Many commentators these days show an understandable eagerness for the field of Democratic candidates to get narrowed — and quickly. And so they express the hope that those candidates who have “no path to the nomination” will withdraw from the race. After Super Tuesday, it is said, it will be clear that some of the remaining candidates lack any such “path,” and those candidates should throw in the towel.
Their hope, it seems, is that Bernie Sanders will not be the nominee, and they think that the best way to prevent that will be for the not-Bernie forces to consolidate as quickly as possible behind a viable alternative. They remember what happened to the Republicans with Trump in 2016: the not-Trump vote was so divided among several candidates — Cruz and Rubio on the home stretch — that there was no stopping Trump.
But the Democrats’ situation is different from the Republicans. (Structurally different, not just different in that Sanders is a decent guy while Trump is a monster.) The Republicans’ primaries were (mostly? all?) “Winner take all,” with the result that Trump’s 40% of support was enough to get him a plurality in the voting in state after state, but all of the delegates in those states. The Democrats, by contrast, are dividing up the delegates among all the candidates that reach a certain threshold.
As a result, whereas Trump went to the convention with enough delegates to win on the first ballot, the likeliest scenario for the Democrats (I would judge, as we await the results in South Carolina, and then on Super Tuesday) is that no one will have a majority of delegates, and therefore no one will win on the first ballot.
If we think about how that scenario might well unfold, it becomes clear that the idea of “no path to the nomination” would likely fall apart.
“No path to the nomination” — and sometimes “no conceivable path to the nomination” — has generally meant that it has become impossible for a candidate to win enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot, i.e. to win a majority of delegates.
But if, as I’m predicting, no one wins on the first ballot, then the question of who will be the nominee gets thrown open. Yes, it could be the candidate with the biggest number on the first ballot. Or, if the majority of the delegates don’t want that candidate, it could be the candidate who came in second on that first ballot.
But what if the convention finds there are reasons not to choose either of those two candidates. For example, to get specific, what if the majority of delegates don’t want to risk having Bernie Sanders be the nominee (because, rightly or wrongly, they think that would be too risky)? And what if the supporters of Bernie Sanders are strongly opposed to the second-place finisher (say Joe Biden, or perhaps Michael Bloomberg), because they are far from representing the kinds of transformational progressive politics that they’ve been fighting for?
What then?
Well, then it could be that the wrangling at the convention turns to someone else— someone who is acceptable to the not-Sanders faction that doesn’t want to gamble, and acceptable (enough) to the Bernie movement that such a nomination would not prompt that important faction to fracture the party.
That “someone else” would quite possibly be someone of whom it has been said — perhaps as soon as this coming week — that he or she had “no path to the nomination.”
Historically, there have been conventions that turned to “dark horse” candidates. (Wendell Wilkie, for example, won the Republican nomination for President in 1940 on the sixth ballot.)
And I suppose there isn’t any rule preventing the convention from nominating some horse that’s so dark that he or she didn’t even run in the primaries. (Rep. Adam Schiff and Senator Chris Murphy would both be fine candidates, in my opinion.)
But more likely, it would be a candidate who did run for the nomination, but didn’t get enough delegates to finish in the top two. By staying in the race, such candidates enhance their chances of being the person to whom the convention would turn in an effort to field a candidate they think can keep the party unified and run strongly against Trump.
My guess is that this is why, in a recent debate, every candidate on the stage except for Bernie Sanders declared against making it automatic that the person with the most delegates should be the nominee, and maintained instead that the convention should be free to make its collective decision by following the rules that were made — in large part in response to the desires of the Bernie Sanders camp after the 2016 contest — to govern its process.
It would seem that those candidates all recognize that there are “paths to the nomination” that some of the commentators are not envisioning.
Indeed, it could prove to be the case that winning delegates is not the most important way for some candidates to win the nomination, but rather positioning themselves to be as attractive as possible to the all the delegates being elected in support of other candidates.