this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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It gets complicated because the parties can hold their primary elections however they want, independently by state because various rules mean you need a Democratic party for each state, plus the national party. So each state does it differently to some degree. Some vote for the candidate, and the delegates are assigned to vote for the winner, some get a proportion of the delegates, and in some the voters vote for the delegate based on who they support.
They use that process to assign delegates who go and vote on who the national party will select for the national election. If the first election there doesn't yield a majority winner, they keep voting but now the delegates can switch if they want, and members of party leadership can also vote. That hasn't happened in quite a while though, since it's much easier to know the counts accurately before the convention and do your politics by getting people to drop out and endorse you.
Out of interest, what happens to delegates pledged to vote for a candidate who has dropped out between winning their state/a proportion of their state and the day of the convention? Do they have to cast a useless vote for a non-candidate, or can they free-vote on the first round?
Depends on the state, and when exactly the candidate dropped out.
Basically the state holds a primary, and then a little later they have a state convention to assign delegates.
If they drop out before the delegates are picked, the delegate selections are usually reallocated to the remaining candidates. If they drop out afterwards, their delegates may be expected to vote for them anyway in the first round, or they may be free to vote as they please depending on the state. If the candidate has endorsed another candidate, the delegate is often expected to vote for the endorsed candidate.
"Expected" is important because their votes aren't disqualified if they don't adhere to expectations or anything, they just risk their state party being mad at them and if they're someone with continued interest in party involvement, that's a great way to make them not want to involve you. This is in contrast with the electoral college where faithless electors can see their votes not count unless they're cast according to the election outcome.
In both cases, electors or delegates are chosen for a mix of loyalty and dedication, usually as sort of a minor honor or reward, so it's not common for them to go rogue against expectations.
It's why there's an advantage to staying in the race longer: you get to pick the delegates you won, even if you drop out afterwards, and you can use that to get the frontrunner to involve you in their campaign in exchange for an enforcement.
Oh boy. Yeah, the clash between convention and rule is something I'm familiar with. In Australia, like America, our federal Senate technically represents the state, not the people (which is the job of the House of Representatives). As such, historically, a vacancy caused by death or resignation was filled by someone chosen by that state's legislature. By convention, they would choose the person nominated by the previous Senator's party. Crucially, in 1975 my state's legislature was run by what was effectively an authoritarian dictatorship using gerrymandering and other political tricks, as well as police brutality to hold on to power for 19 years. In '75 it was 7 years into that reign, while the federal government had the most left-wing leadership in the country's history. When one of their federal Senators died at a time when the Senate was already on a knife-edge, my state's legislature took the opportunity to break from convention and nominate someone who would not support the incumbent federal government.
This in turn provided the opportunity to break another convention. This one's a little more difficult to explain, but it has reverberated so strongly in Australian political history that it is known as simply "The Dismissal", or the less catchy "1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis." In summary: when the Senate failed to pass the government's budget (something made possible in part thanks to the unconventionally-appointed Senator), the normal thing to do would be for the Prime Minister to go to the Governor General (the monarch's official representative) and request a new election, or a special kind of election called a "double dissolution" election. Australia normally elects only half its Senate in an election, but with a double-dissolution it re-elects the whole Senate. By convention the Governor General is entirely a figurehead, and just goes ahead with what the Prime Minister requests. In this case, instead of doing that, he fired the PM and appointed the minority leader as the new PM, at which point the previously-opposition Senators turned around and passed the exact same budget they were previously opposing. Incidentally, there are strong reasons to believe that the GG's actions here were in part influenced by CIA involvement, including the fact that in the lead-up to it the US sent someone nicknamed "the coupmaster" as their Ambassador, and the fact that the government had been threatening to close down the important CIA base at Pine Gap.
These were in Australia, where because we use the Westminster system there's a tradition of conventions being much, much stronger than they tend to be in America.
Anyway, thanks for sharing the details of the American process. I appreciate it.