If you only tuned into the Democratic presidential race for the first time Wednesday night, you could have sworn Mike Bloomberg was the Democratic front-runner. You’d probably have also wagered that Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were fighting over something more than also-ran status, given their intensely personal feuds. And you almost definitely wouldn’t have assumed that Bernie Sanders was threatening to run away with the delegate race — imminently.
And yet, that’s where we’re at right now. The status of the senator from Vermont as the front-runner in Nevada’s caucuses, set for Saturday, was probably only bolstered by the bickering we saw on the debate stage in Las Vegas. And a win there would set him up nicely to build a big and possibly insurmountable delegate lead in the weeks to come, if trends hold.
Indeed, you could be forgiven Wednesday night for thinking the other candidates were kinda, sorta conceding that outcome and focusing on something else.
The convention.
One of the more interesting moments in the debate came toward the end. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked each of the candidates whether they thought whoever wins the most pledged delegates should be the nominee — even if they don’t get the majority necessary. Only one committed to that, and it was Sanders.
“Whatever the rules of the Democratic Party are, they should be followed,” said Bloomberg, the former New York mayor.
“A convention working its will means that people have the delegates that are pledged to them and they keep those delegates until you come to the convention,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) said.
Former vice president Joe Biden offered a more direct, “No, let the process work its way out.”
“Not necessarily,” said Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor. “Not until there’s a majority.”
“Let the process work,” said Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota.
If no candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates after the primaries, the situation heads to the convention. On the second ballot there, 758 superdelegates would be able to vote for the first time, potentially changing the math and opening the door to another candidate. If no candidate gets a majority then, things get messy.
And indeed, that may be the best the non-Sanders candidates will have to shoot for in a few weeks. The current FiveThirtyEight forecast has Sanders as the most likely candidate to get a majority of the pledged delegates, at a 35 percent likelihood. The only outcome that outpaces that is that nobody gets a majority — i.e. a contested convention. That’s at a whopping 41 percent.
Among the rest, only Biden has even a 1 in 8 chance (13 percent) of winning a delegate majority, and he’s not exactly riding high at the moment. The rest of the field has a combined 11 percent chance of a delegate majority, per the forecast.
Projections are not foolproof, of course, and things in the race could shift dramatically in coming weeks. But The Washington Post’s Philip Bump this week laid out just how possible it was that Sanders would be out of sight in the relatively near future — at least when it comes to winning a plurality of delegates.
And that looks increasingly probable now. Bloomberg was looking like perhaps the biggest threat to a Sanders romp on Super Tuesday, and he was almost certainly knocked down a peg or two at Wednesday’s debate. Biden seems as though he might nab significant delegates, but he hasn’t really demonstrated an ability to suddenly take the race over. If neither of them have the goods, it would take Warren, Buttigieg or Klobuchar mounting an extremely improbable surge (a combined 2 percent chance, per FiveThirtyEight) in the coming weeks.
Add on top of that the latest California poll Thursday, from Monmouth University. It showed Sanders with a seven-point lead in the state, echoing other polls showing him leading by that much or more. That’s big because California constitutes the biggest delegate prize of all, with more than 400 at stake. Perhaps as important, it showed four other candidates essentially fighting it out to clear the 15 percent threshold that is needed to win any delegates both statewide and in each congressional district. If they can’t hit that number consistently, they’ll have a difficult time amassing delegates, and Sanders could pull out a much bigger delegate win than his vote margin suggests — possibly a net of more than 100 delegates in the state alone.
If that happens, Sanders would have to do very poorly in other states — possibly the Southern ones — to walk away from Super Tuesday on March 3 with anything but a pretty commanding lead.
If the other candidates had designs on preventing that from happening Wednesday night, it didn’t really show. Even if you set aside the ganging up on Bloomberg, there was plenty of sniping not involving either Bloomberg or Sanders. For whatever reason, the candidates seem to be unable or unwilling to try to go hard at the leading candidate in the race. It was as if they saw being the second-place candidate or a viable alternative in a contested convention as a viable (and maybe even their best?) option.
Perhaps they reason that if any of them can somehow win a plurality but not a majority of delegates, they wouldn’t have the nomination taken from them, so they can stake out this position. But they’re also on-record now saying that shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all.
And even if a convention did wrest the nomination from Sanders’s grasp, imagine the outcry. His supporters in 2016 already complained about an unfair process, and they voted in significant numbers for President Trump; it’s difficult to believe such a situation wouldn’t rip the party in half.
Alas, as things stand, that could be what’s left to shoot for in a few weeks’ time. And on Wednesday, five of the six candidates declined to foreclose that option.
