Michigan’s Presidential Primary Is Two Months Away
DETROIT – You might think it’s way too soon for anyone in Michigan to be thinking about next year’s presidential election, but you’d be wrong.
In fact, the state’s presidential primary is now barely two months away, on Feb. 27, weeks earlier than before. Though the bill setting that date was signed into law February 1, it wasn’t certain the primary would happen then till exactly a month ago, when the legislature recessed for the year.
That’s because in Michigan, unless two-thirds of the legislators agree to give any new law immediate effect, it doesn’t take effect till 90 days after the lawmakers leave Lansing. Angry Republicans refused to do that for the primary bill, because it violated their party’s rules.
The Republican National Committee had decreed that if any state holds a primary before March 1, they would be penalized by losing many of their delegates. Democrats, who control all branches of state government for the first time in 40 years, didn’t care, and many secretly delighted in annoying the Republicans.
Yet in the end, the national GOP worked out a solution. Michigan Republicans would be allowed to award 16 of their 55 delegates to their Milwaukee convention in July based on the primary. The other 39 will be selected in private caucuses March 2, at Republican, not state, expense.
So in order for the February primary to happen, the legislature had to adjourn at least 90 days before Feb. 27. So they closed down on Nov. 14, the earliest date in decades. In most recent years, the lawmakers have usually come back after temporarily adjourning during the mid-November deer-hunting season. But Democrats, now in control of all branches of Michigan government for the first time since 1983, insisted on finishing early.
So if you live in Michigan or watch broadcast media in the state, get ready for a deluge of highly expensive political advertising. Seven names will be on the GOP presidential primary ballot: Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswany, and one Donald Trump. The Democratic ballot will have three names: Former minister Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, and President Joe Biden.
By the way, there is no party registration in Michigan, and anyone can vote in whichever primary they choose.
Democrats, who always have more delegates, will send 140 from Michigan to their nominating convention in Chicago in August, 117 of which will be chosen in that February primary. But that brings us to something we seldom think about: The delegates themselves.
They are who we actually elect in presidential primaries, and they are the ones who, in the end, will actually choose the nominees. Four years ago, Democrats sent a total of 4,749 delegates to their national convention (virtual, because of Covid) Republicans, 2,550.
Winning the nomination means getting a majority of all delegates; for example, for the Republicans in 2020, it took 1,276 votes. However, Donald Trump, then the incumbent President, got them all. On the Democratic side, Biden easily beat Bernie Sanders 3,558 to 1,151.
We seldom think about delegates, because what usually happens is this: Candidate A wins most of the first primaries, and donors soon stop giving to those who did badly. Nobody, after all, wants to waste big money on losers. Without money, most of the candidates who fell short in the first primaries soon drop out. Within a month or two, the front-runner coasts to victory after victory and soon wraps up a majority of the delegates and the nomination.
But what if multiple candidates win delegates, stay in the race, and no one arrives at the convention with a majority? Let’s say, for example, that Trump gets to Milwaukee on July 17, the night they are supposed to pick a nominee, with 800 delegates; Ramaswamy comes with 750, Haley 735, and the rest are scattered among other candidates.
The roll of the states would be called; they’d cast their votes, the clerk would announce the total, and then say something like “No candidate having received a majority, the convention will vote again,” and, perhaps after a brief recess, they would once again call the roll.
If that were to happen, there would be frantic negotiations in which the stronger candidates try to get the weaker to drop out and endorse them, perhaps in return for a promise to be selected as vice president or secretary of something. After a single ballot, or at most two, the delegates elected in the Michigan, Ohio and other primaries become free agents, able to vote for whomever they want.
That used to be what happened all the time. Exactly a century ago, in 1924, the Democrats had a nightmare convention that lasted more than two weeks and took 103 ballots to select a nominee.
Nobody wants that again, and the last time a convention went more than one ballot was 1952, when Democrats took three to select Adlai Stevenson. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.
For in politics as in life, you never can tell.
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