It may not seem like it, given all the noise and drama, but the fight for the presidential nominations in both parties has just begun.
The four early primary states have done what they always do – weed out weaker candidates and shape the field – but these small states don’t begin to tell the story. So far, the Republicans have allocated only 6 percent of their delegates to their convention, and the Democrats have allocated only 4 percent. The month of March will tell us a lot more about the race for the presidency as the delegate count begins in earnest.
Nominations have been won and lost when presidential candidates have lost sight of the fact that the ultimate goal is getting 2,408 delegates to vote for you at the Democratic convention and 1,237 delegates to vote for you at the Republican convention.
By the end of March, which is heavy with primaries in medium-to-big states, the Democrats will have selected 56 percent of their delegates and the Republicans 64 percent. While it is likely that no one in either party will have enough for a first-ballot nomination by the end of March, we will have a pretty good idea of where the race is going and whether or not we’re headed for that fabled “brokered convention” in either party.
The fight for delegates is governed by party rules – not state statutes – although sometimes they are one and the same. Understanding the Democratic side is easy (sort of) in that the rules in every state are the same.
After decades of fighting about it, the Democrats adopted a blanket rule in 1992 requiring that delegates be awarded to presidential candidates on the basis of proportional representation. This came at the insistence of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had failed twice to win the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988 and was angry at being cut out of as many delegates as he thought he deserved.
Republicans, consistent with their overall federalist philosophy, give states much greater leeway in deciding how to award delegates to presidential candidates, but they too have gotten into the business of dictating rules from above. This year, states holding their contests March 14 or earlier must use a proportional system; after that date, they can choose how to award delegates to candidates. This is why there is a big “Super Tuesday” on March 1 but also a kind of mini-Super Tuesday on March 15.
So what does this mean as we move forward? Well, it’s important to note that the Democrats’ rules are much more proportional, while the GOP puts a higher premium on winning states and awards fewer delegates to losers.
On the Democratic side, the structure of the rules rewards losers relative to winners. The way the delegate math works in every congressional district in the country, the winning candidate has to have a very big win in order to win more delegates than the losing candidate – especially in a two-person race. That’s because the Democrats don’t reward fractional votes, and the rounding rules end up favoring the loser. In a district with an even number of delegates, the winner must win over 62.5 percent of the vote in order to win three delegates out of four or four delegates out of six.
Winner-take-all rules, forbidden on the Democratic side but favored on the Republican side, have exactly the opposite effect of the Democratic rules; they favor winners over losers.