Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

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...

Posted in Delegate Count, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — Wyoming

Delegate Math 2020 — Alaska (Updated)

By tmess2 | Published April 4, 2020

With things somewhat up in the air about Wisconsin, Alaska is the next state to complete its voting.  Alaska is one of the states that moved from a caucus to a party-run primary since the last cycle.  In response to Covid-19, the Alaska Democratic Party has moved to a vote-by-mail election.  Ballots are supposed to be received by April 10, and the state party will release the results on April 11.

Alaska is using a ranked-choice ballot with candidates being eliminated (starting with the candidate with the least votes) until all of the remaining candidates are viable.  With only two candidates still running, even if some small segment of voters who voted early have another candidate as their first choice, the final count after preferences are distributed should leave only Senator Sanders and Vice-President Biden with votes on the final count.  Under the rules for the primary, because only viable candidates will be left in the final count, there is no difference between the final total votes and qualified votes.

What makes delegate math unusual in Alaska is the fact that it is a single-district state.  Under the rules, the allocation of delegates is calculated separately for each of the three pools, but the state-wide results are used to allocate all three pools.  The fact that the pools are calculated separately gives a different result than if all the delegates were allocated as one pool. Continue Reading...

Posted in 2020 Convention, Delegate Count, Delegates, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — Alaska (Updated)

Delegate Math 2020 — The COVID 19 Break

By tmess2 | Published March 22, 2020

Barring a statutory change at the federal level, federal law requires that states choose electors for President on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November.  While there are other provisions governing the possibility that states are unable to choose electors on that day and the states are free to change the way that they select the electors, it is unlikely that those laws will change — either at the state or federal level.  Likewise, federal law requires that elections for the House and Senate will take place on the First Tuesday after the First Monday in November.    And the Constitution and federal law makes clear when the existing terms of office expire.

There are a lot of questions about what would happen if for some reason elections are postponed in some states.  Do the governors get to appoint temporary Senators in the states for which the term has expired until the elections can be held?  Are the elections merely postponed or must the governor’s call for special elections?  However, for President, what happens is governed by the Presidential Successor Act until somebody is chosen to fill the remainder of the term.  Of course as the Presidential Successor Act would put the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate into the White House, the question is whether the House and Senate will be able to convene as normal in early January to choose the people who will be in those positions if such a vacancy occurs.  If they can’t, do the old officers continue over until the House and Senate can convene (allowing one of them to become President)?

In short, while things still need to be worked out, it is more likely than not that some way will be found to hold elections this fall.  In the states that currently rely heavily on voting-by-mail, it is almost certain that the elections will proceed as planned.  And some of the remaining states may try to transition to a vote-by-mail system.  And if there is going to be an election for President, both parties need to continue with the process for choosing a nominee.  As others have noted for this site, there are questions about how the national convention will be restructured to deal with the current crisis and how the states will alter the delegate selection process in light of the current goal to minimize person-to-person crisis.  (I know that, in my state, the delegate selection process has been postponed by almost eight weeks.) Continue Reading...

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Delegate Count, Joe Biden, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — The COVID 19 Break

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...

Posted in 2020 Convention, Delegates, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , , , , Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — March 17

Winnowing Out???

By tmess2 | Published February 12, 2020

Historically, the main role played by the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary is to narrow the field.  While, for different reasons, they are not necessarily representative of what it takes to win the nomination or the general election, they are both small enough that even candidates not well-known to the general public have a chance to make their case to the voters.  (Of course, for all of its flaws, the party-sponsored debates are eliminating some of that aspect of Iowa and New Hampshire.)  And candidates who fail to show any signs of life in these two states tend to lose their supporters (both financially and vote-wise) who begin to look for somebody who has a chance at making it to the convention.

This year seems like it might be a bit different than in the past.  In part due to the chaos that was Iowa, nobody dropped out after Iowa.  Last night, when it was clear that the results were not going to be there for them, Senator Michael Bennet and Andrew Yang announced that they had reached the end of the road.  And Governor Deval Patrick is apparently taking time to consider if he still has a path forward.  Bu that seems to be the extent of the winnowing that we will see for now.

With the possible exception of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the remaining candidates each seem to think that they have a path forward that, at least, justifies staying in the race a little bit longer.  Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Tom Steyer have invested heavily in South Carolina.  Biden still leads the polls in South Carolina and Steyer is either second or third depending upon which poll you credit.  If they can hold onto that support, South Carolina would breathe new life into their campaign.  As the last remaining person of color in the race, Governor Deval Patrick apparently hopes that he can become the second choice of South Carolina voters in Biden’s support collapses. Continue Reading...

Posted in 2020 Convention, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , , , , , Comments Off on Winnowing Out???

Health & Age in the 2020 Election

By tmess2 | Published October 6, 2019

For a long time, there has been an expectation that Presidential candidates will release their health information.  Being president is a highly stressful job, and a president who is not fully competent has the tools to do a lot of damage to the country and the world.  As such, there is an expectation among voters that candidates will release health information.  Of course, as with every other expectation, President Trump made a farce of this expectation by releasing medical summaries that were not particularly credible to any neutral observer, but there was so much that was wrong with the Trump campaign in 2016 and the mainstream media tries to avoid the appearance of taking a side that the lack of a real report on Trump’s physical and mental health was only a semi-big deal even on MSNBC.

This week, we had a bit of a health scare with Senator Bernie Sanders.  From every report, Senator Sanders is recovering from his surgery and should be able to resume his campaign.  However, this medical emergency does bring back into sharp focus an underlying issue in the nomination process.  President Trump and the top three candidates for the Democratic nomination (according to the polls) are all in their seventies.  And that means that issues of age and health will be in the background of this campaign.  Unfortunately, a healthy discussion of health is not likely.  But there are several things that should be on the table.

First, heart disease is a serious problem in this country impacting people of all ages.  A heart attack or a stroke can occur at any age.  I have known people who have died from a heart attack in their forties and fifties, and I have known people who have survived a heart attack in their seventies and eighties and have returned to a mostly fully functional life.  While people have become more health conscious in the past several decades, there are a lot of dietary and other factors that contribute to heart disease being one of the top causes of death in the U.S. Continue Reading...

Posted in Presidential Candidates | Also tagged , , , , 2 Comments

The 2020 Convention — Rules Changes (June 2018)

By tmess2 | Published June 17, 2018

For both parties, the rules governing the national convention is the product of gradual change over time.  It is a natural desire — shared by both parties — to look back and what went wrong and to try to fix it.  The more intelligent members of both parties understand that every cycle will be somewhat different,; so “fixing” something to stack the deck against a candidate is likely to backfire.  A perfect example is the Republican rule changes after 2012.  In 2012, the Ron Paul campaign was perceived as manipulating the rules to get Ron Paul supporters elected to fill delegate slots won by other candidates.  In response, the rules were changed to bind delegates to vote for the candidate that won the delegates.  Regardless of how one feels about the merits of that change, the result was that the Republican Party establishment (which had pushed for the rule change) was helpless to stop the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump.

After the last convention (following past practice), the Democratic Party appointed a commission (the Unity Reform Commission) to study the rules and suggest changes in certain areas.  In early 2018, The commission’s report then went to the Rules & By-laws Committee (RBC) of the Democratic National Committee.  Among the tasks of the RBC is drafting the actual rules governing the 2020 delegate selection process and the convention process.  Since receiving the report of the commission, the RBC has been considering that report along with looking at other issues related to delegate selection process and has been composing a draft of the rules for 2020.  Later this year, that draft will go to the full Democratic National Committee for a final vote.

While the RBC has discussed a large number of changes, the one change that has gotten some media attention is the rules governing who can run.  Most of the media coverage has, at the very least, ignored the history behind this rule, and suggested that the rules change is targeted at Senator Bernie Sanders. Continue Reading...

Posted in Democratic Party, DNC, Primary Elections, Uncategorized | Also tagged , Comments Off on The 2020 Convention — Rules Changes (June 2018)

Convention Committees

By tmess2 | Published July 10, 2016

While most of the media attention is currently focused on whom might or might not still be in consideration for vice-president, a key activity over the next several weeks will be the work of the convention committees.

Because the Democrats give candidates a key role in selecting their delegates (and here in Missouri we had a bit of an uproar at our state convention due to the Sanders campaign exercising its right to trim the number of candidates for at-large delegates), the Rules Committee and the Credentials Committee tend not to be that important.  The fight this year was in the Platform Committee which wrapped up its work yesterday in Orlando.  There were several changes to the draft platform adopted at the full committee meeting in Orlando, and the revised draft has not yet been posted on the convention’s website (which does have the original version of the draft platform.)  There were some issues on which the committee had significant splits between Clinton and Sanders delegates.  It is unclear if any of these splits will lead to a minority report and debates on the floor.

Continue Reading...

Posted in Cleveland, Donald Trump, PHLDNC2016 | Also tagged , , , , , Comments Off on Convention Committees

Delegate Math — Week of June 13

By tmess2 | Published June 11, 2016

The end is finally here.

On the Republican side, the voting is over and the only delegate selection still to come is the South Dakota state convention starting on June 24.  Depending upon which count you use, Trump has slightly over 1,440 delegates who are bound to him by current Republican Party rules (and another 80 who are officially uncommitted who have pledged to support him).  Of course, every time Trump opens his mouth, some senior figure in the party begins longingly considering the power of the Rules Committee and the Convention to change those rules.  Whether Trump has enough loyal delegates to survive himself is unclear (and it is unlikely that the Republicans would take this extreme step), but Trump is the exact type of candidate who would justify throwing the rules out the window to save the party.

The Democratic side still has a little more work to do.  With the caveat that the count in California is not yet final, Secretary Clinton currently has around 2,180 pledged delegates to 1,797 delegates for Senator Sanders — a clear majority of pledged delegates (even if Sanders wins every delegate still theoretically up for grabs, he would still be approximately 300 delegates behind Secretary Clinton). Continue Reading...

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Delegate Count, Delegates, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton | Also tagged , Comments Off on Delegate Math — Week of June 13

Delegate Math Week of June 6 — Part 2 (California)

By tmess2 | Published June 5, 2016

As discussed in part 1, the math in both parties has been relentless.  After last night’s results in the U. S. Virgin Islands, the Greenpapers has Clinton only 85 votes short of clinching the nomination in its “soft” count.  Barring a large number of superdelegates endorsing Clinton over the next forty-eight hours, today’s primary in Puerto Rico does not have enough delegates at stake (60 total) to put Clinton over the top, but the states discussed in Part 1 (New Jersey, South Dakota, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Montana) have more than enough delegates to put Clinton over the top.  Sanders is urging the media to remember that superdelegates can change their minds and depart from past practice by not declaring Clinton the nominee unless she wins enough pledged delegates to put her over the top (almost impossible).

With so few contests left, it is all but certain that Clinton will win the pledged delegate count.   Even the attempt to win additional delegates in the later stages of caucus states is not going well.  While the Washington Democratic Party has only posted the names of the delegates elected by the Congressional Districts (not the candidates that they are supporting), they have announced the allocation for the state-wide delegates (which is based on the breakdown of the Congressional District delegates).  Based on that allocation, Clinton won between 17 and 19 delegates at the Congressional District level (post-precinct caucus estimates had her winning 18).    In the other states that have already held first-tier caucuses, there are only 48 delegates still at stake (with Sanders having a 28-20 advantage).    (6-2 in Idaho, 7-8 in Iowa, and 15-10 in Nebraska).  Gaining more than five delegates from these states is unlikely, and adding it to the potential gain of 1 in Washington, Clinton would still have a 261 delegate lead heading into Puerto Rico.  Since for reasons discussed previously, Sanders is probably going to have a net loss of delegates between Puerto Rico and the other states on Tuesday, Sander’s outside hope of significantly closing that gap come down to California.

Continue Reading...

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Delegate Count, Delegates, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Primary and Caucus Results, Senate | Also tagged , , Comments Off on Delegate Math Week of June 6 — Part 2 (California)