The first phase of a presidential election year begins in January, when Democratic and Republican candidates seek their party’s nomination for president by running in state caucuses and primaries. Caucuses and primaries are a series of political events used by the Democratic and Republican parties to determine their nominees for president. The first caucus of the election season is held in Iowa. Voters from Iowa’s precincts assemble in a public place to discuss the candidates and to select representatives to attend county conventions. The process builds through conventions at the county, congressional district, and state levels. In comparison, primaries are statewide elections. Candidates earn delegate votes based on the number of voters who support them at the caucuses’ conventions and primaries. The primary season concludes with a party convention, where a candidate becomes the party’s nominee if he or she has received a majority of the delegate votes from the primary season. If no candidate has a simple majority, then the convention is called brokered and the party’s nominee is determined through a negotiation process.

That Iowa is the first caucus of the primary season seems to have been an accident, but it is now written into the parties’ rules. The winner of the Iowa caucus achieves a sort of front-runner status that translates into greater opportunities to raise funds to support his or her campaign. Other states have tried to jockey for position so that their caucus or primary appears earlier in the primary season and, hence, has greater impact. Delegate counts have been discounted when a state has pushed its primary before the Iowa caucus, as both Florida and Michigan did in the 2008 Democratic primary.

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There is some variability in how delegates are awarded for the Republican caucuses and primaries. We will return to their most frequently used rule from the 2008 Republican primary after we examine how delegates are tallied in the Democratic primaries. The same Democratic Delegate Selection Rules are used for all primaries to translate votes into delegate counts. The 2008 Democratic primary was one of the closest primaries in recent U.S. history, second only to the 1976 Republican contest between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan that was not decided until the convention. The close 2008 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was due in part to the Democratic Party rules that assign delegates to each candidate based on his or her proportion of the popular vote. Although these rules assign delegates based on the number of votes each candidate receives, these rules prevent candidates who do not receive 15% of the popular vote from receiving any delegates. As such, these rules help narrow the field of candidates. For example, of the eight candidates who mounted national campaigns in the 2008 Democratic primary, only three were awarded delegates.

Because delegates are individuals and cannot be divided into fractions, awarding delegates proportionally requires a systematic way of rounding the fractional values to whole numbers. Methods for doing so, referred to as apportionment methods, are best known for their role in determining the number of representatives allotted to each state in the U.S. House of Representatives (see Chapter 14). The Democratic Delegate Selection Rules appear in Table 12.1. Example 1 demonstrates the five steps.

The proportional allocation of delegates in the Democratic primary is in contrast to the most frequently used rule from the 2008 Republican primary: the winner-take-all strategy. As the name implies, under this strategy the candidate that receives the most popular votes receives all of the delegates. The 2008 Democratic primary was not decided until June, whereas John McCain had wrapped up the 2008 Republican nomination on March 4. The reason for the difference in how long it takes a candidate to lock down the nomination could be that the winner-take-all strategy focuses attention on the first-place candidate. The candidates that win early primaries also receive the additional campaign funds that come with the increased media attention and popular support. The effect is that the candidate field narrows more quickly in the Republican primary than in the Democratic primary. Also, the shorter time it takes for the Republican Party to determine their presidential nominee can be viewed as advantageous, as it gives the Republican candidate more time to focus on the potential Democratic opponent for the general election in the fall.

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When data are rounded, unusual behavior or a counterintuitive result may be observed. Such behavior is referred to as a paradox in the apportionment literature (see Chapter 14). Requiring candidates to receive 15% of the total vote to be awarded a delegate introduces surprising behavior that can affect even the non-eliminated candidates in ways that are not predictable. It may seem that eliminating candidates who receive less than 15% of the vote can only help the remaining candidates by giving them more delegate votes. The following example shows that this may not always be the case.

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Despite the paradoxical behavior that can occur under the Democratic Delegate Selection Rules, the 15 % threshold achieves its goal of narrowing the field by keeping weakly supported candidates from being allocated any delegates. For states with few delegates, a candidate with less than 15% of the vote may not receive any delegates in a district anyway, but that is not the case for states with many delegates. And even states with small districts use the same apportionment method with 15% threshold to allocate Pledged Party Leaders and Elected Officials (or PLEO) delegates and at-large delegates using the statewide vote totals for the candidates. The number of these additional delegates usually surpasses the number allocated in any one district.

The multi-stream calculation of delegate totals is part of the Rube Goldberg aspect of the primary process. As discussed, the winner-take-all policy used in the Republican primaries consolidates support more quickly for a single candidate. After the two party conventions, the Democratic and Republican nominees and any third party candidates square off in the general election. How candidates position themselves in the general election is discussed in the next section. These strategic implications are also useful in explaining how candidates compete strategically in the primary elections.