On March 15th, you did what you were supposed to do.
You woke up, and, either on your way to work, on your lunch break or on your way home, you went and cast your vote in Florida’s primary election.
For the two major political parties, those two primary contests boosted the delegate tally for the winner, as every state presidential primary does, and that was that.
Except that it’s not.
In Florida and other states, the selection of a party’s nominee extends well beyond the primary itself and, man, can it get convoluted.
On May 7th, Democrats across Florida will pack libraries and conference halls in each of the state’s 27 Congressional districts. Some will be asking their fellow Dems to help send them to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July so they can cast their vote in favor of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
Republicans recently went through a similar process.
That Tuesday primary on March 15 simply determined the ratio of Clinton to Sanders supporters it will send. Clinton won Florida’s primary with 64.4 percent; Sanders received 33.3 percent.
“Everybody thinks they’re voting for a candidate,” said Mike Fox, a national coordinator with the Progressive Democrats of America, who hopes to be a Sanders delegate from Congressional District 13. “But, no. They’re actually voting for a delegate who in turn eventually goes to a convention. And those delegates are supposed to be committed to a particular candidate.”
In all, there are 246 delegates going to Philly from Florida, and 214 of those will be determined on Saturday.
Sanders supporters will vote on who will go represent them at the convention; Clinton supporters will do the same for their candidate.
These are the “pledged” delegates — those who want to be one are vetted by each presidential candidate’s campaign, and the party more or less relies on the honor system when it comes to the question of whether or not a delegate is being honest about his or her allegiance.
“I’m certainly not going to flip my vote by any stretch, but it des certainly make for interesting sausage making, as they say,” Fox said.
Anyhow, a typical prospective delegate will likely have already been actively campaigning for his or her respective candidate.
As for who can vote for the delegates, it’s just about everyone.
“Any Democrat that is registered in that Congressional District can participate,” said Rick Boylan, co-chair of the Florida Democratic Party rules committee. “We call them Congressional District caucuses, but these are not like Iowa-style caucuses. This is not where people go and sit around in a big meeting room for a couple hours debating with each other as to who the delegates should be. This is more of what sometimes is called a firehouse primary. It’s a party-run process, where people will show up, they’ll sign in, they’ll indicate which presidential candidate they want to get a ballot for that day, what their presidential preference is. When they sign up as a Clinton person, they’ll get a ballot with Clinton delegates, if they sign up as a Sanders person, they’ll get the ballot for Sanders delegates.”
The list of delegate candidates, which one can find on the state party’s website, is diverse, and features a long lists of party activists and other figures like longtime Sanders supporter Amos Miers and Pinellas Democratic Party chair Susan McGrath, who’s also president of the county arm of the Stonewall Democrats.
She said she’s supporting Clinton, but that regardless of who gets the nomination, the party needs to coalesce around him or her.
“To be clear, I think both of our candidates are excellent, and we would be fine,” McGrath said. “It’s important to go into the convention to do what’s best for our country and what’s best for our party. And at the end of the day, our party has a platform of shared values.”
The male-to-female candidate ratio has to be a pretty even split; the state party has for years required the number of male and female delegates to be even.
“In the early '70s, the national party said parties needed to take affirmative steps in making sure that women are included,” Boylan said. “This used to be kind of a good-old-boys process, smoke-filled rooms and all of that.”
Observers will also note that, compared to their GOP counterparts, Florida Democrats are also sending a lot more delegates.
“I guess that, the Democratic Party decided a long time ago that it was important to get as many voices and folks involved in this process as possible,” Boylan said. “It’s just one of those many differences in how the parties approach this.”
The number of delegates from each district varies. It’s based on the number of Democrats in a given area, and the proportion of Clinton to Sanders supporters reflects the outcome of the March 15 primary.
Take Florida’s 14th Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Hillsborough County and (until November) a swath of southern St Petersburg. It’s a highly Democratic district represented by Democrat Kathy Castor.
“When people show up in Congressional District 14, there are six delegates. Four of them were apportioned to Hillary Clinton and two to Bernie Sanders,” Boylan said.
Running to be a pro-Hillary Democrat from that district is Anita Balch, who lives in Plant City and has long been a Clinton supporter.
“I want to raise my hand at that convention. I want to vote for her. I believe in her strongly,” said Balch.
The retired nurse said she has long admired Clinton’s work on healthcare as well as her resiliency.
“I’m a goal-oriented old nurse that got my RN at age 50,” she said. “I was an abandoned mother once upon a time. I probably can relate, rebel girl to rebel girl.”
But as excited as she is about potentially going to the convention to support her candidate, she said she didn’t expect to be so busy trying to get herself elected.
“Nobody told me. I started doing research, found out I had to apply, and I got my hands on a form, and then I find out I’ve got to campaign and do all this stuff, which is kind of frustrating because I’d really rather be working for Hillary, that’s who we need to worry about getting elected,” she said.
On top of this process, the party also has 32 unpledged delegates, who are elected officials and other Democratic party leaders. Among them is Congressman Alan Grayson, an Orlando-area Democrat who has said he’ll support Sanders. Such delegates also have a much maligned nickname.
“We don’t call them superdelegates. You guys do,” Boylan said, referring to the media.
Unlike what the term “super” might suggest, they don’t have more weight than regular delegates, and they’re unlikely to make much of a difference in the nominating process.
Instead, the purpose they serve is to keep elected officials involved in the process without the risk of alienating their constituents.
“One of the problems is that it was politically uncomfortable for someone who was, say, a member of Congress to run as a delegate in their state because they were running against their constituents, and that didn’t make them very popular,” Boylan said.
Whoever gets elected to be a delegate on Saturday, it’s still unclear what type of convention they’ll be walking into come July — brokered, contested, or otherwise.
“People love a horse race, and I think it’s a little too early for people to say whether there’s going to be a contested convention,” Boylan said. “If a candidate doesn’t have enough delegates at that point, then we’ll go into the convention still negotiating and trying to win delegates to make that happen, but it’s extremely unlikely. Certainly the race in 2008 between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama was much closer at this point in time than it is for Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton.”
But many Sanders supporters are hoping for something of an insurgency at the convention; that they’ll be able to lobby enough of their Clinton-supporting counterparts to create a real contest between the two. And while many observers say Clinton’s delegate count puts her so far ahead of Sanders that a contested convention looks unlikely, Fox and others disagree, and look forward to (peaceful) excitement in July.
“That’s where all the action with all of this happens,” Fox said. “However, as Hillary Clinton in 2008 made the argument, even though you are committed and you sign on the dotted line, saying ‘I’m committed to X-candidate,’ everyone truly is, at the end of the day, a freelancer, especially if there is a contested convention, like this will be.”
And if that doesn’t happen, he said, the party needs to, at the very least, adopt Sanders’ policy positions going into November if it has any hope of retaining the many Sanders supporters that flocked to the party to support him.
“Nobody at this level has taken the shots at power that Bernie Sanders has. Even FDR… Bernie names names. And what’s amazing to me is, imagine you’re a Walton, and this guy on national television is saying ‘I’m going to take billions — with a B — of dollars from your family,” he said. “If we do not choose Bernie Sanders as the nominee, then we at least want to see the platform of the Democratic Party express the things that Bernie has been saying.”
Even so, polls showing Clinton trailing Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in a hypothetical match-up are disconcerting to some Democrats, especially given what’s at stake in the general election this year.
“Not only am I more progressive than my party is right now, I’m also concerned about the polls. Hillary doesn’t win. Period. Bernie does,” Fox said. “Bottom line, I want to make sure that whoever our nominee is beats Republicans,” he said. “What we’ve been shown on that side of the aisle in this cycle is just frightening."
This article appears in May 5-11, 2016.