In the interest of interjecting a little more lightheartedness into our lives, here is an offering.
Do I think what I describe here is exactly what is going to happen? No.
Do I think this could happen? Certainly.
I won’t cite or link to the plethora of information available on the internet as to how one may define a “contested” or “brokered” convention, so for this purpose let’s just say it’s one in which no candidate enters the convention with a majority of Pledged Delegates and therefore no candidate wins outright on the first ballot.
Per the revised DNC rules, “Superdelegates” -- actually called “Automatic Delegates” by the DNC, a term I’d rather use, but because “superdelegates” is more understood, I’ll use that term here – cannot vote on the first ballot.
If no candidate receives a majority of the 3,768 Pledged Delegates on the first ballot, then Superdelegates get to vote on the second (and any subsequent) ballot. If it goes to a second or larger number of ballots, a candidate would then need to gain a majority of Total Delegates (Pledged + Super) to become the nominee.
In the last few months one can see numerous articles by pundits discussing the likelihood of the Democrats seeing a contested convention in 2020. Here are just a few:
Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine
Glenn Altschuler in The Hill
Eleanor Clift in Daily Beast
A few months ago I saw a Tweet from Nate Silver saying he thought there was a one-in-three chance that the 2020 Democratic convention would be contested. For reasons I suggest in this story, I think the chances are closer to one-in-two.
In the 2016 contest it was perfectly clear where the vast majority of Superdelegates had their loyalties and I won’t get into all that here. Suffice it to say that Clinton eventually saw about a 12-to-1 advantage over Sanders in Superdelegate support, and that support was well advertised long before the convention. Particularly because of Sanders’ complaints about the 2016 Superdelegate situation, the DNC modified its rules for the 2020 contest to not allow Superdelegates to vote on the first ballot.
Because of this change, for the current contest, those who are Superdelegates appear to be less vocal in who they may be supporting. I haven’t seen a single tabulation this time as to which candidates have which Superdelegate’s support. The closest proxy for this is probably the FiveThirtyEight “Endorsement” tracker. FiveThirtyEight uses its own scoring system depending on how important the position a given endorser has. While most of the individuals already endorsing are probably Superdelegates, they may not all be. A quick glance at the tracker shows that the tabulation of endorsement points is much more evenly spread out among several candidates than was the case with Superdelegates in 2016.
Why do I think it’s likely that the 2020 convention will be contested? Because most recent polling suggests that there are four candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Harris) that are all consistently polling in the 15 to 30 percent range, and because the DNC algorithm for Pledged Delegate allocation makes it harder to achieve a majority of delegates when there are multiple candidates consistently polling above 15 percent.
Here are the latest RealClearPolitics polling averages. The four candidates listed above currently hold more than 70 percent of the total polling data. While Harris is currently a bit below 15 percent, her trend is upward.
Because I’m an analytical nerd, I’ve created this 2020 Democratic Pledged Delegate calculator to show more clearly how the DNC’s “15% threshold” works. The first tab recreates an example used by The Green Papers, which I did to ensure I’m doing it correctly. Then the second tab shows an example with 15 candidates, four of whom get more than 15 percent of the vote in a primary event.
fladem of this site has provided this link to their detailed delegate estimator which is updated near daily as new polls come out. fladem’s work breaks it down into congressional districts. The model currently estimates that Biden would capture less than a majority of Pledged Delegates (46 percent), and Biden’s trend is downward.
While Biden is still clearly the leader, he’s no lock at all to win 50 percent of the Pledged Delegates. If Sanders, Warren, and Harris all stay in the race, which is likely given their strong polling averages and good fundraising totals, and if Biden’s polling average slips into the upper 20s while they all stay in the 15 to 20 percent range, the likelihood that no candidate goes into the convention with more than 50 percent of the Pledged Delegates increases.
(Yes, candidates other than these four will undoubtedly win some Pledged Delegates [O’Rourke in Texas, Klobuchar in Minnesota, etc.], and that will only increase the chances of a contested convention.)
If Superdelegates split their support more broadly during a second ballot, one can imagine the rare situation where we’d see an even more contested convention (requiring a third ballot) because no candidate earns a majority of Total Delegates on a second ballot.
Were that to occur, I think that Kamala Harris would emerge as the consensus candidate because she checks more boxes than the others when considering a candidate’s overall appeal, and I think that she is someone that both the progressive and the moderate factions of the party could get behind.
Admittedly, a lot of pure conjecture here on my part.
But hey, it’s fun.