Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ trouncing of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire was an enormous psychological victory, but what about under the hood? If you look at the delegates right now, it’s a little less dramatic: Sanders picked up 15 of New Hampshire’s delegates. Clinton got nine. Including the haul from the Iowa caucuses, Sanders has 36 and Clinton 32—a lead, yes, but just a drop in the bucket in the total number needed for victory: 2,382.

So that’s good news for Hillary, right? Not quite. When you look at the Democrats’ rules for winning a primary, you can see a very different picture coming into focus: a delegate knife fight, which could lead to a fractious convention.


There are no “winner take all” states in the Democratic primaries. Every state allocates delegates on a proportional basis. So even if Clinton rights her ship and starts racking up clear primary wins—likely, considering that Sanders has yet to prove himself in racially diverse territory—her victories could be as thin as his in terms of delegates. The primary system is set up perfectly for a strong insurgent candidacy, someone with enough money and enthusiasm to keep pulling big chunks of voters in state after state, to carry clout all the way to the convention. And if he does, he could use it to reshape the White House ticket, and even the future direction of the party.

The Democrats’ formula for distributing delegates is downright socialist. While candidates get extra delegates for winning statewide, most delegates are distributed by candidate performance within congressional districts. Most districts offer four to six delegates. In most cases, those congressional district delegates will be divided evenly or, in districts with five delegates, in a 3-2 split. To win bigger delegate spreads, candidates have to score supermajorities of at least 63 percent within a congressional district. Opening up a wide lead against a persistent opponent with a stubborn base of support is impossible.

One person who knows this all too well is Hillary Clinton, who until the bitter end in 2008 clung to the hope of holding down Barack Obama’s delegate count and prevailing at the convention. Another is Tad Devine, one of Sanders’ key advisers, who explained the intricacies of delegate math in a 2008 article for PollingReport.com.

The delegate fight now shifts to terrain more favorable to Clinton than Sanders. Nearly 70 percent of Democratic voters in nearly all-white Iowa and New Hampshire self-identified in exit polls as “liberal”—an increase of more than 10 points from 2008. (The Vermonter won among moderates in his neighboring state, but not in Iowa.) After Nevada and South Carolina close out February, the two Democrats will battle in 22 states between March 1 and March 15 to divvy up 2,143 delegates. Twelve of these are “red” states (the Republican kind), and most of those are in the heavily African-American South.

The biggest delegate prize is Texas (54 percent nonwhite electorate in the 2008 Democratic primary). Other big delegate hauls are in swing states like Florida (34 percent nonwhite) and Ohio (24 percent nonwhite). There are some deep blue states where Sanders would be expected to do well, including Massachusetts, and caucus states with healthy liberal populations like Minnesota and Colorado. But the revolution will have to be in full effect for Bernie to win the lion’s share of these states.

While the March electorates are less liberal than New Hampshire and Iowa, it’s still a Democratic primary. Bernie-friendly liberals will exist, not to mention young voters who almost unanimously #FeelTheBern. Texas’ Democratic electorate was 38 percent liberal in 2008, Ohio's 40 percent and Florida's 51 percent. Sanders is working hard on making inroads into communities of color, and presumably he won’t be shut out.

If he can keep Clinton under about 60 percent in most areas, he will keep scooping up delegates. As long as his base sticks with him, and maintains his ability to collect delegates, he will have no incentive to drop out.

Why? Because if you have delegates, you can make demands.

Democrats haven’t dealt with a significant holdout who had enough delegates to do that since 1988. Clinton claimed nearly half the delegates in 2008. But she had no ideological beef with Obama and expressed no interest in the vice presidency, so she made no mischief inside the convention hall. John Kerry and Al Gore won their nominations handily in 2004 and 2000, respectively. Bill Clinton faced a minor nuisance in the form of former Gov. (and now current Gov.) Jerry Brown, who insisted on nominating himself at the 1992 convention and tried to draw attention to an alternative platform. But with only 614 delegates, he lacked the strength to upend the proceedings.

The year 1988 was a far different story. The Rev. Jesse Jackson won 10 states and 1,075 delegates, coming in second to Michael Dukakis’ plurality of 1,790 delegates, needing superdelegates to seal the deal. (Dukakis’ delegate point man? Tad Devine.) Superdelegates are Democratic Party officials who can make their own choice for president, and who are already being viewed with suspicion by Sanders supporters who believe they would block Sanders even if he had the most pledged delegates. (MoveOn.org, a liberal PAC that has endorsed Sanders, launched a petition urging the 712 superdelegates to “back the will of the voters.”) In the midst of the primaries, Jackson called on the party to distribute the superdelegates proportionally according to popular vote totals, which would have increased his delegate share even if he lost the nomination. Don’t be surprised if Team Sanders extends the delegate knife fight to this front as well.

Jackson lost that battle, then proceeded to withhold his endorsement of Dukakis. Instead, he said he deserved vice presidential consideration. Dukakis obliged with multiple face-to-face meetings before the convention.

Even without the extra superdelegates, Jackson’s delegate count hit 26 percent of the total available, which meant he would have a similar amount of representation on the party’s platform committee. And under platform committee rules, with 25 percent you can demand a “minority report”—a public dissent from the official platform.

Jackson used his numbers to instigate public debate over several positions too left-wing for Dukakis’ taste, such as higher taxes and military spending freezes. Most controversially, the eventual minority report backed a Palestinian state.

In the summer of 1988, Dukakis would have preferred to focus on beating George H.W. Bush rather than keeping Jackson in the fold. The process exposed party divisions and became fodder for conservatives. Dukakis was soon to be hammered as a “liberal” by Republicans and beaten in a landslide. He was arguably hurt from the left as well. Dukakis’ aides later groused that Jackson’s provocations contributed to a 4.3 percent drop in black turnout from the previous presidential election.

Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the nominee, would also want to spend her summer positioning herself for the general election. The Republican primary has been a circus, with polls already indicating that swing voters are turned off by the spectacle. Clinton ideally would pivot from the debate over who is the true “progressive” and target those voters as soon as possible. But a delegate-rich Sanders would likely keep Clinton busy catering to the concerns of him and his base.

To really dominate the proceedings, Sanders would need more than Jackson’s 26 percent of the delegates. A total closer to 40 percent would allow Sanders to claim representation of an ascendant progressive populist wing of the party. Sanders supporters, either taking his cue or acting on their own, could easily use the convention run-up to demand he or his fellow traveler Sen. Elizabeth Warren be nominated for vice president in order to make the party whole. Both options would be fiercely resisted by Clinton, who would worry about their willingness to echo her positions and messages. A possible compromise to satisfy the populists would be Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is very close to Warren and Sanders ideologically but has endorsed Clinton and hails from the key swing state of Ohio.

But that could cause friction with others in the party who want to see a person of color on the ticket, especially if Republicans nominate someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio who would compete for Latino votes. The pressure to pick a rising star like HUD Secretary Julián Castro could collide with economic populist demands and inflict fresh wounds on the party.

Sanders himself probably cares less about the VP slot—he’s too old to treat it as a steppingstone to the presidency—than he does about controlling the party’s platform. He may well envision replicating what Hubert Humphrey pulled off in 1948. The Senate candidate from Minnesota changed the course of history, taking a minority report endorsing civil rights for blacks and forcing a vote on the convention floor to include it in the official platform. He narrowly won the vote, prompting a walkout by Deep South delegates and fundamentally transforming the Democratic Party.

The stronger the Sanders minority, the more plausible it would be to force, and possibly win, floor votes on stricter Wall Street rules, rejecting corporate campaign cash and single-payer health care. Relitigating disagreements from the primary would complicate efforts to present a united front at the convention but would serve Sanders’ long-term goal of transforming the party, as Humphrey once did.

If Sanders wins enough delegates to be nominated—unlikely, but who knows?—he’d have a crisis on his hands even before the general election, since Clinton die-hards might be tempted by an independent Michael Bloomberg candidacy. That dance could resemble the 1980 Republican convention, when conservative hero Ronald Reagan was so worried about moderate voters—who had an option in independent candidate John Anderson—that he tried to persuade former president, and former 1976 primary rival, Gerald Ford to be vice president. Ford snubbed him before the final night of the convention, prompting Reagan to settle on a less famous moderate, his primary runner-up, George H.W. Bush. If Sanders’ idealistic delegates prove to be an unruly bunch, some could even vote to reject a choice designed to appeal to moderates.

But Reagan’s shotgun wedding worked out in the end, as the 1980 Democratic convention was an even more divided affair. Dukakis was not as lucky. He escaped his convention with a solid convention speech and strong polling bounce, yet still struggled to carry his left flank through the campaign in a time when “liberal” was the worst thing you could call a politician.

Since 1988, Democratic conventions have been well-scripted, stage-managed affairs, so much so that news coverage of them has been severely reduced. For those who miss the days of conventions with real drama, you may just get your wish this year.