three a piece for Romney and Gingrich and two for Paul.

(In Washington State’s March 3 caucuses, Romney won King County by roughly 29 percent over Santorum.)

“We are now far exceeding the perceived delegate counts as laid out by the Romney campaign,” Yob said. “This is just the beginning.”

The campaign claims the upper-hand in the coming state conventions, which will award some bound and unbound delegates over the next few months. Santorum’s team reckons more grassroots conservatives will show up — a group that has been friendlier to Santorum.

Yob’s theory about Florida and Arizona is based upon the Republican National Committee’s original rules that forbid states from holding winner-take-all contest before April 1. Both states leapt ahead on the primary calendar and chose to use a winner-take-all delegate rule. The Santorum campaign plans to challenge the allocation through a formal contest process before the convention.

“We believe that the RNC is likely to follow their own rules,” Yob said. “And we believe that any effort by the Romney campaign to manipulate the rules will have a negative impact on their effort to get to a majority on the convention floor.”