Democratic National Convention
Pledged delegates from all fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the American territories, and superdelegates which are unpledged delegates representing the Democratic establishment, attend the convention and cast their votes to choose the party's presidential candidate.
The party's presidential nominee is chosen primarily by pledged delegates, which are in turn selected through a series of individual state caucuses and primary elections.
[3] These superdelegates may also be called unpledged PLEO (party leaders and elected officials) delegates.
where Step 2: The base delegation for each state and the District of Columbia is then determined by multiplying its allocation factor by 3,200 (rounded to the nearest integer):[1][5]
Step 3: Finally, the jurisdiction's base delegation is used to calculate the number of its District, At-Large, and pledged PLEO (party leaders and elected officials who are not superdelegates) delegates (fractions 0.5 and above are rounded to the next highest integer):[1][5]
[1][5] Puerto Rico is assigned 44 base votes in 2020, then the same formulas used in Step 3 above for U.S. states are used to calculate the territory's at-large, district, and PLEO pledged delegates:[1][5]
The Democratic Party awards bonus pledged delegates to each jurisdiction based on two factors: timing and clustering.
[1][5] The bonus awarded is then a percentage increase in the jurisdiction's delegation (rounded to the nearest integer).
This amounts to in fact three different delegate groups, allocated proportionally but separately, leading to contortion and slightly unproportional results.
[5] A superdelegate is an unpledged delegate to the Democratic National Convention who is seated automatically and chooses for themselves for whom they vote.
On August 25, 2018, the Democratic National Committee agreed to reduce the influence of superdelegates by generally preventing them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing their votes only in a contested nomination.
[3] In the 2024 presidential election cycle, the Democratic National Committee held a virtual nomination vote in the first week of August to select its nominee.
[8] From 1832 to 1936, any nomination for president or vice-president was required to have a majority of two-thirds of the total number of delegates.
Backroom deals by party bosses were normal and often resulted in compromise nominees that became known as dark horse candidates, people who never imagined they would run for president until the last moments of the convention.
Dark horse candidates were chosen in order to break deadlocks between more popular and powerful prospective nominees that blocked each other from gaining enough delegates to be nominated.
In 1944 and 1956, the nominee let the convention choose the running mate without any recommendation, which led to two ballots of voting being required in each case.
President Andrew Jackson's "Kitchen Cabinet" privately carried out the plan for the first Democratic National Convention: the public call for the first national convention emanated from Jackson's supporters in New Hampshire in 1831.
Although this rule was waived in the 1836 and 1840 conventions – when Van Buren was nominated as presidential candidate by acclamation – in 1844, it was revived by opponents of former President Van Buren, who had the support of a majority (but not two-thirds) of the delegates, in order to prevent him from receiving the nomination after his 1840 defeat.
The rule then remained in place until 1936, when the renomination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt by acclamation allowed it finally to be put to rest.
The elimination of the two-thirds rule made it possible for liberal Northern Democrats to gain greater influence in party affairs, leading to the disenfranchisement of Southern Democrats, and defection of many of the latter to the Republican Party, especially during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.
Other confrontations between various groups, such as the Yippies and members of the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Chicago police in city parks, streets and hotels marred this convention.
Following the 1968 convention, in which many reformers had been disappointed that Vice President Hubert Humphrey, despite not having competed in a single primary, easily won the nomination over Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern (who was announced after the assassination of another candidate, Senator Robert F. Kennedy), a commission headed by Senator McGovern reformed the Democratic Party's nominating process to increase the power of primaries in choosing delegates in order to increase the democracy of the process.
The 1972 convention was significant in that the new rules put into place as a result of the McGovern commission also opened the door for quotas mandating that certain percentages of delegates be women or members of minority groups, and subjects that were previously deemed not fit for political debate, such as abortion and lesbian and gay rights, now occupied the forefront of political discussion.
The 1996 convention that nominated Bill Clinton was accompanied by protests resulting in the arrest of 11 people including Civil Rights Movement historian Randy Kryn.
