BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

February 10, 2008

With only 26 delegates to his name at the time he "suspended" his campaign for president, it is unlikely that John Edwards will be the final factor that puts Clinton or Obama over the top, but not impossible given how close the candidate count is.

First, a little delegate counting background. Three of the BuzzFlash staff were on a DNC phone call on Friday about the technical issues surrounding the election, counting and seating of delegates. (For the record, the DNC staff was scrupulously non-partisan and professional.) First of all, that threshold figure you see for obtaining the nomination does not include the controversial Michigan and Florida delegates.

As far as all the different delegate numbers that you see for Obama and Clinton, there is good reason for that. They are largely just estimates. In many states, final delegate allocations are determined at a follow-up state party convention or state party meeting. The counts won't change dramatically, but they will change. (This explains the differing claims over whether Clinton or Obama won one more delegate in Nevada. This won't be finally determined until a Nevada state party convention a little further down the road.) Also, the superdelegate "pledges" of support are just that. They aren't recorded by the DNC, but kept manually by various media organizations.

(By the way, if you are wondering who are the superdelegates (officially called ""party leaders and elected officials"), the DNC provided a breakdown of who they were by category and how many for each state. Here it is: 411 of them are DNC members active in their state parties; 259 are Democratic members of Congress (House and Senate); 27 of them are Democratic governors; 23 of them are "Distinguished Party Leaders," which includes former Democratic presidents, former Democratic leaders of the senate, speakers of the house, etc.; and 76 "add-ons." That makes a total of 796 superdelegates.)

So let's follow through a couple of scenarios. If Hillary Clinton were to reach the current threshold number necessary for nomination (that is minus the Florida and Michigan delegations) through elected and superdelegates, then the Edwards delegates, as well as the Florida and Michigan delegates would not matter.

If Barack Obama were to get enough elected and superdelegate votes to reach the threshold figure for nomination, then, given the statements of Hillary Clinton and her campaign, she would try and get the Florida and Michigan delegates seated based on the results of the unsanctioned primaries. To do this, the Florida and Michigan delegations would have to file an appeal to the DNC Credentials Committee, which won't meet until July or August. (It should be emphasized that the state parties of Michigan and Florida would have to file the appeals, not the Clinton campaign, but the Clinton campaign has indicated that it would support those appeals.) However, in this hypothetical, there would potentially be a complication for the Clinton campaign; here's why. Supposing the Credentials Committee were to decide to seat all the currently "elected" delegates from the unsanctioned primaries, the first order of business of the 2008 convention would be to decide whether or not to accept the recommendation of the Credentials Committee. This is a full delegate vote. If Barack Obama already had enough votes for the nomination, it is more than likely that his supporters would be instructed to vote against the hypothetical Credentials Committee recommendation, since the nomination might then be snatched from Obama.

Okay, now we get to the more likely scenarios. Neither Obama nor Clinton have enough pledged and superdelegates to reach the current threshold. In this case (the Florida and Michigan situations aside), the 26 Edwards delegates might be enough to put either one over the top, it it is that close.

So, there is the small potential that Edwards can obtain commitments to achieve his populist goals from Clinton and Obama and then decide who to throw his 26 delegates to.

Improbable, perhaps, but this has been a year for improbability.

By the way, for those who don't know yet, the superdelegates came into being in 1982 and played a role in securing the presidential nomination for Walter Mondale in 1984. They "represent less than 20% of the total number of delegates at the Convention," according to the DNC.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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