Every four years, political pundits draw up fantasy scenarios about how there could be a contested convention. No doubt, much of this is fueled by the fact that most working journalists are not old enough to have experienced a real convention fight, and if 15,000 members of the media are going to travel to a city in the middle of the summer, they’d like to dream of covering something other than a four-day infomercial. But there are several reasons to believe that this time could be different, and that Democrats are looking at the real possibility of a contested convention in 2020.
In 2020, Democrats are dealing with several factors, including the size and composition of their field, the delegate allocation rules, and the voting procedures for choosing a nominee, that all increase the likelihood of a contested convention.
The sheer size of the Democratic field is one issue. It’s simple math. The more candidates, the greater the chance that voters are divided, and the harder it is for one single candidate to emerge with a majority of delegates. Currently, there are 19 candidates, not including Joe Biden.
What’s more, there’s no clear front-runner. Biden tops most polls, followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., but both of them have many vulnerabilities and certainly shouldn’t be considered prohibitive front-runners. After them, all other candidates are currently polling in the single digits, with five candidates within five points of each other. Also, a number of campaigns raised a respectable amount of money, but none of them — not even Sanders with his $18 million haul — raised enough to blow the other candidates out of the water.
What’s more, the field is quite diverse — ideologically, in terms of race and gender, and geographically. So there are plenty of “lanes” that various candidates can compete in to remain competitive and stay in the race.
Now, the obvious response to this is to note that in 2016, Republicans had a massive 17-candidate field, there were countless pieces written about the strong chances of a contested convention, and in the end, things wound up as they usually do. That is, one dominant candidate, Donald Trump, won a number of big early victories and carried that momentum over to the later contests, amassing delegates as the field dwindled.
That’s where the different delegate allocation rules come in.
Back in 2016, Republicans had nine purely winner-take-all contests, meaning that when Trump had big wins in states such as Florida and Arizona, he enjoyed a massive delegate windfall. In addition, there were nine “hybrid” states in which a certain number of delegates were allocated to the statewide winner, and another wave of delegates were winner-take-all by congressional district. In practice, the “hybrid” states mostly functioned as winner-take-all. This was the case when Trump enjoyed major wins in South Carolina and Indiana. In total, the winner-take-all states awarded 391 delegates, and the hybrid states awarded an additional 613. Combined, that means that over 1,000 delegates were set to go all or mostly to the winner, out of 1,237 delegates needed to capture the nomination.
The Democratic Party system, however, is totally proportional. That means that delegates are split at both the state level and the congressional district level among all candidates who receive at least 15% of the vote. Given the size and diversity of the field, it isn’t hard to envision candidates being able to peel off 15% here or there, and deny any one candidate a majority of delegates.
Nate Silver has observed that the “2016 Republican convention would almost certainly have been contested under those rules.”
To just provide a few examples: In South Carolina, Trump received all 50 delegates because he won the state and all seven congressional districts. But a closer look at the numbers shows his victory would have been significantly less impressive under Democratic rules. Trump carried 32.5% of the vote, with Sen. Marco Rubio at 22.5% and Sen. Ted Cruz at 22.3%, so the delegates would have to have been split among three candidates. At the congressional district level, Trump won three of the seven districts with less than 29% of the vote, and in his best performing district, he received 43%. Under the Democratic rules, Trump likely would not have received a majority of delegates in the state, let alone all 50.
In Florida, Trump won and carried all 99 delegates with 46% of the vote. Yet in the Democratic system, he would have had to share those delegates with Rubio (27%) and Cruz (17%).
As Harry Enten wrote at FiveThirtyEight in April 2016, that at that point, “Overall, Trump has won 37 percent of the vote in the 35 contests, while winning 48 percent of the delegates … If Republicans were to allocate delegates the way Democrats do, Republicans would be much closer to a 1-to-1 votes-to-delegates ratio. That system would also result in Trump’s having pretty much no shot at winning a majority of delegates heading into the Republican National Convention.”
In the weeks that followed that post, Trump would ultimately secure the nomination when Cruz dropped out after Indiana, seeing no path forward. In the seven contests following Enten’s post, Trump’s average winning percentage was higher at 58%, but he received 94% of the delegates awarded in those races.
Beyond the sheer math, there is the psychological impact. As a candidate rapidly picks up delegates and can look forward to more contest in which he can do the same, it makes the math more daunting, and discourages rival candidates, as well as the donors and voters who may otherwise be support them. If the 2016 Republican primary were fought on Democratic allocation rules, it would have given much more hope to various efforts to stop Trump, and encouraged more candidates to fight on until the end.
For Democrats in 2020, that means that Sanders supporters, who felt cheated out of the nomination last time around, are not likely to quietly retreat. Or to those who believe Democrats need to nominate a person of color and/or a female, they may not be willing to step aside to make way for an old white male when there’s still a legitimate chance for more diversity at the top of the ticket.
In addition to these two factors — size of field and proportional representation — there’s the Democratic National Committee’s change that weakened superdelegates, who were Democratic officials with the ability to vote for whoever they wanted on the first ballot at the Democratic convention, regardless of who won more delegates. This was a big gripe of Sanders supporters, as Clinton benefited from her dominance among superdelegates. Though a nomination hasn’t technically been decided by superdelegates, lining up enough of them in advance has been a way for establishment candidates to create an air of inevitability, discouraging rivals and their potential supporters.
Under the new rules, superdelegates will only be able to vote on the second ballot at the convention if no candidate is able to secure a majority on the first ballot. Though that means they could still determine the nominee if the Democratic primaries are inconclusive and thus prevent a protracted convention battle, they won’t yield the same power of intimidation as they have in previous races, making it more likely that candidates would be willing and able to fight on.
It is true that the Democratic primary calendar, as it stands now, is quite frontloaded, with two-thirds of the delegates being awarded in a six-week blitz after Iowa. That could allow a strong candidate to emerge and put the nomination out of reach relatively quickly. Yet it could also cut the other way. It’s easier for candidates with less funding to stick it out for six weeks than six months, meaning that the field could still be quite crowded during that early period. Even if one candidate emerges from that period with a clear delegate lead, there may not be enough delegates still on the board to put him or her over the top going into the convention.
So, while it’s true that it’s typical for pundits to overhype the possibility of a contested convention, and that in the modern system support ends up coalescing around one candidate as the field winnows, there are many unique factors about this 2020 contest that make the possibility much more realistic than in the past.
