Today, Explained - Tuesday, Explained

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

Vox's Andrew Prokop explains what makes this Tuesday so super and performs some basic arithmetic to suggest how Democrats could end up with a contested convention. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Twente, Twente Explained. 2020 Explained. Big weekend. Steyr dropped out.

Buttigieg dropped out. Biden finally notched a win, which leaves all eyes on tomorrow, Super Tuesday. Andrew Prokop, what makes it so super? How many states will be holding elections tomorrow? Well, you have California, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, Vermont, and American Samoa. American Samoa? That's not even a state. You got 14 states and one territory. You had a cadence there, I wonder. Is there a song? Is there a Super Tuesday song?

I don't know. That's not my department. Whose department is it? Ahem. Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee And Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia

And American Samoa So, who decided that all these states would just go for it on Super Tuesday? Nobody decided it. Nobody dictates the exact order of the primary calendar. The DNC has set one restriction. It's that four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, get the privilege of going early. But after that early state period, which this year is reserved for February, is up, then it's really up to every other state or territory to decide when they want to hold their contest. And a whole lot of them made the decision that the way they think they'll be able to have the most influence on the contest is to go as early as they're allowed to, basically, which this year is the first Tuesday in March.

So basically, the DNC says no one can go in February except these four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and all the states jump on as soon as they're allowed, which happens to be tomorrow, Super Tuesday. Yeah, or 14 states in this case. But it's a process known as front-loading. It has resulted in the past and this year in somewhat unbalanced primary calendars. It's not really a gradual ramp-up in how many delegates get allotted. We're going from 4% of the total Democratic delegates allotted before Super Tuesday to about 38% after Super Tuesday is done. So that's an enormous jump in just one day, though we should also note that early voting and mail voting in several Super Tuesday

states has been going on for several weeks at this point. So not all of the votes will be cast on just one day, but the results will start coming in on Super Tuesday evening. How long has Super Tuesday been super? So the history is actually pretty interesting. It started in a much less super form in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was the president. He was facing a primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy. We're facing the fact that Mr. Carter will not come out of that White House or the Rose Garden, but we're going to get him out of that White House or the Rose Garden, but we're going to get him out of that White House and the Rose Garden. And he and his strategists wanted to ensure that states that were good for Jimmy Carter voted early so he could build up a big delegate lead.

So in that case, it was three large southern states that moved to pretty soon after New Hampshire. And as predicted, they did result in Carter doing quite well and getting a big delegate lead. Fellow Democrats, I thank you for the nomination you've offered me. I accept your nomination. And we're going to beat the Republicans in November. Super Tuesday also had this Southern character in the election cycles after that, too. This was part of a concerted project from the South to give their region more influence in helping pick the Democratic nominee. But eventually states in other regions caught on to this whole plan. And the first Super Tuesday that truly spanned the nation took place in 2000. And that's been the norm ever since.

The record was in 2008 for the number of states and the proportion of total delegates at stake. Turnout was heavy across America, from New York to California, as 24 states held primaries or caucuses. This election has engaged and energized Americans like no other in decades. This year's will not be as massive as 2008's, but it will still be pretty massive. It's interesting that Jimmy Carter was responsible here because we did an episode previewing the Iowa caucus called WIOWA, and it seemed like he played a pretty big part in making Iowa the first state

or the most important state in the primary process there, too. Yeah, that's because the system of how we choose candidates was modernized starting with the 1972 presidential election. And people were still kind of figuring out how this whole new system worked back then. So in his first run, Jimmy Carter helped solidify the importance of Iowa in picking the nominee. And then in his reelection campaign, he started this trend of certain big states trying to move early to have more influence on the process. And now decades down the line, we're still dealing with the logic and the consequences on strategies that were first

pursued back then. So he was successful, though. He created this new strategy, and everyone's basically followed that plan since? Everyone except Mike Bloomberg. I'm Mike Bloomberg, and I approve this message. Nice. What has affected whether states go on Super Tuesday or don't? You mentioned that it's not exactly been like a completely consistent flow. It's really a decision made within the state among the state government or party leaders. And it just varies from year to year. California, for instance, has moved around in 2016. They went in early June. But in 2008, they were on Super Tuesday. And this year, 2020, they are back on Super Tuesday again. This was a specific decision made by the Democrats in charge of California's government that they thought it took too long to get to them last time around. And they specifically

wanted to exert more influence on the process this time, so they're going early. How much weight does California have to throw around here considering it's the most populous state? It is definitely the behemoth of the states that are up. It's got 415 pledged delegates at stake. For context, there's 1,344 delegates at stake overall on Super Tuesday. That means California is about a third of that. So it's a really big deal. You also this year, though, have a bunch of southern states.

The south is overrepresented on the Super Tuesday lineup. You have Texas, the second most populous state in the country that has a little more than half of the delegates of California. So that's a big deal too. And in addition to Texas, you also have North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. And together, counting Texas, those seven Southern states make up 46% of Super Tuesday's delegates. So Super Tuesday, a lot of it is still about the South. It's the South and it's California, and then there's a grab bag of other contests. Andrew, it sounds like it's time that you and I do a little bit of math, delegate math. I love math.

Good. How about after the break, you help us understand how many delegates the eventual Democratic nominee will need to clinch the nomination. Yeah, let me mentally prepare and then we can jump into it. California, California, here we come. Spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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with iGamingOntario. 2020, 2020, 2020. Andrew, it's high time I ask you how many delegates a Democratic candidate will need to ultimately secure the party's nomination. To win the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, a candidate needs 1,991 out of 3,979 pledged delegates. That is 50% plus one rounded up a bit. That doesn't sound that complicated. So it's just over 50%.

Why does this feel so complicated? Because the way that delegates are allotted in the Democratic primaries is pretty complicated. If we remember the Republican primaries back in 2016, they had a lot of states that awarded all of their delegates to whoever won the state, kind of like how the electoral college works in almost every state. You just come in first place and then you get everything. Classic us. Democrats have no winner-take-all states. The Democrats, all of their states and territories, all of their primaries and caucuses, award their delegates based on the proportional results. Sounds European. and someone else gets 25% of the vote and somebody else gets 20% of the vote, then those delegates would be split among those people roughly in proportion to how much of the vote they got.

Got it. Because these delegates are awarded proportionally, that means that winning a state isn't all that matters. The margin of victory, how much you win by, is crucial. How much the second place person gets is also crucial. You don't just have to win. You have to win by a lot. And there are a lot of aspects to these delegate rules that make things a bit more complicated. More complication?

Why did the Democrats complicate this more so than the Republicans? There is a history to all this dating back to George McGovern's insurgent candidacy in 1972. McGovern won the California primary very late in the process. I always knew California was a big state, but I didn't know it would take so long to count the votes. California was a winner-take-all state, and there were some arguments that having all of those delegates awarded to McGovern was a bad idea. So next time around, the Democrats changed the rules to try to build in strict proportional delegate allocation requirements into their system. So that's how the system has worked for decades for Democrats.

And it hasn't really gone awry in all of that time. But this is the year when it seems to have the greatest chance of going awry in the sense that these rules could either throw the nomination to someone who gets a relatively small plurality of the vote, or, alternatively, they could result in the delegates being split among several people and nobody ends up being able to get a clear majority. And why is this more of an issue this time around? Is it just because so many people are running? Yeah, that's it. It's because there's so many candidates.

Every recent Super Tuesday, the Democratic field has winnowed to just two people before Super Tuesday has began. You had Clinton and Sanders in 2016. You had Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008. You had Kerry and Edwards in 2004. Gordon Bradley in 2000. So it's a system that will produce a clear winner when there are just two people in the race. But if there are more than that who are doing well enough to get delegates, which means passing 15% in the relevant state or district of the vote, then that's when things can go a little wrong. Well, bad news, Andrew. We've got like a half dozen people potentially landing delegates out here. What's going to go wrong? There are two scenarios where things get a little weird

with this delegate math. The first unusual scenario is what happens if one candidate has a plurality of votes in a lot of big states. OK. Say 30 percent of the vote. But the rest of the vote, the other 70 percent, is split among a whole lot of people. And what ends up happening is that that key threshold, 15%, is only crossed by one other candidate. That is what we saw happen in Nevada. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were the only two candidates who passed the 15% threshold needed to get statewide delegates. Every other candidate was eliminated. But the other consequence was that Bernie Sanders' advantage was enhanced.

Right. Bernie and Biden got past the 15% threshold. The other candidates didn't. And Bernie won over Biden. So he gets the big winner's boost once everyone else is eliminated. What's funky scenario two? So the other possibility is that let's say the vote splits among three candidates or four candidates and the same three or four people consistently top that 15% threshold in a lot

of places, which means they get delegates. And no one person is ahead by that much. Okay. Four leading candidates. The race is tight. So what happens then is that one person will be in first place, but so many delegates are at stake on Super Tuesday especially. About 34 percent of the total in the entire nomination contest are locked down in just one day. And if those delegates are split among three or four or more people with nobody getting a clear majority of them or anywhere close, then nobody will be on track to win that actual majority that you need to win the nomination. And with so many delegates allotted, those same proportional rules make it very difficult for anyone to get back on track after that point.

Basically, you have to win overwhelming victories to get a huge delegate majority except in the case of this odd six or seven way split that I just went through. And what happens in scenario two if we don't have a clear front runner with the majority of delegates by the time of the convention in July? That's the scenario that leads to a contested convention, a muddled outcome, nobody clearly in the lead. The delegates have split several ways. And there's a lot of fear in the Democratic Party that a contested convention would just lead to chaos. pledged delegates will definitely be arguing that they should just get the nomination because they got the most delegates. They didn't get a majority, but nobody else got more than them. So they are the deserving winner. And that's how elections usually work. Bernie Sanders, likely anticipating that this candidate will be him, has outright made this argument already. He has said that the winner in pledged delegates,

even if they're short of a majority, should just get the nomination. But in the Las Vegas debate, the candidates were all asked whether they would commit to supporting whoever gets the most delegates. Should the person with the most delegates at the end of this primary season be the nominee, even if they are short of a majority? And none of them did, besides Bernie. Vice President Biden? Yes or no? Leading person with the delegates, should they be the nominee or not? No, let the process work its way out. Mayor Buttigieg?

Not necessarily. Senator Klobuchar? Let the process work. They all wanted to keep their options open. And this is how it has generally worked in the Democratic nomination contests of the past. It's just been widely agreed that to lock down the nomination, you need 50 percent of delegates plus one. But we've never really had a situation in the modern democratic races since they reformed the nomination system and made primaries and caucuses so important in the 1970s, where the outcome was truly split. There has always been someone going into the convention who was pretty close to a majority of delegates. And that person has always ended up

getting the nominees. So if you're out there hoping, praying, wishing for an uncontested convention, you have to hope Super Tuesday or the primaries thereafter clear things up for everyone. Yeah, yeah. The two weeks after Super Tuesday are, if not quite super, at least reasonably sized. On March 10th, we'll see Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, and North Dakota. That's a fair chunk of delegates. And on March 17th, there are several big states, Florida, which is the third most populous state in the country, as well as Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona. So that is a really hefty chunk of delegates there.

So if things are up in the air after Super Tuesday, there is at least a chance that the two weeks of contests following Super Tuesday could clarify things very quickly. Andrew Prokop covers politics at Vox, but his interests are manifold. I love math. He and our politics team will be covering the math out of Super Tuesday over at Vox.com, and we'll bring you a podcast about the results, too. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Tuesday Explained. California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and American Samoa.

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