Party National Conventions and the Delegate Race: Why is This a Thing?
Since everyone’s talking about Democratic/Republican National Convention delegates like there’s a question about who might get nominated (spoiler alert: Hillary and Trump), it’s worth stepping back to ask why we even do this.
The Electoral College is in the Constitution. The founders never intended to have political parties at all, so conventions certainly are not. But as we know from Hamilton, “someone came along to resist him/pissed him off until we had a two party system.” It turns out that designing a system of government not to work well with political parties doesn’t stop us from having parties. It just stops the system from working well with them. Anyway.
For the first few decades of the republic, the party system was in flux. The parties were informal and presidential nominees, if you can call them that, were chosen by Congressional caucuses.
In 1824, the long-ruling Democratic-Republican Party had a schism which resulted in John Quincy Adams serving one term as President and Andrew Jackson (with his own faction) coming back to kick his ass in ’28. Because of this break, and because some thought it a separation of powers problem for Congressional caucuses to choose Presidential nominees, they needed a new method.
Hence, conventions. The first Democratic National Convention was held in 1832 at the urging of New Hampshire people and Andrew Jackson people. (The Democratic Party is the oldest in the world, and the Republican Party didn’t exist until decades later — you should know such things)
So we’ve been doing it this way since 1832? (Actually, no.)
Conventions have been around that long, but for most of their history, delegates have just been state and local political figures exercising their own personal or factional discretion.
Primaries and caucuses evolved over the course of the 20th Century. New Hampshire (again) decided to hold a Presidential primary for the first time in 1916, but the idea didn’t come to dominate the process until much later. Floor fights and brokered conventions used to be more common because only in the past 40 years or so have most delegates been allocated based on voters’ preferences expressed through primaries and caucuses.
Serious candidates could forego primaries entirely and still compete at the convention as late as the 1960s.
So now that we have primaries and caucuses it’s just a filter for popular vote? Like the Electoral College? (Kind of.)
Like the Electoral College, you need an absolute majority, not just a plurality, to win. But that’s rarely an issue in the Electoral College because, as long as two parties collectively win all of the Electoral Votes, whoever wins has a majority of them. Party nominating contests don’t have the winnowing function of…well…parties. Unlike the Electoral College, in which nearly all states give all of their votes to the plurality winner within the state, convention delegates are allocated through complex formulas that, on the Republican side, vary substantially from state to state. Not only that, but caucuses exist! And they are bad! But I digress.
The Electoral College never actually meets. Conventions do (with substantial federal funding for the major parties). The Electors mail their ballots to Washington from their respective states. If nobody gets a majority in the Electoral College, they don’t get to try again (it’s complicated, but essentially Congress decides). By contrast, conventions can have negotiations, second and third and hundredth (yes, hundredth) rounds of voting, and all kind of other shenanigans. And by the way, pledged delegates can change their mind after the first round.
There’s also superdelegates. These are important political figures (DNC/RNC members and, on the Democratic side, major elected officials) who get a vote and can use it however they want at the convention. It’s pretty unlikely superdelegates would overrule a majority of pledged delegates at this point in political history. Except to stop Trump. That could happen.
Conventions serve another important function too: they get your attention for speeches. Even though the decisions that used to be made by conventions (presidential nominee, vice presidential nominee, party platform language) are essentially up to the person with the pledged-delegate majority, conventions are televised and give each party the chance to make its case to the people for a week. Unless the people have cable TV or internet access, in which case it’s very easy to tune out the whole process. Whoops.
What does this mean for 2016? (Probably not much.)
There are only two of Hillary and Bernie, so one of them (probably Hillary) will end up with a majority of delegates before the Democratic convention. But there are 3–4 Republican candidates who will enter the convention with delegates. It is therefore plausible, though the math is complicated (especially on the Republican side), for the frontrunner (Trump) to have only a plurality, not a majority, of the delegates going in. Then there’s negotiation among the delegates and their leaders. If anyone other than Donald Trump were coming out on top in so many primaries and caucuses, everyone would assume he’ll enter with most delegates and get nominated easily. But the Republican establishment hates Trump almost as much as Trump hates [insert minority group here], so we’ll see what happens.
Bottom line, if Trump fails to secure an absolute majority of delegates before the convention, you should probably invest in Orville Redenbacher because there will not be enough popcorn in the world.
