America conducts most of its elections by awarding the winner to the candidate who gets the most votes even if a majority of the people cast ballots for someone else. We’re used to this and people don’t question it as much as they should. It creates all kinds of problems and discourages third party voting. Ranked-choice voting has been adopted in Maine to deal with this, and some states opt for run-off elections if no one reaches a majority.
The Democratic National Convention does not operate by our ordinary rules. To be awarded the nomination, a candidate needs a clear majority of the votes. On the first vote, the delegates will be pledged to a candidate, but thereafter they are free to choose someone else. Also, if there is a second vote, the superdelegates (party and elected officials) get to weigh in.
This is not exactly like ranked choice voting, and it’s not a strict run-off either as no one is eliminated after the first vote. But it offers the opportunity to discover who actually has the most support from the delegates.
Simply having the most votes going into the convention doesn’t tell us much about this since a simple plurality is technically a minority.
On Twitter, I tried to give an example of what I’m talking about. Imagine that you’re the elected sheriff of a small frontier town in the 19th Century and you have finally apprehended the horse thief. The people are joyous but also divided about what kind of punishment should be doled out. You want to please the people and win reelection, so you ask them whether the horse thief should get the death penalty or some lesser punishment. To your surprise, 70 percent of the townsfolk recommend some leniency while 30 percent want him dead.
It would make sense to accept this verdict and begin a debate about a suitable non-lethal sentence, but what if instead you offered four options: hanging, jail, hard labor or a fine?
Now imagine that the same 30 percent opted for the hanging, but the other three options were split at around 23 percent.
Should you hang the bastard because more voters chose that option than any of the others? Do you think this would please the people and make them more likely to reelect you?
The problem was introduced when you didn’t drop the death penalty as an option. This set you up to settle on an unpopular position.
Choosing candidates is not binary like being for or against the death penalty, but neither does it confer any natural credibility to have the most votes among many options if most of the people have voted for someone or something else.
We tend to think it makes sense that the person with the most votes should win because that’s how we ordinarily operate, but it’s not uncommon for someone to lose an election in our country because a third party candidate cannibalized their votes. A Republican who wins a blue district because the Green Party candidate pulled 10 percent of the vote is not in a better position to win a one-on-one race. If they won according to the rules, we accept that, but the Democratic National Convention does not operate by those rules.
A Democrat who isn’t even supported by a majority of their own party is not necessarily going to be a better position than other candidates to beat Donald Trump. One can argue that denying the winner of a plurality the nomination would be divisive and cost the alternative the party unity needed to win, but you can just as easily argue that nominating someone who cannot command a majority within the party will have the exact same problem.
At the Nevada debate on Wednesday, every candidate except Bernie Sanders refused to commit to supporting a plurality winner. Collectively, they have won over 70% of the votes so far in Iowa and New Hampshire, but only Buttigieg has accumulated more delegates than Sanders. As I said above, this isn’t a binary pro- or anti-Sanders vote. It wouldn’t be fair to say that 70% oppose Sanders or that anyone else has more support than he does. To determine that, you need to get down to second choices.
Imagine asking a Buttigieg voter who they prefer if Buttigieg isn’t the candidate, and then when they tell you ‘Klobuchar,’ you respond by saying you can’t pick her because Sanders got more votes. That would’t be a fair way of measuring voter sentiment. But that’s what a lot of people think needs to happen if no one gets a majority before the convention.
According to the rules, the people get to choose the nominee rather than party bosses, but if the people don’t produce a majority winner, then it is up to the delegates to agree on someone. The best way for them to do that is to express their true preference rather than defer to the person with the most votes. We wouldn’t want to see a hanging just because the delegates couldn’t agree on a lesser punishment and we shouldn’t believe that kind of process will please the townsfolk and find the best candidate to beat Trump.
I disagree, Martin. If one candidate is just slightly in front, I might agree. But if someone (let’s say Sanders) is way out front, the party is gonna be a fucking mess if it prevents him from securing the nomination. I say this as one who shares your concerns about Bernie. I’m not quite as fearful because I have zero confidence I can pick the best road forward. It’s possible he’s the transformational candidate who ushers in a new coalition. It’s possible he’s McGovern 2.0 which results in the weakest incumbent president in modern history getting a second term, with all the horrible consequences that entails.
If there were a clear superstar like Obama, I’d feel differently. I think Warren’s the closest we have to the ideal candidate for this place and time but I recognize my hubris in thinking I really know this. If one candidate is significantly out in front, I think the party would be unwise to deny that reality.
Be careful to detail where you actually disagree with me and where you don’t. I acknowledged there would be cost to denying a plurality winner the nomination. And I only said it would be advisable to do so if that candidate was actually opposed by the majority of the delegates (who are our best proxy for the voters who elected them).
The problem with that argument is that, as proxies go, the delegates are only as good as their credibility and their credibility is not that high among the general population. So you get articles like Bloomberg Quietly Plotting Brokered Convention Strategy. Try this and see how it works out for you.
Bloomberg can try whatever he wants. If Bernie comes into the convention with 40-45% of the vote and about that much in delegates, he will be the nominee. Period.
But if it’s actually splintered, he might still be the nominee, but there will be prices to be paid for it. But he might not. I don’t think this will happen because I don’t see the splits occurring like that. The field is going to winnow and he’s one of the few who is viable everywhere.
A lot of the delegates will be people who will themselves be facing the voters. So who has the best coattails will be a major consideration to many, to the extent that can be judged.
Thanks for your comment, but I’m not sure you disagree completely with Martin’s post. As a practical matter, if Sanders comes into the convention “way out in front” (with, let’s say, 45% of the delegates on the first ballot), he’ll almost certainly be nominated by acclamation on or immediately after the 2nd round of voting.
The specific scenario Martin put forward was if Sanders comes into the convention narrowly “out in front” with 30% of the delegates and most of the remaining delegates split fairly evenly among 3 other contenders (for the sake of argument let’s say Buttigieg, Warren, & Klobuchar who are currently 2-4 in the delegate count).
In that scenario, is it legitimate (in your view) for the convention to nominate someone other than Sanders?
yes, that’s the rule. and I’m ok with the candidates not making any kind of pledges about what they’d do.
but if Sanders goes in with a 10 point lead and the convention turns into the anybody-but-Bernie show… that would be doubleplusungood.
Well, I’m not particularly a fan of Bernie’s, and if a contested convention ended up with someone else, I would probably be personally pleased. But…I think your attempt to logically justify such a move is…shall we say…strained.
There are two problems that I sew with your argument. The first is that we really don’t know what people’s ranked choice would be. If the candidates clearly fell into groups (progressive, moderate) then maybe you could make the argument that all delegates for the same group are interchangeable, and that the largest group should win. This would be akin to, in your example, saying that all non-hanging punishments are essentially interchangeable compared to hanging. But in the current case, can we really do this? Can we really say that a Klobuchar voter would, say, prefer Warren to Sanders? I think we don’t know.
The other problem is that I don’t think we can say that the delegates are really representatives selected by the people to use their own judgement. Do people even know who the delegates are, or care? I think in many states their names don’t appear on the ballot. (This of course applies mostly to the elected delegates. I think you *can* make an argument that the superdelegates should be free to negotiate. After all, they are there as representatives of the party, who really were selected through a meaningful election.)
The bottom line is that I suspect that if we get to a convention with a clear plurality winner, then the most justifiable thing is to go with that person. There are many, many reasons why that would be a suboptimal solution, but given the limitations of our knowledge, any other soluition might be worse.
Thanks for your comment, and for your detailed explanation.
The last major party convention to go past a first ballot was (I think) in 1952, so very few living Americans have any memory of it…let alone of a truly open and brokered convention like the 1924 Democratic convention which lasted 2 weeks and required 103 ballots to elect a nominee.
That said, ranked choice voting (or a run-off election) is the closest analogue to an open convention that most Americans have. There’s no winner until someone gets a majority; and the leader after the first round of voting doesn’t necessarily win the election. Progressives in Maine love how it worked out in the 2018 2nd congressional district race. https://ballotpedia.org/Maine%27s_2nd_Congressional_District_election,_2018
More importantly, without the rules we’re playing Calvinball.
A Democrat who isn’t even supported by a majority of their own party is not necessarily going to be a better position than other candidates
How about a non-Democrat who can’t get a majority of voters of the party that he’s too good to belong to?