Published
3 years agoon
A new poll of California voters finds a virtual tie among Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden just a couple of weeks before mail voting begins for the March 3 Democratic presidential primary.
Sanders crept ahead of long-time leader Biden among Democratic voters in the Public Policy Institute of California poll, jumping 10 percentage points over the last two months to 27%.
California will send 495 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, Mitchell continues. “Of those, 416 will be pledged delegates (meaning that they are committed to a candidate), while 79 will be the unpledged ‘superdelegates. … ‘
Got that? And to make it even trickier, counting the votes and applying the formula district by district could take weeks and by the time California’s final result is known, the race might have already been decided elsewhere.
The likelihood of a close finish among the three frontrunners, the complexity of the delegate allocation system and the inevitable delay in counting votes could essentially make our primary a non-factor in choosing the Democratic candidate to challenge President Donald Trump, undercutting the contention that advancing the election from June to March would make California more relevant.
The system that Mitchell describes in excruciating detail poses another question: If California’s Democratic politicians are enamored of a proportional primary election, rather than winner-take-all, why do they insist that November’s electoral votes all go to the winner of the popular vote, rather than being allocated by congressional district, as a couple of other states do?
Just asking.
CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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