I personally don’t think this is going to happen, but the American Prospect’s Bob Kuttner wrote a column this week that explains how a divided Democratic electorate may lead to a brokered convention this summer. (Kevin Drum pondered the same question back in November.)
It’s a scary thought, but just as importantly, it’s exactly the kind of delay the DNC hoped to avoid by front-loading the primary process. Kuttner explains:
Most knowledgeable observers think I’m inhaling something. The usual view is that after a few primaries, the race must narrow to the top two contenders because everyone else’s money dries up. But consider these unusual factors, which have all converged this year:
Proportional voting. The Democrats no longer use a winner-take-all-system. Thanks to party reforms, votes are allocated proportionally. So, in a nine-person field, a candidate can “win,” say, South Carolina with a plurality of 30 percent of the vote — but only get about 30 percent of that state’s delegates. In the old days, the winner would have taken them all.
A persistent field. Several also-rans will doubtless drop out after a few primaries. But the first few primaries could well splinter and give five or six candidates a reason to stay in through March 2 (Super Tuesday), by which time 2,046, or nearly half, the delegates will have been chosen (and splintered).
Flukey front-loading. The Democrats keep trying to front-load the primary process, so that the party unites behind a nominee early and the in-fighting ceases in February rather than July. But this year, front-loading could backfire.
This strikes me as a little far-fetched, but not impossible. A month ago, it looked like Dean would cruise to victories in Iowa and New Hampshire on his way to probable success on Feb. 3 and beyond. It’s far less clear today and getting hazier all the time.
No one knows who’ll win Iowa, New Hampshire is suddenly competitive, and several Feb. 3 states are too-close-to-call. The rest of February doesn’t give too many clues, either, with races in Michigan, Washington state, Maine, Tennessee, and Virginia, where any of the top 5 candidates — Clark, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, and Kerry — have a shot at least a victory or two. Even Super Tuesday states on March 2 have something for everyone, including Kerry’s, Lieberman’s, Dean’s, and Kucinich’s home states.
And the longer it’s a multiple-candidate field, the longer it’ll take to create a definitive frontrunner. Carol Moseley Braun dropped out, which helps, and Kucinich will have to go in the early spring so he can run for re-election to his House seat, but that’s not quite good enough.
While Dean and Clark are certainly leading the field right now, none of the other guys are showing sings of withdrawing any time soon. Indeed, most of them have nothing else to do — Edwards isn’t running for re-election so he’ll stay in until the last possible second, the same goes for Gephardt, while Kerry and Lieberman have Senate careers they can fall back on but are in no hurry to return to. (Which leads to wonder a side point: are Dean and Clark leading because they’re the only two without a day job? Hmm)
With a proportional voting system, few candidates will be emerging from successful primaries with huge delegate pickups. Even if a leading candidate won a majority of the primaries, he could conceivably enter the convention with far less than half the available delegates. Which would, of course, then give enormous influence to the “superdelegates” who could back anyone, and at this point, have no real favorite. And who would the insiders end up backing in the event of a brokered convention? I could realistically make a case that they’d back Clark, Dean, Kerry, or Gephardt, so who knows?
Kuttner surveys this possibility and believes it’s valuable, at least in part, to have a campaign that could be “generating real excitement.”
That’s sort of true — it would certainly get plenty of TV coverage for the convention for the first time in decades — but I’m more concerned with the party tearing itself apart than I am generating excitement.
For what it’s worth, Kuttner predicts that the nominee won’t be decided until the convention. He then believes the party will pick Clark as the nominee, Dean as the VP candidate, and that Clark-Dean will beat Bush-Cheney in November. I sincerely doubt that Clark and Dean would team up, particularly after months of Dean’s negative attacks, but I can only hope that Kuttner’s right about the end result on Election Day.