As more delegate selection plans are posted on-line, we have two states that have confirmed that they are switching from a caucus to a state-run primary. The first is Minnesota. Previously, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had informed the Minnesota Secretary of State that it would be participating in the state-run primary, but we now have the draft plan which bases delegate allocation on the results of the primary. The other state is Washington. When we looked at the draft plan for Washington last month, the Washington Democrats had submitted two plans — one based on the caucus and one based on the primary. Since then, the state of Washington finalized the scheduling of the primary for March (moving it up from May) and, at last weekend’s state committee meeting, the Washington Democrats opted for the primary-based plan.
With these two changes, we were down to a handful of states. Yesterday, Wyoming released their draft plan for 2020. Wyoming is keeping with a caucus system using, as in the past, a county caucus as the first step. While there is not a specific set date in the plan, it does indicate an intent to hold the county caucuses on a weekend in March which would be earlier than the mid-April date from 2016. To meet the goals of making access to the caucuses easier for voters, Wyoming is tentatively calling for allowing those who are unable to attend the county caucuses to participate by submitting a “surrogate affidavit.” The exact details of how this will work is still being discussed and is not clear from the current draft. (The name suggests a proxy vote, but my hunch is that — either at the final plan approved by the state or the final plan as amended in response to the national Rules and By-laws committee requests — it will be more like a typical absentee ballot.)
The Wyoming plan uses the preference vote at the county caucuses to elect state convention delegates. It uses a separate preference vote at the state convention to allocate the national convention delegates. This part of the plan is clearly contrary to the national party rules. In relevant part, Rule 2.K.5 requires that the delegate allocation be locked in based on the final preference vote at the first determining step. In Wyoming’s plan, the first determining step is the county caucuses. As such, assuming that Wyoming does not correct this part of the plan in the final draft, it is likely that the Rules and By-laws Committee will require a change prior to approving Wyoming’s plan. Given what the other states are doing, Wyoming will probably be given the option of using either the raw vote totals (which they have used in the past) or the state convention delegates won. As noted in previous posts, using state convention delegates won eliminate the effect of high turnout in some parts of the state but can also penalize candidates who are get just over 15% of the raw vote state-wide (as those candidates are likely to miss the threshold in some of the counties converting 13% of the vote in those counties into 0% of the delegates potentially causing the candidate to slip beneath 15% if the delegates won state-wide).
Wyoming is also combining all three types of delegates (district-level, pledged party leader, and at-large) into one pool and is attempting to satisfy the “pledged party leader” allocation by requiring that any candidate who wins three or more national convention delegates must have at least one pledged-party leader among their delegates. The national party rules allow a state-party in a one-Congressional district state like Wyoming to elect all delegates at one time (Rule 8.E) but it is unclear if a state may combine these delegates into one pool for the purposes of allocating these delegates. With 8 district-level delegates, three at-large, and two pledged-party leader delegates, how the RBC interprets the national rules and Wyoming’s plan could make a big difference.
To demonstrate, the difference that Wyoming’s draft suggests, imagine that there are still four candidates running when Wyoming holds its county caucuses. Candidate A gets 33%, Candidate B gets 28%, Candidate C gets 23%, and Candidate D gets 16%. For the purposes of allocating delegates, Wyoming first determines the number of delegates using ordinary rounding rules (i.e. anything over .5% is rounded up and anything under .5 is rounded down). If the number of delegates do not equal the number of available delegates, the numbers are adjusted from the top down (if insufficient delegates are awarded) or from the bottom up (if too many delegates have been awarded). If Wyoming allocates the three pools separately (8-3-2), candidate A gets 3 (2.64 rounded up) district level delegates, 1 party-leader delegate (.66 rounded up), and 1 at-large delegate (.99 rounded up) for a total of 5 delegates; candidate B gets 2 district level delegates (2.24 rounded down), 1 party-leader delegate (.56 rounded up), and 1 at-large delegate (.84 rounded up) for a total of 4 delegates; candidate C gets 2 district level delegates (1.84 rounded up), 0 party-leader delegates (.46 rounded down), and 1 at-large delegate (.69 rounded up) for a total of three delegates; and, finally, candidate D gets 1 district-level delegate (1.28 rounded down); 0 party-leader delegates (.32 rounded down), and 0 at-large delegates (.48 rounded down) for a total of 1 delegate. Using one pool, however, candidate A gets 4 delegates (4.29 rounded down); candidate B gets 4 delegates (3.64 rounded up); candidate C gets 3 delegates (2.29 rounded down); and candidate D gets 2 delegates (2.08 rounded down). Additionally, given the rules that Wyoming is using, there will be three party leader delegates (one each from candidate A, B, and C) instead of the two that would be elected if the elections were separate.
While an argument can be made that the Wyoming plan does not technically violate the rules, only small states (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont) with one congressional district have the option of selecting all of their delegates in one vote. (Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands only have at-large delegates but D.C. and Puerto Rico are large enough to have district-level, party leader, and at-large delegates.) The remaining states must allocate and elect district-level delegates first. Because the states with this potential option are very small (Delaware and D.C. have four at-large and two party-leader delegates — Puerto Rico is the exception as Puerto Rico would actually be nearing a medium-sized state if it became a state), combining all the delegates into one pool for allocating delegates will almost always benefit the trailing candidates. (As the above math shows, the trailing candidates are going to have less than one whole delegate for the at-large and pledged party leader delegates if the pools are done separately. Carrying over those fractions when the pools are combined will almost always add a delegate to the trailing candidate at the expense of one of the top two candidates.) While the total number of delegates that would be impacted by this type of rule will be small (less than ten nation-wide if all of the small states went to this system), my hunch is that the RBC is not inclined to approve a plan that will make it harder for the leading candidate to get a majority of delegates at the convention.
To recap where we are nationally, we are still waiting to see plans from one caucus state (Kansas) and the four smaller territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and U.S. Virgin Islands. Of the thirteen 2016 caucus states that have released plans, six (Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska, Utah, and Washington) are switching to state-run primaries, three (Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota) are switching to party-run primaries, three (Iowa, Nevada, and Wyoming) are keeping traditional caucuses, and one (Maine) is tentatively keeping a traditional caucus but might switch to a state-run primary if one is approved by the legislature.
In theory, all plans from all fifty states and the territories should have been released to the public by now. The national party rules require the submission of these plans to the national party by May 3 and also require a thirty-day comment period before the state party can approve a plan. That means that all plans should have been released to the public by April 3 at the latest. However, besides the five caucus states, we are still waiting for delegate selection plans from about a dozen or so states that held primaries in 2016. (Unfortunately, the national rules do not reflect the reality of the state party election cycles. Some states pick new leadership for their state party after each general election. It takes a little bit of time for these new state chairs to get the required committees appointed and then for these committees to finish the draft of the plan.) So we wait for these last states to get their plans in.
