Democrats' democratic deficit

Senator Hillary Clinton has vowed to win the Democratic party’s Tuesday presidential primaries in Texas and Ohio.  If she triumphs in both contests, her campaign will continue.  But if she loses either vote, the party will put heavy pressure on her to bow out -- leaving the field open to her opponent, Senator Barack Obama.

Yet gauging the likelihood of a significant Clinton victory is difficult, given the Democratic party’s Byzantine methods of allocating delegates to its August national convention in Denver, Colorado, which will formally choose the party’s nominee. 

Unlike the Republicans, who generally allocate state primary delegates on a winner-takes-all basis, the Democrats divide their delegates using an allegedly ‘proportional’ system.  Yet this scheme includes state-by-state idiosyncrasies that mean delegates are often assigned to candidates in a manner that bears little resemblance to their share of a state’s vote.

These ‘Democratic’ electoral quirks include:

• Delegate allocation by Congressional district, which sometimes favours candidates who win the broadest geographical support in a state over those who win the most votes.  For example, Obama lost the Nevada caucus vote to Clinton by a 45% to 55% margin, but will probably receive one more delegate than his rival.
• Assigning an even number of delegates to particular districts makes it exceptionally hard -- short of a landslide victory -- for the contenders to avoid splitting the delegates.  For example, a district assigned four delegates would give each candidate two votes at the convention, unless one candidate secures more than 62.5% of the primary vote (in which case, the delegates would split 3-1 in favour of the winner).
• Some states are over- or under-represented, in terms of total convention delegates, depending on how frequently they have supported the Democratic nominee in the last three presidential elections (2004, 2000, and 1996).  For example, Texas has a much larger population (23.9 million) than New York (19.3 million), but receives just 193 pledged delegates, to New York’s 232.  This is true even though the total number of Democratic primary voters (as opposed to the total electorate) in Texas may still be larger.

Texas’s Democratic delegate allocation system is probably the most complicated in the union, as it features a hybrid primary-caucus system, and heavily biases its delegates towards areas of the state that favour the party -- such as Austin.  Many of these areas also tend to be disproportionately black.

This complicated electoral arithmetic means that it will be very difficult for Clinton to make up ground in Texas, even if she secures a majority of the vote -- which polls suggest is increasingly unlikely.  Like the defenders of the Alamo, Texas may well be the site of Clinton’s last stand.