The Democratic Party has not always had a threshold candidates have had to surpass in order to qualify for delegates in its post-reform presidential nomination process, but it has operated under a flat 15 percent threshold since the rule was clarified for the 1992 cycle. That is nine cycles — six of them competitive — in which the 15 percent threshold has been utilized in the Democratic process. And it looks like that will extend to a tenth cycle in 2028.
Although, at a recent Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) meeting in Washington, DC there were some questions raised about where the qualifying threshold has been set. And that is something that stood in fairly stark contrast to the rules-crafting sessions the panel has undertaken during cycles of the recent past. No, nothing changed for 2028, but the idea of either raising or lowering the threshold was broached (in what turned out to be an aside) in the nation’s capital at the end of May.
Now, the May meeting was ostensibly for the RBC to hear pitches from the 12 state parties vying for spots in the early window of the party’s 2028 presidential primary calendar. But a third day — well, half a day really — was devoted to continuing the process of going line by line through the DNC delegate selection guidelines, making any amendments along the way to the rules that will govern the party’s 2028 nomination process. The threshold discussion that followed came when the panel got to Rule 14.B. Here is how that rule read going into the May meeting (before any amendments):
States shall allocate district-level delegates and alternates in proportion to the percentage of the primary or caucus vote won in that district by each preference, except that preferences falling below a fifteen percent (15%) threshold shall not be awarded any delegates. Subject to section F. of this rule, no state shall have a threshold above or below fifteen percent (15%).
It was there that DNC member Wendy Davis (Georgia) interjected to inquire about possibly lowering the 15 percent threshold in view of the fact that the party is likely to see another logjam of candidates similar to the 2020 cycle. [The following is a transcript of the discussion lightly edited for clarity.]
Davis: So this is to my recollection the first instance we’ve talked about the 15 percent threshold. Would this be the place for us to discuss whether we wanted to maintain a 15 percent rule or potentially lower the threshold since there going to be so many candidates? It seems pretty high to me when we’re gonna…the early states will have [so many candidates].
After RBC co-Chair Minyon Moore responded, she yielded the floor to longtime DNC member Elaine Kamarck (Virginia) to provide some context on the history of the 15 percent rule and to subsequently make a case for potentially raising the threshold to 20 percent. [Again, and for transparency, this has been edited slightly for clarity.]
Kamarck: I can talk a little bit about that. I mean we’ve had thresholds as high as 25 percent at some point. There was a lot of support for [a] 20 percent threshold which I personally would favor: a slightly higher threshold. Here’s the problem I see with the 15 percent threshold. I want to go right to the content of this. There are many delegate districts that have only three delegates, okay? Or four delegates. That’s because there’s a lot of congressional districts that are Republican districts and they just don’t have enough of a Democratic vote to get a lot of delegates. And in those districts, nobody with 16 percent ever gets a delegate.
So we have this idea that somehow if you get 15 percent, you’re going to get a delegate. It just doesn’t happen, you know? It just doesn’t happen mathematically unless you’re maybe in the handful of districts that get nine delegates. And those are almost all majority minority districts, which, thank you Republican Party, they’ve now busted up. So the illusion of 15 percent is just an illusion. It just never happens. So, I think it is much more realistic to move it to, say, a 20 percent threshold, particularly when we’re looking at races that there’s going to be just a ton of candidates.
So I like this. It has always been argued that this [the 15 percent threshold] would be greater inclusion, right? And that was the rationale for 15%. The problem is that nobody ever gets included under a 15 percent in a multi-candidate race anyway.
Davis: Not even at the at-large level?
Kamarck: No, it doesn’t even work out at the at-large [level]. But at the district level, it really doesn’t work out. So, I would love to have, I would love to see a 20 percent threshold. I think of all the years when we should do it, this is the time. So, I thank you for bringing it up.
Now, FHQ’s initial reaction to Kamarck’s case was that it sounded right. Honestly, I do not often make a habit of contradicting her in this area.3 And my recollection was (and is) that a five percent shift up to 20 percent probably would not make much of a difference anyway. Yes, there is the math of it that Kamarck notes (more on that below), but also the reality is that, beyond a contest or two into the sequence of primaries and caucuses, there just are not that many candidates who clear the 15 percent threshold to claim many delegates.
After all, the winnowing starts well before delegate counting really kicks in. Wins and losses (outright or relative to expectations) are sufficient to separate the wheat from the chaff early on during the momentum phase of the calendar before delegates become the currency of the process. Yet, delegate counting does not begin in earnest until a little deeper into the calendar when more delegates than are typically available in the early window of the calendar are on the line, during any later delegate phase of the process.
But Kamarck’s notion of the limited impact of a change to a 20 percent threshold is a testable hypothesis. So let’s test it.
Over at FHQ Plus, I will briefly look back at the history of the qualifying threshold in the Democratic presidential nomination process, discuss the purpose of such a mechanism and examine the evidence of what a shift to a 20 percent threshold would have looked like during the Democratic nomination races of the 21st century.
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