What the Pundits are Getting Wrong about Nevada and Delegate Allocation (and why Caucusing kind of sucks)
It’s been a week since the Nevada caucuses and everyone has moved on to the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday coming up. Fine. But while everyone is glossing over what’s happening state by state, we ought to be mindful of the way in which Nevada is not over. That’s right. NV’s allocation of delegates is not at all set and won’t be until May 30, 2020.
What that means is that the current allocation of delegates to the top three finishers in the state are not final, and are subject to change. The tl;dr of this is that as non-viable candidates drop from the list, those top four candidates have an opportunity to pick up district delegates.
Most important for changing the calculus, Elizabeth Warren is conceivably within striking distance of delegates in Nevada if her campaign stays diligent in the state. This is particularly important if Warren is running a delegate strategy. At 9.7% of pledged delegates (not votes), there’s room for her to move up into viability before the State Convention at the end of May and snag both pledged delegates and other party-assigned delegates.
To understand this, let’s talk numbers. These numbers, which come up on the Google search for NV Caucus results are incorrect.
Problem one: YOU are NOT SEEING vote counts or percentages here. You are seeing precinct delegate counts.
104,883 people voted in the Nevada Democratic caucuses. That’s more than 30,000 more than participated in the 2016 Democratic Caucuses (which was around 70,000 people). What is more, around 80,000 people turned out to EARLY VOTE in the Nevada Caucus this year, exceeding the total number of caucus participants in 2016 just in the Early Vote period.
No doubt the opportunity to virtual caucus and Early Vote with ranked choice was largely responsible for the increased turnout, and should Nevada use this model going forward, it would be wise to significantly increase the number of early voting sites to accommodate.
But, to get back to the point, Nevada sends 48 delegates and 3 alternates to the Democratic National Convention in June.
Problem two: 36 of those delegates are pledged delegates determined by the STATE CONVENTION at the end of May. They are not determined now. The remaining 12 delegates and alternates go to the national convention unpledged.
What determines whether a candidate is viable is what happens with the delegates to the county conventions, when they get to the county convention on April 18, 2020. Because of this, although delegates are currently apportioned, any loss of a candidate from the race before the State Convention allows a pledged delegate to realign their preferences. A campaign could also release delegates and allow them to caucus at the county conventions for others, if, say Klobuchar wanted to run a strategic game against Buttegieg by giving her delegates to Warren to get her to viability.
23 of the 36 pledged delegates and 3 alternates are (congressional) district-level delegates who are elected and apportioned through the caucus-to-convention process. By the end of caucuses on Feb 22, 14,491 delegates to county conventions were apportioned, not district-level delegates. This is what has been counted as “votes” on the AP’s info, displayed by Google (above).
The important math here (this is for you, #Yanggang), is that Steyer and Klobuchar likely have no path to the nomination, but they currently hold a combined 1285 of the state’s county delegates (682 and 603, respectively). Then, there’s 1 free delegate that has been pledged to Yang and is likely to be released to re-align, and 7 more delegates are Uncommitted. This leaves 1293 county convention delegates potentially up for grabs, or about 9% of the delegates. [Updated to mention that after today’s primary in South Carolina Tom Steyer has in fact dropped out of the race, which means his 682 delegates are up for grabs in Nevada!]
[3/1 Update! Buttegieg has now also dropped out of the race, releasing his 2073 county convention delegates in Nevada! Shit is up for grabs now people.]
Given that the viability threshold of 15% of county delegates is 2174, and Warren already holds 1406 delegates, Warren would need to pick up just under 60% or 768 of the released county delegates to make viability at the county conventions in April. If she could do that, she could attain viability at the county conventions and therefore be eligible to pick up both pledged and uncommitted delegates at the State Convention.
There are other potentially pledged delegates, called PLEO delegates (Party Leader and Elected Officials) from the ranks of democrats at the state and local level. The following folks are eligible to run for these delegate positions in the following preferential order:
1. big city mayors (uh…Reno and Vegas, maybe Henderson?) who are dems and statewide elected officials (governor or lieutenant governor) who are dems
2. state legislative leaders, state legislators, and other state, county and local officials who are dems (if there is any room for them because the above folks declined…there’s only 5 of these positions)
PLEO delegates may also run to be unpledged or uncommited, which means they would go to the State Convention in May without having been committed to one of the three candidates already at viability (Bernie, Biden, or Buttegieg). So, if Warren wanted to get in this game, she’d get some strong supporters in local and state government to run for uncommitted delegates that could vote for her at the State Convention, if the tides change enough between now and the end of May (i.e. Klobuchar and Steyer drop out of the race and their delegates are up for grabs along with Yang’s single delegate).
The pledged county delegates are locked in* to proportional representation of the precinct caucuses, not the vote. This is another important point to keep in mind, since at first alignment, Buttegieg got 15.4% of people’s first choice vote and Warren got 12.8% of people’s first choice vote. But that number does not determine who got county delegates. Whether or not each candidate achieved viability within individual precincts determined whether or not they get delegates. So, for example, in my precinct, Liz made viability and so she gets a delegate to the county convention from my precinct (which had only five delegates to give out — Joe and Bernie each got 1 as well, and Pete ended up with two, but in a really weird way that I will get to).
After the second alignment, Pete’s total percentage of votes and precinct delegates went up to 17.3% and Liz’s went down to 11.5% because she didn’t make viability in some precincts and her voters were therefore allowed to realign. Pete’s numbers increased because he picked up voters, probably not from non-viable Liz precincts but from the precincts in which Klobuchar, Steyer, Bennet, Gabbard, and Yang did not attain viability. (Liz people whose precincts weren’t viable for her likely went Sanders, whose percentage jumped from 34% to 40.5% after second alignment.)
In our precinct, though, Pete actually wasn’t viable after first alignment, having received 8 of the necessary 11 votes to achieve viability. After second alignment, though, a huge proportion of the second choice early votes for non-viable candidates went to Pete who rode those sloppy seconds to the highest number of delegates from our precinct by ONE VOTE. Biden and Sanders each had 17 votes after re-alignment, and Buttegieg ended up getting 18 votes. This led to him getting double the number of delegates. If that’s not enough to make you pause and rethink how Nevada is apportioning its delegates, I don’t know what is. It’s our own analog to the Electoral College.
Look at the numbers from the total count, as reported by Wikipedia:
Sanders and Biden are going to pick up more delegates than they would have earned if we were using the popular vote. Buttegieg and Warren (and the remaining non-viable candidates) are going to receive fewer delegates than they would have earned in a strictly representative popular vote. Sanders is going to pick up 6% more delegates than he received of popular vote, while Biden picks up almost a percent and a half. Buttegieg loses 3% of the delegates he might have earned if this had been state-wide rather than precinct by precinct, while Warren lost 2% of the pledged delegates she would have earned with a popular vote.
Let’s face it…delegate apportionment this way has a tendency to disproportionately advantage people who have a slight edge and magnify their lead. Like it did for Pete in my precinct. Nevadans, do we love this? I do not love this. It seems counter to my democracy intuition, but I’m open to education.
If we come back to the question of picking up state delegates to the national convention, we also have to remember the other delegates in play.
There are 8 At Large delegates and 1 alternate. These can run to be a pledged candidate directly to the State Convention:
“The At-large delegate and alternate positions shall be allocated among presidential preference according to the statewide division of preferences among convention and caucus participants, at the first determining step of the process,” which initially sounds like it shuts Warren out:
“Preferences which have not attained a 15% threshold on a state-wide basis shall not be entitled to any at-large delegates. (Rule 14.E)” (Nevada State Delegate Selection Plan)
BUT, “If a presidential candidate otherwise entitled to an allocation is no longer a candidate at the time of selection of the at-large delegates, their allocation will be proportionally divided among the other preferences entitled to an allocation. (Rule 11.C)” Which means, if Warren can clean up delegates at the county convention, she can vie for these at large delegates too.
That was all before we even address the last category of delegates. The Automatic Delegates who go straight to the national convention ALTOGETHER unpledged.
Which means all of the top FOUR campaigns could really pick up delegates at the level of Nevada’s Democratic Senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez-Masto and our congressional reps, Dina Titus , Susie Lee, and Steven Horsford, who all can be such “superdelegates.” Those intending to act as a superdelegate simply have to register their intent by March 6.
Superdelegates can add up in a big way, especially when the delegates are split so many ways that no one is able to really distance themselves from the pack. For those that recall the 2016 primary, superdelegates were part of Bernie’s strategy to catch Hillary, but in 2016 the delegates were only split between the two, so Bernie just couldn’t catch Hillz. This year, however, with delegates split four, five, or six ways, no one candidate can distance themselves enough to secure a nomination without a brokered convention where the superdelegates will have a lot of influence.
Why does all this matter? Do I think that a shift of a few delegates from the relatively small contingent that Nevada sends to the national convention can make or break any campaign? No. What is important about the details of Nevada, and each state’s own idiosyncratic rules about how votes add up to delegates, is that the details matter.
A campaign can run a delegate strategy and scoop up numbers here and there from states’ delegate-selection processes after the eyes of the national media have all moved on from what they considered a “completed” primary or caucus.
What this means for Warren voters is that they should take heart heading in to Super Tuesday. Warren pledging to remain in the race until the convention in June likely means she has her eye on a delegate strategy. If there’s any campaign that probably has all the details worked out state by state for how to scoop up extra delegates and under what conditions, it’s probably the lady with 1001 plans.
Moreover, a delegate distribution among several candidates, none of whom have a majority, means a brokered convention and even more influence for those unpledged superdelegates.
Which means everyone who loves Warren in a state that hasn’t had their primary yet should really stop worrying about what the advance numbers mean, especially from Caucus states like Iowa and Nevada, where things are far from settled. Stay excited for your gal, get out there and get those votes and rack up those delegates, one at a time. Each one will count at the convention where the real shit will go down.
Knock them doors. Cast them votes. Then, stay with the delegate selection process for your state to see when and where you can swoop in with the extra bump for the hands-down best qualified, toughest, smartest candidate.
It ain’t over until the smart lady sings.
