Chaos contained: The coming Democratic primary
Hundreds of people have officially filed as candidates for the 2020 Democratic primary. A couple of dozen are considered “major”…
Hundreds of people have officially filed as candidates for the 2020 Democratic primary. A couple of dozen are considered “major” candidates; the Democratic National Committee has announced plans to have no more than 20 candidates participate in preliminary debates.
If there is one ironclad rule about election systems, it is this: More candidates means more chaos, especially when you mostly use voting systems that only count voters’ first place preferences. However, the added chaos from the additional candidates will mostly be contained in the early state contests. The field will narrow very quickly once the primary process begins.
The early states
The Democratic primary system is designed in a way that will very rapidly narrow down the number of candidates without giving any of the remaining candidates an insurmountable edge.
The primary system begins with a sequence of four early states, each of which is in a different region of the country with different demographics: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. The contests are spaced about a week apart, which gives candidates time to digest bad news and decide to drop out.
Iowa
The Iowa caucuses come first, and will be where most of the chaos happens. The caucuses are a set of precinct-level meetings scattered across Iowa, with anywhere from dozens to hundreds of voters in attendance. It will be extremely difficult to predict.
The caucus process is slightly better for dealing with large numbers of candidates than a primary, because it’s a deliberative process rather than a simple plurality vote; however, it also filters out non-viable candidates in this deliberative process. There is a minimum viability threshold of 15% applied at the level of the precinct caucus, so a given precinct will provide votes for at most six candidates.
Iowa has 41 delegates at stake, 27 assigned at the Congressional district level and 14 assigned statewide. The 15% viability threshold applies to both of these levels, which means at most half a dozen candidates will receive delegates from any particular congressional district. Accounting for overlap, it’s unlikely that more than a dozen candidates will earn delegates in the Iowa caucuses. Candidates who get zero delegates out of the Iowa caucuses will struggle to remain relevant.
A significant number of candidates will drop out before the Iowa caucuses; another significant share will drop out right after the caucuses. Even if the number of major candidates rises to over thirty before the caucuses take place, it seems unlikely that there will be more than a dozen candidates being taken seriously after the Iowa caucuses take place.
New Hampshire
Next is the New Hampshire primary, with 24 delegates at stake. Delegates are awarded proportionately, with a 15% minimum threshold for viability (in particular, at least 15% in either of its two congressional districts). It’s unlikely that more than half a dozen candidates will get delegates out of the New Hampshire primary.
Unlike the Iowa caucuses, the primary will only count first-place preferences. Voters who go to the polls and pick a candidate who ends up getting 14% of the vote simply won’t count. In spite of the smaller number of remaining viable candidates, the New Hampshire primary will likely have a similar potential for chaotic outcomes, where a large change in results can stem from a small shift in behavior by a few voters.
However, the New Hampshire results won’t be examined in isolation. At this point in time, there will be a total of 3–6 candidates who placed first, second, or third in either Iowa or New Hampshire, a group that will probably be almost identical to the collection of candidates who earned delegates in both states and have not dropped out.
There could be another 1–2 candidates who did not do well in Iowa or New Hampshire but are expected to do well with non-white voters in Nevada and South Carolina. Overall, I expect that a very large field would mean on the order of half a dozen viable candidates left after New Hampshire.
Nevada and South Carolina
The next two contests will be less important. After New Hampshire, there could be somewhere around a half dozen candidates that are still thought to have a serious chance at the nomination. Each of the first two contests can easily cut the field of candidates considered viable in half.
Any candidate who enters the Nevada caucus behind and ends further behind will face pressure to drop out, unless they are expected to do extremely well in South Carolina. Any candidate who enters the South Carolina behind and ends further behind will face pressure to drop out — even if they did well in Nevada. Even if only one viable candidate gets scratched off the list in each of these two candidates, this would leave a fairly normal-sized field going into Super Tuesday. It seems likely that this will be a field of 3–4 candidates.
An ordinary Super Tuesday
The early states will award a total of 155 pledged delegates. The remaining contests will award approximately 3,613 more pledged delegates.
Less than 5% of all pledged delegates will have been awarded, in other words — and since they are awarded proportionately, the front-runner will not be ahead by very much of that total unless they are truly exceptionally popular.
For the reasons I’ve given above, it’s likely that the large field will have shrunk to a narrower and much more normal field of 3–4 viable candidates after the early states, and with 3–4 viable candidates, the chaos within a proportional allocation system based on first-choice preferences is more limited.
As in primaries that started with smaller fields, how the first major round of contests go on March 3rd (aka “Super Tuesday”) will likely determine the course of the rest of the primary. The added chaos from an initially large field of candidates will have mostly been absorbed in the early contests with little cost in delegates.