Delegates

Starpower asked in Comments that I take a crack at explaining the Democratic Party’s insanely complicated delegate allocation scheme and to be honest, I am not sure that I am up to the task. The last time I took a hard look at any of this stuff was over a dozen years ago, studying for my degree in Political Science. But what the Hell, here goes.

Rule number one; the method used to distribute delegates is at the discretion of each state and the respective state parties. Beyond federal Voting Rights standards, there are very few uniform guidelines governing the conduct these contests and most of those laws regulate registration, ballot access and the like. The national parties lay down some rules regarding the schedule but that and some basic Constitutional guarantees notwithstanding, this stuff is wide open. Most states choose to hold primaries (basically a simple, straight vote), a few other caucus (which really is a bunch of people standing around debating for a while and then voting). And then there is Texas, which has a hybrid, first a primary and then a caucus.

Rule number two; states distribute their delegates either winner take all or proportionally to the percentage of the vote a candidate receives. This would seem pretty straight forward except some states require a candidate to meet some minimum threshold to begin accumulating delegates. Another wrinkle to this; if a state distributes proportionally, the delegates themselves can be chosen by any number methods. Some states appoint delegates at the precinct level, others by congressional district, others still state wide, and a few, like Texas, some combination thereof.

Rule number three; open versus closed events. In most states, one can only participate in a Party’s primary or caucus if one is a Party member. There are a few exceptions, like Virginia, which holds an open primary and one can choose either a Democratic or Republican ballot at the polling place.

Rule number four; pledged and unpledged or “super” delegates. The point of these caucuses and primaries is to allocate “pledged” delegates to the campaigns. Pledged delegates are, in theory, bound to the campaign to which they are pledged for the first round of voting at the national party conventions. I say in theory because the folks are not actually bound (meaning legally or otherwise compelled) to vote for their pledged candidate. Pledged delegates rarely deviate but given the potential for weirdness in this year’s Democratic contest, that point is worth noting.

Both major parties employ unpledged delegates as well. These people are typically elected officials, members of the House, Senate, governors, or party higher-ups who are free to support whomever they choose. The Parties use the unpledged delegates as means of exercising some control over choosing the nominee or as most party officials will argue, to ensure that no unfit or unqualified loony wins the nomination. They call it a safeguard, I call it elitism but that is an argument for another day. Anyway, as a proportion of the Republican delegates, the unpledged are not terribly significant. For the Democrats, however, the unpledged super-delegates represent 20+ percent of the total delegate population. In a typical year, that would hardly matter as the Party usually has a nominee by Super Tuesday. It goes without saying that this is not a typical year.

With the close race between Clinton and Obama, combined with the exclusion of the delegates from Michigan and Florida for violating National Party rules (Sidebar: boy do those state parties look dumb), neither candidate will collect enough pledged delegates to win the nomination outright. This is why the supers are getting so much attention; they can throw this thing either way and are not really accountable to anyone.

Now, conventional wisdom says that the supers will get behind whoever has the pledged delegate lead when the last race is completed. I tend to agree with that. Hillary has almost no chance to catch Obama in pledged delegates. For her to win, she needs a majority of the supers to overturn, without good cause mind you, the will of the people. If that happens and Barack Obama is denied the nomination, the Party will split and Democrats will have lost the black vote for a generation. I cannot believe that the Party leadership would let that happen, but then again, we are talking about the Dems. If anyone has the potential to fuck up this situation, it is the Democratic Party.

So there you have it Star, I hope that helps and preemptive apologies to everyone if I got something wrong.