It's All About Delegates

Before we all get carried away by the results in Iowa and the coming results in New Hampshire, we should remember one important fact: The real race is for delegates to the Democratic national convention. The magic number for any candidate is 2026, which is a majority of the 4050 delegates that will attend the national convention. Of those 4050, 797 are what the media sometimes refers to as "super-delegates". These are elected officials and party officials who are not chosen by either primary voters or caucus attendees.

As of December 28, 2007, when ABC News produced a report showing how the candidates were doing with these super-delegates, Clinton had the lead with 158 committed delegates. Obama was second with 89, and Edwards had 26. Of course, there is no way of knowing how firm that support is, but since most of these super-delegates have been in politics for a long time, such support is probably pretty firm. This is because most people in politics know that your word is important and if they have committed publicly to a candidate, they will probably support that candidate even when the going gets tough.

Interestingly, the Iowa caucuses didn't produce any immediate delegates for Obama, Clinton, or Edwards. This is because what the caucuses attendees were doing was selecting people to attend a convention. This should, though, result in Obama's receiving approximately the same percentage of delegates to the national convention as he had support in the caucuses. Since Iowa has 45 pledged delegates, ie delegates who are pledged to support a certain candidate, and since Obama got 38% of the vote, he should come out of that process with at least 17 pledged delegates. Clinton would come out with at least 14 and so should John Edwards.

Adding those figures to the ABC News super-delegate totals, the three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination would have the following number of delegates: Clinton-172; Obama-106; and Edwards-40. So while Obama is getting a lot of media attention for his win in Iowa which will certainly help him with his New Hampshire campaign, the delegate count still favors Clinton.

New Hampshire will have 30 delegates to the 2008 national convention. Of those 30, 22 will be chosen in the January 8, 2008 primary. Given the fact that no candidate is polling over 50% of the vote in the pre-election polls coming out, it is possible that Obama could win the New Hampshire primary and still be behind Clinton in delegates, although a lot of the uncommitted super-delegates may start moving toward him if he wins New Hampshire.

What all this means is that we have a long way to go until the Democratic nomination is decided one way or the other. Of course, the longer the battle goes on, the bigger chance that Ohio has to play a pivotal role in the nomination process. Local Democratic parties in Ohio would benefit from a tight nomination fight because it would increase turn-out in the Democratic primaries. Since in Ohio a voter becomes a Democrat or Republican by voting in a partisan primary, a tight battle would result in a larger Democratic party identification. This could come in handy for local candidates looking for yard sign locations, volunteers, etc.