The Democrats and ranked choice voting in the 2028 presidential nomination process
Coming off a Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting primarily devoted to the primary calendar, the headline maybe instead should be about RCV.
The meetings of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) are often sleepy affairs. Or rather, they are often sleep-inducing affairs.
…for the uninitiated.
That is not a judgment. It is a statement from someone — yes, your humble newsletter writer — who has often watched folks’ eyes glaze over after asking questions like, “Hi. How are you?” only to invariably get a long-winded answer about delegate selection rules or the primary calendar whether they like it or not. [Yes, I’m a real hit at parties.]
In any event, part of this reaction to rule crafting is a function of the technical nature of the role with which the RBC is tasked: overseeing the rules of the party and the nomination process. But part of it is also the fact that the panel digs, piece by piece, way into the minutiae and then typically makes tweaks by consensus.
But not always. There was a break in the pattern during the course the committee’s meeting this week when the RBC heard spirited pitches from the 12 state parties vying for early window slots on the 2028 presidential primary calendar. [More on that from FHQ to come.] By day three of the latest meeting, however, the committee returned to its work of going line-by-line through the delegate selection rules for 2028, and reverted to the usual pattern.
That is, until the RBC got to Rule 14.
What is Rule 14?
That is the rule that defines what a fair reflection of presidential preferences — that is its literal name — looks like in the Democratic presidential nomination process. This is an important one. Rule 14 defines the proportional delegate allocation process. It does so for each of the three separate pools of delegates in the Democratic formula. It additionally outlines the 15 percent qualifying threshold that determines whether a candidate is even eligible for delegates at any of those levels. In a great many ways, this is arguably the rule in the Democratic nomination process. [One’s mileage may vary on that assertion, but bear with FHQ here.]
What followed with the clock running out on a meeting that was supposed to adjourn at noon on Friday was an amendment proposed to Rule 14.A.
Here is the language of that rule as it existed coming into the meeting (in other words, pre-amendment):
Delegates shall be allocated in a fashion that fairly reflects the expressed presidential preference or uncommitted status of the primary voters or, if there is no binding primary, the convention and/or caucus participants.
Innocuous enough, right?
As goals go, this is a section of the rule that sets up well the process to follow in the remainder of the Rule 14. But it says nothing about ranked choice voting (RCV). No, it does not, but the amendment did. And the lively discussion on the heels of the proposal was not sleepy.
Let’s dig in…