The Wall Street Journal-20080202-Hot Topic- After Super Tuesday- Delegate Math

Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080202

Hot Topic: After Super Tuesday, Delegate Math

Full Text (926  words)

The presidential-primary campaign shifted gears this past week as lagging candidates folded their tents while the remaining hopefuls crisscrossed the country to prepare for Tuesday's unprecedented slate of national primary contests.

Voters in 24 states will head to polls or caucuses Tuesday. More than 2,000 Democratic delegates, including unpledged "super delegates," are at stake in 22 states, representing 52% of all delegates who will attend the nominating convention later this year. And more than 1,000 Republican delegates are up for grabs in 21 states, or about 43% of total delegates.

Frustrated with the outsize influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, a few states, including Missouri and Alabama, last year began moving up their primaries to Feb. 5, the earliest date sanctioned by the national political parties. Megastates such as California and New York followed, and the chain reaction set up what effectively serves as a national primary.

But with the exception of the largest states, that move may have backfired. The compressed election calendar means candidates won't visit every state and won't spend much time in any of the Super Tuesday states. And if at least one of the races remains close after next week's voting, the states that didn't move up their primaries, including Virginia and Maryland, set to vote Feb. 12, and Ohio and Texas, scheduled for March 4, could end up being much more influential.

What's shaping the contest? Here's a closer look:

Delegate allotment: In order to win their party's nomination, candidates must win a majority of delegates, who will cast votes at the summer nominating conventions. Since neither race has yet produced an immediate front-runner, candidates have shifted campaign strategies toward maximizing their delegate tally, even if they don't win states outright. In all the Democratic primaries, delegates are awarded proportionally, which elevates the importance of the margin of victory in each race. That will make it nearly impossible for any candidate to claim the nomination on Super Tuesday, though a string of wins -- especially in big states -- could create unstoppable momentum.

On the Republican side, seven states, including New York, New Jersey, Arizona and Missouri, will award all their delegates to whichever candidate receives a plurality of the vote. Those states account for 11% of all delegates. Last year, supporters of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who dropped out this past week, helped ensure that his strongholds of New York and New Jersey, for example, would award delegates on a winner-takes-all basis.

The remaining 14 states award their delegates proportionally or on a district-by-district basis. In California, for example, a candidate is awarded three delegates for winning a plurality of each of the state's 53 congressional districts, and the overall state winner will take an additional 11 delegates.

One sign of the increasing importance of delegates: New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is contesting the Democratic Party's decision, made last year, to strip Florida and Michigan of their combined 366 delegates. The party punished the states for voting early, and the candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. After winning those primaries, Mrs. Clinton's campaign has argued that the party would be disenfranchising voters in those states by refusing to seat delegates.

Open vs. closed primaries: About half the primaries are open to voters who aren't registered as Democrats or Republicans. On the Democratic side, two of those states, California and New Jersey, have a combined six million unaffiliated voters who can cast ballots, a situation that should benefit Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who has outpolled Mrs. Clinton among independents. Open Republican primaries in battlegrounds Illinois and Missouri should help Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Super delegates: In addition to elected delegates, Democrats have 796 super delegates, who are usually elected officials or party officials and who have the right to vote for the party nominee at the convention. In the past 30 years, super delegates haven't been relevant because the nomination has been decided well in advance of the convention, and those delegates typically vote for whichever candidate their state or congressional district preferred. But they could play a role in a tight race. "They were intended to serve as a peer-review panel" to choose the most electable candidate, says John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. Republicans have 153 equivalent unelected delegates.

-- Nick Timiraos

POINTS OF VIEW

Most of those . . . states are going to get lost in the shuffle. . . . It turns out that they would have been better off keeping their primaries spaced out over the February-to-June time period."

-- Larry Sabato, University of Virginia Center for Politics

FACTS

-- While Barack Obama received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in the Nevada caucus, rules awarded him 13 delegates to Mrs. Clinton's 12.

-- California has the most delegates for both parties, but poses formidable campaigning challenges. The state spans 770 miles from north to south and has 14 designated media markets.

-- New England states have the highest number of voters who consider themselves independent, including Massachusetts (47%) and Connecticut (41%), which both vote Tuesday, according to the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey.

-- In 2004, Sen. John Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination on March 2, the earliest date in modern times. In 2000, George Bush and Al Gore clinched their parties' nominations on March 14.

-- About 24% of Americans regularly get information about the election from the Internet, almost double the amount at a comparable point in 2004, according to a January poll by the Pew Research Center.