Tag Archives: 2020 Delegate Selection Plans

Delegate Math 2020 — Wyoming

By tmess2 | Published April 8, 2020

While waiting for the end of voting and results out of Wisconsin and Alaska, the next state up is Wyoming.  Wyoming was originally supposed to be a caucus state (with the caucuses to be held on April 4 with absentee votes included).  In light of COVID 19, the Wyoming Democratic Party has cancelled the in-person county caucuses/conventions and will be using a mail-in ballot (transforming the caucus into a party-run primary).

Because a substantial number of votes have already been cast (similar to the situation in Ohio), this primary will only be partially impacted by the decision of Senator Sanders to suspend his campaign.  Depending on the results in Wyoming and Ohio (which was already covered in the post on the March 17 primaries), we may or may not have further posts about the May and June states.  (if Biden wins Wisconsin, Alaska, Wyoming, and Ohio comfortably, I will probably not be doing any further delegate math posts as the exact count from the remaining states will not have much significance.)

As with Alaska, Wyoming will be using ranked-choice voting.  Thus, the final count will only include viable candidates meaning that there is no difference between total votes and qualified votes.  The ballots must be received by April 17.  The Wyoming delegate selection plan is ambiguous as to whether ranked choice voting is done on the county level (with state convention delegates being used to allocate the national delegates) or on the state level (with the popular vote being used to allocate the national convention delegates).  And the Wyoming Democratic Party has not announced a time when they will release the results from the mail-in ballots. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — Wisconsin (UPDATEDx3)

By tmess2 | Published April 2, 2020

As of this moment in time, it looks like Wisconsin will be proceeding with their April 7 primary, sort of.  The sort of is that a judge has extended the deadline for mail-in votes which — under the ruling — can be mailed in after April 7 as long as the ballots are received by April 13.  It is unclear whether the various local election authorities will still be releasing the in-person vote totals on April 7 or if the results will be held until April 13.  [UPDATE:  This morning, the judge who granted the extension on mail-in ballots issued a revised order requiring the election results to be held until the afternoon of April 13.  Effectively, that makes the party-run primary in Alaska — ballots due on April 10 with results to be released on April 11 — the next set of results that we will receive, unless an appellate court sets aside the current order which is always a possibility.  UPDATE 2:  On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order staying the District Court’s ruling.  Under this order, all absentee ballots must be postmarked by April 7 and received by April 13.  Apparently, results can be released after the polls close, but that is not 100% clear.  UPDATE 3:  The state election authority in Wisconsin has directed local election officials that they should not release results until April 13 under the part of the court order that was not stayed.  It is unclear how binding that is and some local officials may release results earlier than April 13.]

We are now officially down to two candidates.  And that makes delegate math relatively simple barring the unlikely event of uncommitted getting delegates.  Wisconsin has eight congressional districts with between five and eleven delegates each.  At the state level, Wisconsin has ten party leader delegates and nineteen at-large delegates.  Overall, Wisconsin has eighty-four delegates.

The Seventh District has five delegates.  Whomever gets the most votes will win at least three delegates.  To get a 4-1 split, the winner needs 70% of the qualified vote. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — March 17

By tmess2 | Published March 15, 2020

After the sprint of twenty-four contests in fifteen days, this week’s four primaries represents a slowing of the pace.  After the March 17 contests, there will be only seven contests over the next three weeks concluding with the Wisconsin primary before there is a three-week break between Wisconsin and the Mid-Atlantic primary on April 28.  (EDIT:  Now six contests, with Georgia’s primary being postponed until May.)

In the last two weeks, in the states that vote by mail, we have seen the early results showing significant number of votes for candidates that are no longer in the race.  As counting has continued, however, the later arriving ballots have swung away from the candidates who have suspended their campaigns and toward Senator Sanders and Vice-President Biden.  There will have been some early voting in the states that are voting on March 17.  As such, the initial release of numbers will probably include some votes for these candidates, but that number should decline over the evening as election day returns are added in.

With the narrowing of the field, delegate math is now a state-by-state struggle.  And this state-by-state battle is different for the Democratic primaries than it is on the Republican side.  The media likes to focus on who wins a state.  And, in the general election (and in many states on the Republican side), the winner-take-all rule makes winning a state very important.  On the Democratic side, the proportional allocation of delegates means that it matters more whether somebody wins a state by a large margin than who wins the state.  As we have seen over the past seven days, a narrow in by Vice-President Biden is currently netting him around seven delegates in a large state, but his big win in Mississippi (less than half the size of Washington) is netting him over thirty delegates. Continue Reading...

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2020 Delegate Math — March 10

By tmess2 | Published March 6, 2020

There is just a little bit of room between Super Tuesday and March 10 for everyone to catch their breath.  Over the past seven days, over half of the candidates have dropped out, and we are left with three candidates (Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders.)

While we are down to three candidates, one word of warning is appropriate.  As we saw on Super Tuesday, some states have no excuse early voting or mail-in ballots.  On Super Tuesday, we saw some significant differences between the early vote count and the “election day” count.  Simply put, people who voted early may have voted for a candidate who was no longer actively running.  It is unclear if any of these candidates will ultimately win a delegate, but some of these candidates did get a significant number of votes in some states.  The extra seven days should lessen this effect, but there could be — depending on the state — a significant number of voters who voted before February 28th, and some of these voters went with one of the five candidates who are no longer running.

There are seven contests which will conclude on March 10.  (I use the term conclude because one of them — Democrats Abroad — is a party-run primary in which the polls are open for almost one week and others allow early voting.)  Besides Democrats Abroad, the other six contests are Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Washington.  While nominally styled as a caucus, North Dakota is a party-run primary.  Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Washington are state-run primaries.  (Washington like California relies heavily on mail-in ballots which can cause a delay in getting final results.)  Under the rules of the Democratic Party, all of these contests are binding and delegates will be allocated based on the votes cast for each candidate. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — Super Tuesday (Part 4 — California and Texas)

By tmess2 | Published March 3, 2020

Texas and California as the two largest states in the country are the big prizes on Super Tuesday.  They also have several unusual features that will impact the process.

For Texas, early voting is a significant percentage of the vote.    By definition, people who vote early are locked in regardless of developments that occur between when they vote and the election.  In Nevada, we saw a solid majority of the vote coming from people who voted before the Nevada debate.  In Texas, we could easily have a majority of the vote coming from people who voted before the South Carolina debate (or the results from South Carolina).  The other big thing that makes Texas different is how it splits the district-level delegates.  The national rules only require that states with multiple congressional districts elect delegates from the individual congressional district or some smaller district.  For over thirty years, Texas has used its state senate districts rather than congressional districts in its delegate selection process.  Texas has 31 state senate districts.  Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Texas had fewer than 31 seats in Congress.  Since 2000, Texas has had more than 31 representatives in Congress.  Even though state senate districts are now larger than congressional districts, Texas still uses state senate districts to allocate district-level delegates.

What makes California somewhat unique (some other Pacific Coast states have similar rules) is its liberal rules on voting by mail.  A mail ballot can be dropped off at a ballot drop-off location up until the time that polls close.  In addition, a mail ballot counts if it is mailed on or before election day and received within three days of the election.  Approximately two-thirds of the vote in California is by mail-in or other early vote.  Counting the mail-in vote typically takes several weeks.  Often there is a significant difference between in-person votes on election day and mail-in ballots.  Given how little it takes to change the delegate count in California, any initial estimate of the delegates won in California are just an estimate and the final results could see a change of a delegate in a congressional district or three or four state-wide delegates. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — Super Tuesday (Part 3 — Late States)

By tmess2 | Published March 2, 2020

Aside from the big two states (California and Texas), there are three states that will close their polls after 7:00 p.m. CST — Arkansas, Colorado, Utah.   Arkansas and Utah are small red states.  Colorado is a medium-size purple-blue state.  Between these three states, there are fifteen congressional districts with between two and nine delegates each.

A basic reminder, the rules of the Democratic Party requires each state to have district level delegates (roughly 65% of the state’s total), at-large delegates (roughly 22% of the state’s total), and party leader delegates (roughly 12% of the state’s total).  The district level delegates are split between the districts (usually congressional districts) in the state typically based on votes in past elections.  Each of the pools of delegate (each district is a separate pool) is based on the results in the area covered by the pool (the individual district for a district-level delegates and the state-wide results for the at-large and party-leader pools).  It usually takes 15% of the vote for a candidate to be viable.  And the delegates are allocated proportionately based on the percentage of the qualified vote (the total vote for all viable candidates) that each candidate receives.  The percentages below assume that only viable candidates receive votes,  As the early states have shown, with this many candidates, a significant portion of the vote will go to non-viable candidates.  As such, it is likely that candidates will earn additional delegates despite not reaching the target numbers described below.  Covering all possible situations (number of viable candidates, percentage of vote that goes to the viable candidates, etc.) would, however, lengthen these posts by a significant amount.  As long as we still have seven candidates qualifying for the debate stage and potentially qualifying for delegates in a district, we will have to go with this oversimplified calculation.

With Mayor Pete Buttigieg deciding on Sunday to join Tom Steyer on the sidelines, we are down to six major candidates, four of whom have won delegates in prior contests and two of whom have not.  One of those two, however, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg who is almost certain to win delegates.  So in most districts, we are probably looking at somewhere between two and five viable candidates. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — Super Tuesday (Part 2 — Early Prime Time States)

By tmess2 | Published March 1, 2020

On any election day, 8:00 p.m. EST/7:00 p.m. CST, is a key time when polls close in a significant number of states in the Eastern and Central time zones.  (For the general election, the polls close in seventeen states at that time, the largest single batch of states.)  On Super Tuesday, six states will close their polls at that time:  Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.  As with the states closing earlier that evening, poll closing is not an exact end to the voting.  Instead, all voters still in line at a precinct still get to vote.  Additionally, election workers have to get the ballots from the precinct to a centralized vote counting location.  So there is a lag between the polls closing and the results being reported.  However, this time is when the news media can release exit polls and make projections and counties can report the totals from early votes.

Before going much further into the details, one significant change from earlier reports.  Maine law currently allow parties to opt to use ranked-choice voting for their primaries.  Early drafts of the Maine delegate selection plan indicated that the Maine Democrats would use ranked-choice voting.  Ultimately, the party decided against using ranked-choice voting.  (Apparently, Maine’s law required a party using ranked-choice to continue the process until one candidate got a majority of the vote and did not give the option of using it to determine who met a party’s threshold for delegates).

While Tom Steyer has ended his campaign, we still have five candidates in the race who have won delegates in at least one state.  We also have Michael Bloomberg who has put a lot of money into these states.  So far, we have not had any district (or state-wide) result in which more than four candidates reached 15%, but every one of these six candidates has at least one state or district in which they expect to be viable.  How many are viable in each district will impact the math for the distribution.  (And with early voting/absentee ballots and his ad spending, Tom Steyer could still get a significant number of votes in some locations even if he is not viable.) Continue Reading...

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Delegate Selection Plans — Kansas

By tmess2 | Published May 4, 2019

Somewhat late in the process, Kansas Democrats have issued their draft delegate selection plan for 2020.  Like the prior plans from Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota, Kansas will be using a party-run primary instead of their traditional caucus.

As with most of the other states that held a caucus in 2016, this plan authorizes registered democrats to participate in the primary either by a mail-in absentee ballot or by depositing a ballot at one of the party-run ballot centers on the primary day.  Under the proposal, the party will mail a notice to all registered Democrats in early March 2020 explaining how to vote in the primary.  Voters will be able to request an absentee ballot starting March 30.  Any absentee ballot must be mailed by April 24.  On primary day (May 2 — a Saturday), the ballot centers will be open for four hours (from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.).  

The plan indicates that the ballots will use ranked-choice voting, but does not expressly explain how ranked-choice voting will work.  In other states, if there are candidates how fail to meet the threshold for delegates, then their votes are redistributed (starting with the last-placed candidate) until all remaining candidates are over 15%.  Ranked-choice voting should be applied separately at the congressional district and at the state-wide level.  If, by the time of the state convention, a candidate “is no longer a candidate,” any at-large and pleo delegates that the candidate would have won will be proportionately reallocated to the remaining candidates.  Continue Reading...

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Delegate Selection Plans — Wyoming and Update

By tmess2 | Published April 13, 2019

As more delegate selection plans are posted on-line, we have two states that have confirmed that they are switching from a caucus to a state-run primary.  The first is Minnesota.  Previously, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had informed the Minnesota Secretary of State that it would be participating in the state-run primary, but we now have the draft plan which bases delegate allocation on the results of the primary.  The other state is Washington.  When we looked at the draft plan for Washington last month, the Washington Democrats had submitted two plans — one based on the caucus and one based on the primary.    Since then, the state of Washington finalized the scheduling of the primary for March (moving it up from May) and, at last weekend’s state committee meeting, the Washington Democrats opted for the primary-based plan.

With these two changes, we were down to a handful of states.  Yesterday, Wyoming released their draft plan for 2020.  Wyoming is keeping with a caucus system using, as in the past, a county caucus as the first step.  While there is not a specific set date in the plan, it does indicate an intent to hold the county caucuses on a weekend in March which would be earlier than the mid-April date from 2016.  To meet the goals of making access to the caucuses easier for voters, Wyoming is tentatively calling for allowing those who are unable to attend the county caucuses to participate by submitting a “surrogate affidavit.”  The exact details of how this will work is still being discussed and is not clear from the current draft.  (The name suggests a proxy vote, but my hunch is that — either at the final plan approved by the state or the final plan as amended in response to the national Rules and By-laws committee requests — it will be more like a typical absentee ballot.) 

The Wyoming plan uses the preference vote at the county caucuses to elect state convention delegates.  It uses a separate preference vote at the state convention to allocate the national convention delegates.  This part of the plan is clearly contrary to the national party rules.  In relevant part, Rule 2.K.5 requires that the delegate allocation be locked in based on the final preference vote at the first determining step.  In Wyoming’s plan, the first determining step is the county caucuses.   As such, assuming that Wyoming does not correct this part of the plan in the final draft, it is likely that the Rules and By-laws Committee will require a change prior to approving Wyoming’s plan.  Given what the other states are doing, Wyoming will probably be given the option of using either the raw vote totals (which they have used in the past) or the state convention delegates won.  As noted in previous posts, using state convention delegates won eliminate the effect of high turnout in some parts of the state but can also penalize candidates who are get just over 15% of the raw vote state-wide (as those candidates are likely to miss the threshold in some of the counties converting 13% of the vote in those counties into 0% of the delegates potentially causing the candidate to slip beneath 15% if the delegates won state-wide).  Continue Reading...

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Delegate Selection Rules — Alaska, Maine, and Utah

By tmess2 | Published April 6, 2019

At this time last week, eight of the eighteen states that had used caucuses or party-run primaries in 2016 had released their delegate selection plans for 2020.  This week three of the remaining ten released their plans and they are a very mixed bag.

This week, we start out west in Alaska.  In 2016, Alaska used a traditional caucus process with the caucuses occurring at the legislative district level.  When it came to allocating delegates to the national convention, Alaska used the raw vote totals from the legislative district caucuses to allocate the “district-level” delegates, but used the votes of the state convention delegates to allocate the pledged party leader and at-large delegates.

For 2020, Alaska is switching to a party-run primary that will allow early voting (either electronic or by mail-in absentee ballot).  Additionally, the party will run voting centers in key locations that will be open for at least four hours on the primary/caucus date (although there is conflicting language in the draft concerning the times that these centers will be open).  All of the delegates to the national convention will be allocated based on the results of the party-run primary.  (Like many “primary” states, Alaska will continue to use the local caucuses to choose delegates to the state convention which will elect the actual national convention delegates.) Continue Reading...

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