Today is Super Tuesday. It's a big deal in the political world because people are voting in political primaries in eleven different states, and it sets a precedent for who is likely to become their party's nominee. While the democratic race is looking pretty clearly like Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, the Republican race is a lot messier. The Democratic and Republican nomination processes are different, so everything I'll talk about here is specific to the Republican process.
As voters head out to make their voices heard, either through presidential primaries or caucuses, those votes turn into delegate votes which get counted towards the various candidates. In order for a candidate to secure the nomination as the candidate of the Republican Party, the candidate needs to acquire 1,237 (the simple majority) of delegate votes.
I'm writing this as the polls are still coming in, but at the moment, these are the delegate counts:
Trump: 221
Cruz: 69
Rubio: 41
Kasich: 19
Carson: 7
There are 2,108 delegate votes still available, and the Republican Convention will happen in July. If by the time of the convention, no candidate has secured the requisite 1,237 delegate votes, a brokered convention will take place.
The Republican Party has not had to hold a brokered convention since 1948, and the Democrats had their last one in 1952. And this election cycle carries the possibility, however slight, that no single candidate will have secured those necessary delegate votes.
Each state can vary slightly in how they assign delegates, and there can be some tricky math involved, but the popular vote is still a pretty effective guideline for estimating the number of delegates someone will win.
While Donald Trump is clearly leading the pack in delegate votes, there are (at the moment) 2,108 delegate votes remaining, which mean that he would need to secure roughly half of the remaining delegate votes to secure the nomination. When he wins, he has typically been receiving between 30-40% of the popular vote. Let's say that he wins 40% in all remaining states (and I'm going to pretend that all of those delegates will get assigned strictly proportional to the popular vote), he would end up with only 1,064 delegate votes.
And this is where a brokered convention comes in. All of the 2,382 Republican delegates will head to the party's convention, (and for the most part) their votes have been pledged to whichever candidate they were originally cast for. At the convention the official first ballot casting occurs, where each delegate officially casts that vote. If at that point no candidate has secured the necessary number of delegates, then the delegates get "released" and are now free to change their vote to a different candidate for the next round of balloting.
There is talk about "back room deals" when the term brokered convention comes up, but it's been several decades since there has been one and there doesn't seem to be a clear picture of what one would look like today. I'm sure there is plenty of room for corruption in the process, but there would also be room for those delegates to stay true to conscience if anything significant happens between now and July.
Labels: Politics