Warren ready to take fight to convention floor
Will run for as long as supporters want her to
WASHINGTON – Sen. Elizabeth Warren is ready to stay in the race for the presidential nomination through the Democratic National Convention in July.
During a CNN town hall event Wednesday night, the senator from Massachusetts said that she would take her fight all the way to the convention floor, even if she is trailing another candidate in delegates.
“A lot of people made $5 contributions to my campaign to keep me in it,” Warren said. “And as long as they want me to stay in this race, I’m staying in this race. That, and I’ve done a lot of pinkie promises out there so I gotta stay in this. I’ve told little girls, ‘We persist.’ ”
Theoretically, the candidate who holds the most delegates heading into the convention could be denied the nomination if they did not win more than half of the delegates up for grabs in the primaries and caucuses.
According to the rules laid out by the Democratic National Committee, a candidate must have the support of a majority of the 3,979 available pledged delegates to lock up the nomination on the first ballot. If no candidate has the 1,991 votes needed, the “contested convention” moves to a second ballot, which would include 771 unpledged delegates – better known as “superdelegates” – who are composed of elected officials and Democratic Party leaders.
At Wednesday’s town hall, a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders told Warren that that process “essentially means the will of the voters could be denied by the superdelegates and the DNC, which is basically undemocratic.”
“You do know that was Bernie’s position in 2016,” Warren shot back.
In his 2016 run for president, Sanders kept up his campaign for the nomination even after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had secured a majority of the delegates, which included the lion’s share of the superdelegates – whose votes were counted on the first ballot that year.
At the Democratic debate in Las Vegas this month, every candidate except Sanders agreed that the nominee should be determined at the convention if no one had secured a majority of the delegates.
“The will of the people should prevail,” Sanders said at the debate.