A delegate is a person selected to represent a group of people in some political assembly of the United States.
Pledged delegates are elected or chosen at the state or local level, with the understanding that they will support a particular candidate at the convention.
[2] The Democratic Party uses a proportional representation to determine how many delegates each candidate is awarded in each state.
[3] However, it had been a usual campaign strategy to negotiate with as many superdelegates as possible to get their non-binding public endorsement and win a psychologically or even mathematically important numeral advantage by counting their awaited vote into one's delegate numbers.
The Republican Party utilizes a similar system with slightly different terminology, employing bound and unbound delegates[4][5][6] (also known as automatic delegates, but rarely as superdelegates, as their influence is much smaller compared to those in the Democratic Party).
As the Republican Party in difference to the Democratic Party puts few national rules on how to organize the state contests and the state parties have large freedom to decide over their delegate selection process, there are also very few contests, territorial in particular and in a few states, which reserve the option to let all of their delegates or a substantial amount stay unbound until the convention, or freely declare their candidate preference binding themselves.
[5][7] Despite their status still being part of the national party rules, unbound delegates have not retained their freedom to vote for whichever candidate they please.
At the 2012 national convention, following the unusually long process to determine presumptive nominee Mitt Romney and in order to prevent a chaotic convention through a so-called "insurgency" of Ron Paul delegates (who had planned to garner public interest for Paul's minority libertarian views), the Romney campaign and the Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business enacted several historic rule changes by a vote of 63-38, which tightened the role of unbound delegates and enabled the RNC to change the rules (by a 3/4 majority) between national conventions, without needing delegate approval.