What If Democrats Used Winner Take All?

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Even as the Obama and Clinton campaigns fight frantically to establish the appropriate yard-stick by which to judge the will of the American people, one fact has been largely ignored: Obama's significant delegate lead is largely a product of the Democrats' unique delegate allocation system.

A remnant of the bitter convention of 1968 and the McGovern-Fraser Commission that followed, Democrats now award their presidential convention representatives in a proportional manner, under which delegates are given to all those surpassing certain percentage thresholds. We have to wonder, what would the race look like if the Democrats used the same "winner-take-all" system used in the Republican Party? The results are quite surprising, to say the least.

If the Democrats were to allot their current state delegate totals in a winner-take-all format, Clinton would actually have a significant delegate advantage. Despite having won only 14 recognized contests to Obama's 30, Clinton would currently have a 120 (1738 to 1618) total delegate lead and a remarkable 167 (1427 to 1260) pledged delegate lead. These numbers give Texas' "prima-caucus" delegates to Clinton and do not include Florida, Michigan or the 693 total delegates and 566 pledged delegates still to be won in the next few months.

Obviously, the Clinton campaign cannot argue for changing the system this late in the game, especially since they agreed to the ground-rules of the process before the campaign started. Yet in a race that has become principally about winning the several hundred uncommitted super-delegates, this argument could be used to provide cover for electors currently unwilling to go against the race's "clear leader".

The Clinton campaign could contend that it is the proportional allocation system's inherent "over-fairness" that is denying her the significant delegate gains that she justifiably deserves from winning states like Ohio, where Clinton's 10 percent margin of victory only garnered her 9 more delegates than Obama. This may be an effective argument for Sen. Clinton to justify going forward in the race, especially if she is able to pull closer to even in the popular vote after the contests in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina.