Should Democrats Really Worry About a Contested Convention?

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report published an op-ed article in the New York Times on Wednesday provocatively titled "Why a Long Democratic Primary Slugfest Might Help Re-Elect Trump." In the piece, Wasserman argues that the Democratic presidential nomination race in 2020 could well turn out to be a protracted fight that exposes or exacerbates wide rifts within the party, that the identity of the Democratic nominee might remain unresolved until the national convention, and that internal conflict could prevent Democrats from unifying to defeat Donald Trump in the November general election.

At the foundation of Wasserman's case is an important observation: under the internal rules of the Democratic Party, winning a majority of pledged delegates requires attracting at least a near-majority of the popular vote in presidential primaries. That's because Democrats, unlike Republicans, mandate the proportional allocation of delegates; all candidates who receive at least 15 percent of the vote in a state or congressional district are entitled to a corresponding share of the delegates chosen there regardless of whether they place first. If there are multiple candidates attracting significant but not overwhelming popular support over an extended segment of the primary calendar, no single candidate will accumulate a majority of delegates, and therefore the national party might assemble in Milwaukee on July 13, 2020 without a certain nominee.

However, I think that this scenario is far less probable than Wasserman suggests—and that even if no candidate ends the primary season with a majority of delegates formally pledged to him or her, neither unusually bitter infighting nor ineffective opposition to the Republican ticket are particularly likely consequences. Here are some of the reasons behind this skepticism:

1. The early states will immediately cull the field. At the current preliminary stage of the process, it's relatively easy to envision a long competition with multiple strong contenders. But the early states invariably impose a deep and sometimes brutal mark on the race, reinforced by the news media's enthusiasm for branding candidates as either winners or (more commonly) losers. There have been 20 contested presidential nominations since the modern system was introduced in 1972, and the eventual nominee placed no worse than second in the New Hampshire primary in all 20 elections. Unsuccessful candidates may not immediately drop out if they do badly in the first few states, but unless they can consistently reach the necessary 15 percent threshold of popular support in the face of the resulting negative publicity or media inattention, they won't be able to deprive the front-runner of delegates.

2. Front-loading might end the race sooner, not later. Wasserman argues that the front-loading of the nomination calendar paradoxically increases the chance of a dragged-out competition, because many pledged delegates will be chosen at a point when multiple active candidates could potentially split the electoral map among themselves. It's possible to see things working out that way. But it seems equally plausible that the evolution of Super Tuesday into an early March quasi-national primary raises the level of financial and organizational resources necessary to run a viable campaign beyond the reach of more than a handful of candidates, and that the extensive media coverage required to catch the eye of voters tuning into the race after Iowa and New Hampshire will similarly be divided among just two or three main contenders. If the results of Super Tuesday and the two following weeks give one candidate a large enough lead in the delegate count, the front-loading of the calendar could produce an apparent nominee by March 17, since the combination of proportional allocation requirements and the lack of delegate-rich states voting later in the season makes it even more difficult for a trailing opponent to mount a second-half comeback.

3. The Democratic Party is not "highly fractious." Notwithstanding the wildly disproportionate fascination in some circles with a few backbench members of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party is arguably as unified, at both the mass and elite level, as it's ever been in its history. There are important differences among Democrats, of course, and some of these differences will be publicly litigated over the course of the 2020 presidential nomination race. But there's little reason to believe that internal party divisions are any greater, or harder to overcome, than they were in 2008, or 1992, or 1976, or 1948, or 1932. Democrats universally dislike Donald Trump and are highly motivated to defeat him in 2020; no major candidate or group within the party will want to risk being forever blamed for Trump's re-election by stirring up trouble between the convention and the November vote.

4. A true contested convention is very unlikely, because party leaders will work hard to prevent it. Media discussions of hypothetical contested conventions often carry the whiff of hopeful anticipation; many journalists find today's scripted coronations to be impossibly boring and yearn to experience the excitement of yesteryear's dark horses and smoke-filled rooms. But party leaders have exactly the opposite view. They fear and despise the unpredictability and colorful in-fighting that media types live for; above all, they want an exuberant, harmonious, drama-free party. Democratic officials will therefore do everything in their power to prevent the kind of rollicking free-for-all that the term "contested convention" or "brokered convention" commonly connotes.

For risk-averse party leaders who are habitually obsessed with maintaining internal unity and popular legitimacy, the obvious path of least resistance in a situation where no candidate has accumulated a majority of pledged delegates is to close ranks around the first-place finisher in the delegate count. Secondary candidates could be pressured to release their own delegates and endorse the leader; alternatively, superdelegate votes could deliver him or her a numerical majority on the second ballot at the convention. Denying the nomination to the candidate with the greatest demonstrated popular support would risk a highly inconvenient public debate over whether the "voice of the people" was being silenced by the scheming of party "bosses," as the experience of the 2008 and 2016 superdelegate controversies demonstrated so memorably. At the same time, the Democratic leadership is quite unlikely to let a contested nomination play out without attempting to direct the proceedings in advance; it's not obvious how a modern convention could even be competently staged without a presumptive nominee to take charge of its organization.

Until such a turn of events actually happens, it's impossible to know whether the nominal majority requirement for presidential nominations is, as I suspect, closer to a plurality requirement in practice. But the prospect of a chaotic nomination process or national convention doesn't seem like a leading concern for the Democratic Party at this stage of the election. Whatever challenges Democrats may face in 2020, a deeply divided or unmotivated party base is unlikely to be one of them.

Emotion Meets Calculation in Both Parties

Late spring is an odd time in every presidential election year. The presumptive nominees of the two parties have reliably emerged by this point (if not before), yet the schedule of primaries and caucuses continues at a slow, drawn-out pace, sometimes contested by an active opponent or two who can still score a few popular state-level victories despite the unforgiving arithmetic of the national delegate count. The leading candidates prepare to fight each other for the support of swing voters in the general election, even as they attempt to inspire unity and enthusiasm within the popular bases of their own respective parties. With six months to go before the election itself, the political press and other attentive observers follow every strategic move with great interest while most voters remain only intermittently engaged in the day-to-day combat of the campaign.

Things are even stranger than usual in 2016. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have both claimed an insurmountable lead in delegates—Trump is now running unopposed in the Republican race—yet visible segments of both parties have not become reconciled to their nominations, as demonstrated by the events of this weekend.

Saturday's Washington Post brought news of a draft campaign that is actively attempting to recruit an anti-Trump Republican to contest the general election as an independent candidate. The ringleaders of this scheme (Mitt Romney, Erick Erickson, and Bill Kristol, along with a few veteran Republican political consultants) appear undecided about what qualities they are looking for beyond (1) antipathy to Trump and (2) some commitment to run as a conservative—as is clear from the rather incoherent collection of names on their wish list, which includes John Kasich, Condoleezza Rice, ex-Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, first-term Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, a couple of retired generals, and even Dallas Mavericks owner (and reality TV star) Mark Cuban.

It's easy to understand the frustration felt by conservative elites who currently face the prospect of choosing among Trump, Clinton, and a pro-choice/anti-interventionist Libertarian Party nominee on their November ballots. But their lack of success so far at persuading any of their targets to volunteer for this mission isn't hard to figure out, because it would be a big mistake for any sensible politician to agree. Siphoning off Republican votes from Trump would clinch a sizable Democratic victory—ignore the nonsense about how it might throw the election to the House of Representatives—and ensure that the candidate would go down in party history as the Republican version of Ralph Nader. Ex-McCain and Jeb Bush strategist Mike Murphy's idea that an anti-Trump conservative might only contest a handful of swing states is even sillier; why would a significant share of voters turn out to support a candidate who couldn't even claim a hypothetical chance of victory?

On the Democratic side, the Sanders campaign and some of its most fervent supporters have largely declined to acknowledge the true state of the delegate math, instead nurturing unrealistic theories that superdelegates will overturn Clinton's victory in pledged delegates at the national convention this summer. Such hopes sit with a certain awkwardness alongside claims that dastardly Democratic "bosses" have illegitimately manipulated the nomination process to prevent a Sanders nomination—a point of view that even fueled open conflict at this weekend's state party convention in Nevada.

Once the primary season is over, however, the political environment will change in a way that will make the Sanders campaign's position strategically unsustainable. Many of the superdelegates who are now publicly undeclared will likely endorse Clinton on or shortly after the final primary date (as occurred in 2008, with Obama in the front-runner position) One of those undeclared superdelegates is Obama himself, who can be expected to offer his public support to Clinton once the primaries are over. Sanders's own backers among the ranks of Democratic elected officials and national committee members will then exert pressure on the campaign to begin the process of promoting party unity.

Sanders may well withhold his formal endorsement until he secures concessions from the Clinton camp at the convention itself. But any attempt to continue an active fight against her past the end of the primary calendar will leave him open to substantial criticism from within the party that he is becoming a spoiler in the Democratic Party's battle against a potential President Trump.

In both parties, resistance among the losing factions in the nomination contest is still unusually elevated at the moment, preventing each side from quickly uniting around its future standard-bearer. But the strong emotions of disaffected activists are beginning to collide with the cold calculations of actual and potential candidates, who perceive substantial political risk from maintaining or exacerbating divisions within the party as it turns to face the opposition in a general election in which the political stakes will be particularly high. By October, it is likely that most of the current intraparty strife will be a distant memory, and the population of Republicans who remain unreconciled to Trump (perhaps a smaller and less visible group than those who are currently vowing to stand in opposition) will probably lack a prominent candidate of their own, leaving them with an unappealing choice between voting for Clinton and sitting out the presidential race.

Don't Expect the Superdelegates to Stop Bernie Sanders

Under Democratic Party rules, all sitting Democratic governors, members of Congress, and members of the Democratic National Committee, and all sitting or former Democratic presidents, vice presidents, congressional leaders, and DNC chairs, enjoy automatic delegate status at the national convention. The creation of these "superdelegate" positions in the 1980s was designed to give the party's leaders some potential influence in the selection of the presidential nominee and approval of the party platform, as well as a formal participatory role in the convention every four years.

In 2008, the margin between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the pledged delegate count (those delegates allocated based on the results of primaries and caucuses) was sufficiently narrow that the superdelegates could have decided the nomination, mathematically speaking. In practice, however, any suggestion that the outcome among pledged delegates (which favored Obama) be reversed by the superdelegates was met with concerns—and even threats—that denying the nomination to the pledged-delegate winner would fatally split the party. Then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi went on record in March 2008 as questioning the legitimacy of such a turn of events, and enough superdelegates endorsed Obama on the last day of the primary calendar that his path to the nomination was cleared—prompting Clinton to quickly concede the race.

This time around, Clinton's massive lead in superdelegates over Bernie Sanders initially suggests a built-in advantage for her campaign, forcing Sanders to win a supermajority of pledged delegates in order to make up the gap. In the wake of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, some news outlets even reported that Sanders's landslide victory only netted him a tie in the state delegate count after factoring in the New Hampshire superdelegates (such as Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Governor Maggie Hassan) who have publicly endorsed Clinton.

But it's once again difficult to imagine the superdelegates actually working to deny Sanders the nomination if he places first in the pledged delegate count—even if most of them prefer Clinton or view her as a superior general election candidate. The norms of internal "democracy" within the party organization are sufficiently strong that the legitimacy of a Clinton nomination under such conditions would be widely contested. A firestorm would ensue that would extend all the way to the convention itself, if not beyond, tearing the party apart and significantly weakening the eventual nominee.

It's worth remembering that the current nomination system is itself the product of a crisis of legitimacy. After Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 presidential race, the Democratic primaries were dominated by anti-Vietnam War candidates Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but Hubert Humphrey captured the nomination on the first ballot amid protests and violence both inside the convention hall and on the streets of Chicago (Kennedy had been assassinated by the time of the convention, but still would not have been nominated had he lived). The requirement that most delegates be selected by party voters rather than organizational leaders was adopted in response to the criticism that Humphrey's nomination did not reflect the anti-war sentiment of the Democratic rank-and-file that year.

So I would argue against paying too much attention to the superdelegates, whether you're a Sanders supporter angered by their lack of support for your candidate, a Clinton backer who views them as a reassuring backstop to your candidate's currently shaky campaign, or a neutral observer just trying to make sense of the process. The winner of the pledged delegate count will almost certainly be the 2016 Democratic nominee—or else the Democratic Party will really feel the burn.