DETROIT — You may think it’s way too early to start thinking about next year’s Presidential election. But guess what?
The candidates don’t. As I write this, there already 16 declared candidates for the Democratic nomination, not counting Joe Biden, who is expected to join the race soon.
Democratic contenders are so thick on the ground so early that Texan Beto O’Rourke and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York almost tripped over each other in Michigan one day last week, campaigning in several mostly blue-collar Detroit suburbs.
President Trump so far has drawn only one challenger for the GOP nomination, William Weld, once GOP governor of Massachusetts, then a libertarian, now a Republican again. But there’s speculation that either former Ohio Gov. John Kasich or U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, now of Utah, may take him on as well.
Next year, Ohio and Michigan are, for the first time, tentatively scheduled to hold their primaries on the same day, March 10 – so expect to see more candidates hitting both states together.
The odds are that Donald Trump will be renominated on Aug. 26, 2020, at the GOP convention in Charlotte, N.C.
But while he is, like all incumbent presidents, a heavy favorite for renomination, nobody knows who the Democrats will nominate at their convention in Milwaukee a year from July.
What most experts think they do know, however, is the mechanics of the process. It goes something like this: After the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primaries on February, candidates who aren’t making much of a dent will start to drop out.
By the time Michigan and Ohio and a handful of other states vote March 10, there should be only two, or at most, three contenders left standing. Within days, the weakest will find it nearly impossible to raise more funds, and they will “suspend” their campaigns.
Long before Democrats assemble at the Fiserv Forum on July 13, it will be very clear who their Presidential nominee will be …
or maybe not.
What if three or more candidates are still in the race after the primary wars? There will be 4,532 delegates to the Democratic convention. To win nomination, someone has to get 2,267 votes –a simple majority. If this convention is like those in the past, the delegates will vote for a nominee, with the clerk calling on every state to proclaim their total on the night of Wednesday, July 15, 2020.
But what if nobody has a majority on the first ballot?
What if the result is Biden, 1,950 votes; Bernie Sanders, 1,650 votes, and Kamala Harris and a scattering of others, 932?
What would happen?
The clerk would announce the total, proclaim that nobody had a majority – and then call the roll again, and again till someone got enough votes. If that did happen, you can bet that behind the scenes, the candidates would be frantically trying to make a deal, offering, for example, the vice-presidency in return for a rival’s dropping out.
That hasn’t happened in either party since 1952, when the Democrats needed three ballots to nominate Adlai Stevenson.
But it used to happen all the time.
Republicans needed three ballots to nominate Abraham Lincoln, and six to nominate Wendell Willkie. The system had a meltdown in 1924, however, when Democrats needed 103 ballots to give John W. Davis a nomination that was, by that time, worthless.
Multi-ballot conventions were far likelier when most of the delegates were chosen by regional party bosses, who could then make deals in those old so-called smoke-filled rooms.
We’ve become so used to a single candidate wrapping everything up long before the convention we have virtually forgotten that it could take multiple ballots to select someone.
That may not happen, of course.
But that might be more likely this year, with the Democratic primary electorate split into various factions, and serious candidates who are male, and female, black and white and multiracial.
But there is one big reason why a severely divided Democratic convention may not happen. Democrats of all factions strongly agree that the most important thing next year is defeating Donald Trump.
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A multi-ballot convention is not the only strange thing that could happen next year. Think about this:
What if in the national election, Democrats win back usually Democratic Michigan and Wisconsin, which narrowly voted for Mr. Trump, and add Arizona, which has been trending Democratic?
If the other states split as they did in 2016, that would mean a 269-269 electoral college tie. What then?
Some smart civics students may remember the U.S. House picks a President, and Democrats control that body 235-197. But members wouldn’t vote as individuals, but by states.
Any successful candidate would need to get 26 states to win. Right now, Republicans have a majority in 26 states, Democrats 22, and Michigan and Pennsylvania are tied. But it would be the newly elected house that would pick the President in January, 2021.
What if Democrats gain a single seat in both Florida and Wisconsin? That would give Democrats 23 delegations, Republicans 24, with three tied. That might mean no one could get a majority.
The vice-president, in such a case, would be chosen by a straight vote of the U.S. Senators. Republicans have a 53-47 majority now – but the next senate is expected to show some gains for Democrats.
What if the Senate was to wind up 50-50, and deadlocked on a vote? According to Amy Bunk, a lawyer who advises the Electoral College, if neither the House nor the Senate could pick someone by January 20, the next President would be the Speaker of the House.
And that would very likely be … Nancy Pelosi.
