What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 10

Welcome to a weekly collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and ABC News. With 5,000 people seemingly thinking about challenging President Trump in 2020 — Democrats and even some Republicans — we’re keeping tabs on the field as it develops. Each week, we’ll run through what the potential candidates are up to — who’s getting closer to officially jumping in the ring and who’s getting further away.

Former Texas congressman and Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke officially entered the presidential race on Thursday. But with every big-name Democrat to get in the race — the field is now more than a dozen Democrats strong — the prospect of a contested convention gets all the more real.

That’s because the Democratic Party changed its nominating rules over the controversial role superdelegates played in Hillary Clinton’s nomination in 2016. Now, only pledged delegates will vote on the first ballot at the national convention in Milwaukee next July — not superdelegates. The Democratic National Committee’s rule change was meant to prevent superdelegates from casting the deciding vote in the first round of voting, but with so many candidates in the race, superdelegates could still play an outsized role. If the results of the primaries and caucuses spread pledged delegates too thin and no one candidate has a majority, it means superdelegates could still swing the nomination when they cast their preference in a second ballot vote. So in this case, O’Rourke’s relatively late entry into the field, and perhaps that of former Vice President Joe Biden soon, may not be good for the party unless some Democratic challengers drop out or a clear front-runner emerges long before next July.

-more-

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-potential-2020-candidates-are-doing-and-saying-vol-10/