When are bound delegates unbound?
For Republicans, there is incrementally more clarity (required) for 2028
The question of when national convention delegates are bound and when they are unbound has been a sort of Wild West in recent presidential cycles. Well, in comparing the rules of the two major parties, it has been a study in contrasts. Whereas the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has offered top-down clarity on the matter for years now, their counterparts at the Republican National Committee (RNC) have typically deferred to the states and state parties with respect to the binding of delegates. And that deference, in turn, has led to broad variation across the more than 50 jurisdictions conducting delegate selection events in the Republican presidential nomination process.
They have run the gamut.
On the one hand, there were states that had state party-run events with presidential preference votes at the earliest stage of the caucus/convention process, but subsequently selected delegates without regard to the results of that preference vote. Rick Santorum could “win” the Iowa caucuses, for example, but Ron Paul supporters could overrun the district and state conventions to actually fill the state party’s national convention delegate spots. Paul supporters in the Iowa delegation (and in other states) had their preference in 2012, but they were not bound to it, much less Santorum, the “winner” of the caucuses, at the convention in Tampa. Iowa Republicans were not alone. Republicans in the Hawkeye state and those in several other states in 2012 (and for years before that) held non-binding caucuses like these, sending unbound delegates to national conventions.
On the other end of the spectrum, however, were states like Maryland, where the specifics of the binding and unbinding of delegates was specifically laid out in state law and/or state party rules. In the case of Maryland in 2012, the Republican delegates were bound based on the results of the presidential primary in the Old Line state until either 1) the candidate to whom those delegates were bound won the nomination, 2) the candidate to whom they were bound received less than 35 percent of a convention vote or 3) two presidential nomination votes at the national convention had been completed.
But those were just two ends of a continuum. There were many variations in between and some of them were clear (or clearer) about the binding process while often leaving some or all of the unbinding process either unsaid or open to interpretation. After 2012, however, the RNC became more involved in this area and has steadily increased the regulation of this process in its rules for successive cycles. And 2028 is no different. Over at FHQ Plus, I will more fully explore the latest evolution in this regulation of the binding and unbinding of national convention delegates for the upcoming cycle.
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