You heard it here first -- the Democrats are going to have a multiple-ballot convention next summer. Even though there is speculation about this in every election cycle, the Democrats have unusual circumstances that make this more likely than ever before in our lifetimes at this stage.
I ran the convention organization effort for Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign in a large field of highly qualified candidates in 2016. Donald Trump won that nomination on the first ballot largely because he won enough state primaries in which the rules dictated that the winner of the primary (even with a plurality of the vote) could win 100% of that state's delegates to the national convention.
Such rules allowed Trump to consolidate enough delegate votes as the primaries wore on to cross the 50% threshold before the end of the primaries.
This is where the 2020 Democratic presidential primary will differ most significantly from the past: there are no winner-take-all states. All delegates to their national convention will be distributed on a strictly proportional basis.
The only two rules the Dems have that will winnow the field are the requirements that to receive delegates in a state or district, a candidate must exceed 15% of the votes cast in that state or district, and to be nominated at the convention, a candidate must be able to get at least 300 delegates (approximately 6%) to sign a petition of nomination.
If we were to project forward using current national polling and pretend that was the vote total in hypothetical state X, that would mean that only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders would get delegates from state X, as they are the only two polling above 15% at the moment. If this situation holds in every state and congressional district when voting starts in early 2020, then one of those two would almost certainly arrive at the convention with the necessary pledged delegates to win on the first ballot. But the odds of such an outcome in every state are very low.
In addition to proportional voting and no superdelegates on the first ballot, there are other reasons it will be hard for any particular candidate to win on the first ballot. Most obviously, different candidates have differing strengths in different states, so it could be possible for multiple candidates to make the 15% threshold in different states, thereby spreading out the delegates.
Even if some of these candidates later stop campaigning, typically their already-won delegates don't go to other candidates unless they formally withdraw from the race (which is very rare once delegates have been won). And while some candidates will get out when they fail to catch fire in February 2020, the first big test will be on Super Tuesday in early March. By the end of that day, over 1/3 of the pledged delegates will be allocated, with the next biggest chunk coming only a week later.
Furthermore, while it is hard for a middle-of-the-pack candidate to break the 15% threshold with 20 candidates, once more than half of them are gone by the end of February 2020, breaking the 15% threshold is going to look much more achievable in a smaller field, and many of them will likely stick around.
And, of course, the Dems will have candidates who don't have a prayer but for their own reasons refuse to get out of the race, and so they will keep getting small numbers of votes, thereby making it harder for others to achieve a majority on the first ballot.
Finally, we should consider the changing role of the Democratic superdelegates.
Superdelegates in the Democrats' convention are all unbound and include all elected Democrat governors, senators, congressmen and members of the Democratic National Committee. They total approximately 1/6 of all of the delegates at the convention -- an enormous chunk of the total.
In 2016 and in prior conventions, these superdelegates automatically got to vote as unbound delegates (i.e., they could vote for whoever they wanted to, regardless of the voting in their home state); however, Bernie Sanders' supporters made such a ruckus over this obvious pro-establishment arrangement that the DNC changed their rules for the 2020 convention.
While they will still have unbound superdelegates, those delegates will not be able to vote on the first ballot; thereby ensuring that the outcome of the first ballot is dictated by the results in the primaries and caucuses in each of the states. However, if no candidate wins on the first ballot, those superdelegates can vote in all subsequent ballots. The result in 2020 may well be that they can effectively play the role of kingmaker.
I expect that a large swath of the Democrats' base would become very angry if they realize that their "reform" of the superdelegates effectively changed nothing.
If the Democrats' 2020 rules had governed the GOP nomination in 2016, we would have almost certainly had a multiple-ballot convention. Time will tell if the Democrats reach that point next summer. Based on my experience, the odds look better than ever right now that they will go to multiple ballots next summer.
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