Delegates: Pay attention, California: Math could shape which Democratic candidate takes on President Trump
California’s presidential primary on Tuesday might prove decisive in choosing the Democratic nominee — but figuring out who gets the Golden State’s coveted delegates is about as confusing as a Mike Bloomberg tax return.
So, welcome to California Delegate Math 101. Pull out your calculators and pay attention. No dozing off, Yuba County: This gets complicated.
The results of California’s Democratic primary won’t only be determined by who gets the most votes. Instead, the largest trove of delegates of any state in the nation will be divvied up among all the candidates who earn at least 15% of the vote, both statewide and in each of the state’s 53 congressional districts.
Unlike the winner-take-all method used in some Republican primaries, the Democrats’ system is aimed at gently pushing the lowest-polling
candidates out of the race to winnow the field, while still dividing delegates on a mostly proportional basis.
The real-world implications are huge: Sen. Bernie Sanders could walk away with a big delegate majority in California even if he only gets about a third of the statewide vote, since so many of his rivals are splitting the more moderate voters. That would make it difficult for any other candidate to overtake him in the national delegate race.
For help explaining the process to those of us who struggle with splitting a restaurant bill, we turned to Andrew Walter, a former high school math teacher in Stockton (and a San Jose native) who won a national presidential award for math education.
“When you first look at it, it comes across as really convoluted and confusing,” Walter said of the system. “But it’s pretty interesting how you can have a relatively small amount of the total votes but end up winning the entire state.”
First important question: How many delegates are at play?
The magic number to win the Democratic nomination is 1,991 — that’s one above a majority of the 3,979 pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses around the country. California has more delegates at stake than any other state: 415 pledged delegates, more than a fifth of the total needed for victory.
Quick-but-important side note: The state will also send an additional 79 superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials —to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July. But superdelegates can only vote at the convention if no candidate wins a majority of the pledged delegates based on the state-by-state results, so they don’t factor into Tuesday’s primary.
About a third of California’s pledged delegates — 144 — are divided based on the statewide results. The other 271 delegates get split up based on the results in each congressional district.
Pay attention here! Not every district is equal: Those that voted more Democratic in past presidential elections get more delegates. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ultra-liberal San Francisco district has seven delegates to award, while GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Trump-loving Bakersfield district only has four. That makes the deepblue Bay Area a major prize.
How well do the candidates have to do to win delegates?
When you’re watching election returns Tuesday night, the most important number to keep in mind is 15%. A candidate needs to reach that threshold statewide in order to receive any statewide delegates, and has to reach it in any individual congressional district in order to get any delegates from that district.
The system “magnifies the strengths of the winners,” said Paul Mitchell, the vice president of the nonpartisan California firm Political Data Inc., who has written about the delegate process. “It almost eliminates or makes disappear the votes going to lowerranked choices.”
But don’t let that make you think your vote doesn’t matter. Any single voter could cast the deciding ballot that brings a candidate from 14.99% to 15% — and potentially take them from zero delegates to dozens, Walter pointed out.
“You could be the vote that pushes someone into contention, and potentially change the race,” he said.
The biggest impact would be if only one candidate gets over 15% statewide — and several recent polls have found Sanders doing just that. In that case, he would walk away with all of the 144 statewide delegates, giving him a huge lead over his rivals.
Meanwhile, a front-runner like Sanders will also likely reach the 15% threshold and qualify for delegates in the vast majority of the state’s 53 congressional districts. So candidates lower in the polls —such as former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (who is heading to San Diego this weekend) or Sen. Amy Klobuchar — might be best served by focusing on a few districts where they think they have the strongest support.
The individual districts are like “53 little laboratories
for presidential races,” Mitchell said. “You have districts that are heavily LGBT, or Asian, or more urban or suburban, or have a big tech influence. … It makes it more interesting and gives different candidates more opportunities to pick off a few congressional seats.”
How do the delegates get split up?
This is where it really gets complicated. All the votes of the candidates who didn’t get 15% are eliminated, and new percentages of the “qualified” vote that remains are calculated for the candidates who survived the cut. So, if one only candidate is above 15%, they’d get 100% of the qualified vote.
For example, imagine a district with seven delegates available where Sanders received 30% of the vote, former Vice President Joe Biden got 25%, Sen. Elizabeth Warren got 20%, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg got 15%, and everyone else was below 15%.
Votes for the candidates who didn’t make the cutoff would be excluded, and the four survivors would each get a new recalculated percent of the qualified vote that remains. Then, each candidate’s qualified vote percentage is multiplied by the total number of delegates available in that district.
But wait, there’s more. Delegates have to be awarded in whole numbers — you can’t get 1.5 delegates, for example, because they’re real people who will be voting in person at the convention.
So the number of delegates each candidate gets is always rounded down to a whole number. Then, any remaining delegates available in the district are awarded in order of who has the highest number after the decimal place before the rounding took place.
Yes, we get it, that’s confusing. In the hypothetical district, the math works out to Sanders, Biden and Warren getting two delegates each, while Bloomberg gets one. That shows that even a substantial lead in votes doesn’t always mean a candidate winning more delegates, as long as multiple contenders reach 15%.
When will we know who won?
If early returns show Sanders with a big lead, news networks could call the race for him on election night. But we may have to wait far longer to know how many delegates each candidate actually received.
California has always taken a long time to count votes, and the state’s expansion of vote-by-mail and its new rules allowing voters to change their registration all the way up until Election Day will likely drag the process out even more.
And even small changes in the results as the votes are counted could have a big impact on the delegate division. If Sanders is leading and several other candidates are hovering near 15% statewide, we may not know for weeks how massive a delegate lead the Vermont senator will be able to rack up.
The Secretary of State’s results website, which will be live on election night, will show the presidential results in each congressional district. So you’ll be able to follow along and check the math yourself.
And a warning to Walter’s students in the Stockton school district: Your teacher was so intrigued by the process that you may be seeing California’s delegate math on a future quiz. “It could be interesting and engaging for students to think through this system that will actually affect who their leaders are,” Walter said.
Don’t thank us. Thank the Democratic Party.