Delegates, Convention

EVERY FOUR YEARS, American national political parties gather to officially nominate their candidate for president and conduct other party business, such as deciding the party platform. The nature of these conventions as well as the number and selection methods for delegates to those conventions has changed over time.

Originally, delegates were elected to attend a convention at which meaningful votes for presidential nominees were cast. That is, the party nominee was not decided until the time of the convention. Often, the vote for the party nominee was contentious, and it was not uncommon for the nomination to be decided only after several rounds of balloting among the delegates and some convention-floor negotiations. However, since the adoption in most states of the primary system where delegates are assigned based on the outcome of elections held open to any member of a particular party (or any registered voter, subject to specific state laws) instead of the caucus system where delegates are assigned based on the votes of party committees, conventions have been largely ceremonial. This change was made in response to situations where candidates who handily won primary elections, but had no support among the party elite received no votes at the convention. Additionally, with the front-loading of primaries (the majority of delegates are assigned long before the convention), recent national conventions have resembled pep rallies.

Originally, the number of delegates to each major party's convention was based solely on the number of members of Congress. That is, each state was awarded a certain number of delegates for each congressional district and a certain number of at-large seats. In the early part of the 20th century, the concept of “bonus” delegates was born. The idea behind bonus delegates is to allow more influence for states that are more supportive of the party than those who support another party. Bonus delegates are awarded to states based on several electoral factors, such as the percentage of the vote received by that party's presidential candidate in the previous election, whether or not the state's governor is of that party, if that party controls one or both houses of that state's legislature, and if that state's congressional delegation is of that party. Territories (and in the case of Democrats, expatriates living in other countries) are awarded delegates based on similar factors. Thus, the number of delegates representing each state at a party's national convention is a function of the electoral population of the state modified by the performance of the party within that state.

There are four basic ways in which candidates win delegates to their respective conventions. The first is an advisory primary, in which party members vote for candidates. Delegates are to take the result of that vote under advisement, but are not required to vote accordingly. Because the result is not binding, this method is [Page 169]also known as a beauty contest. The second type is a winner-take-all primary. In this method, whichever candidate receives the most votes receives all delegate votes. This method most closely resembles the workings of the general election. In the proportional method, any candidate surpassing the threshold of 15 percent of the vote receives some delegates proportional to the percentage of the vote they received. In the event that no candidate receives this amount of support (for example, where there are 10 candidates who each receive 10 percent of the vote, the threshold is reduced to some lower amount, based on the percentage of the vote received by the candidate with the most votes. Finally, the bonus method is a hybrid of the proportional and winner-take-all methods. Any candidate receiving the threshold amount receives some delegates, but the winner (that is, the candidate with the most votes) receives a bonus number of delegates. This method is also known as the “winner-takes-more” method.

...