I remember sitting in a high school faculty lounge in the spring of 1990 with a half dozen colleagues, including a foreign exchange teacher from Europe who asked us if someone could explain to him how our primary system for choosing presidential nominees worked. Nobody could. It's such a confusing, labyrinthine procedure that it seems one needs to be a political scientist to understand it.
The Democrats have saddled their voters this year with an even more arcane and convoluted system than existed thirty years ago, a process that, one could plausibly argue, should all by itself disqualify them from running the country.
The Cliff Notes version of the process is this: A candidate needs to garner in the state primaries 51% of the total pledged delegates, some 3979 delegates, to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention this summer. If no candidate has that number (1990 delegates) after the first round of balloting then there'll be a second ballot on which delegates are then freed to vote for whomever they wish. Plus, there are "superdelegates" (party officials, office-holders, donors, etc.) of whom there are 771, who can also vote on a second ballot.
The number of votes needed to win the nomination on the second ballot is 2376 out of 4750 (3979 + 771).
It's all much more complicated than that, but the byzantine rules aside, the Democrats may also find themselves facing an agonizing dilemma this summer and fall.
Many delegates who'll be pledged to Senator Sanders won't actually want Sanders to be the nominee, and neither will many of the superdelegates. He's far too radical, even for the Democrat party which, in its current instantiation, is the most radical major party in modern American history.
If Sanders goes to Milwaukee in July with the most delegates but doesn't have the requisite 1990, many of his pledged delegates may defect to other candidates on the second round, and it's almost certain that many of the superdelegates will also support other candidates.
Consequently, the self-acknowledged socialist could be denied the nomination.
Now, here's the dilemma: Either Sanders gets the nomination or he doesn't. If he does he'll have a very difficult time raising money, he'll also have a very difficult time, barring unforeseen developments, beating Donald Trump in November, and his presence at the top of the ticket in the Fall could cost Democrats lots of offices further down the ballot.
On the other hand, if he's denied the nomination even though he had more delegates than anyone else on the first ballot, either he or his followers, or both, will likely walk out of the convention and sit out the election, which would split the party and probably result in an electoral disaster.
The question that is plaguing the Democrat party leaders, then, is how do they keep Bernie from getting the nomination while at the same time persuading him not to bolt at the convention?
They're probably hoping that former Vice-President Joe Biden wins today's primary in South Carolina (54 pledged delegates) and has a great showing on Tuesday when 1357 of the 3979 pledged delegates and about 260 superdelegates are up for grabs. If Biden can legitimately amass the 1990 delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the convention, Bernie won't have much of a complaint, and the party will breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Of course, if Biden, prone as he is to mental lapses and seemingly lacking any real passion for campaigning, is the party's nominee, that'll cause party leaders a whole other set of headaches.