How political parties award delegates and who gets to be one
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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas primary voters will hit the polls on “Super Tuesday” along with voters in more than a dozen other states and American Samoa.
And when it comes to the presidential race, those who cast their ballots will really be deciding how many party delegates the candidates each receive. Those delegates then select the party nominees during a vote at the party conventions later in the summer.
On the Democratic side, the winner needs at least 1,969 delegates out of 3,936 to secure the party’s nomination. (Texas has 244 delegates up for grabs).
The Republican nominee will need to get at least 1,215 delegates out of 2,429. (Texas has 161 GOP delegates available).
Here’s where it gets a bit more complex. How those delegates are awarded differs between the two major parties.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) uses three different systems, varying from state to state. The first is “proportional,” meaning if a candidate gets 60% of the vote, they get 60% of the delegates for that state. The next is “winner-take all” — pretty self-explanatory. And the third is a hybrid.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) takes a more uniform approach, sticking with proportional, though a candidate needs to win at least 15% of the vote to score any delegates.
As for who gets to be a delegate, these are people selected by the parties and are typically party activists, VIPs, or elected officials.
And what about “superdelegates?” Those are delegates who automatically get seats at the convention; they’re not there because of the result of a primary or caucus.
Before 2018, Democratic superdelegates got to vote for whoever they wanted. You might remember this created an intraparty clash ahead of the 2016 Democratic convention between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The DNC made a change after that and now, Democratic superdelegates can only vote if no candidate wins the first round of voting at the convention.
On the GOP side, superdelegates haven’t really been a factor since an RNC rule change in 2012.
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