I’m confused by this “Delegate Scorecard” on cnn.com. It seems to show that candidates have already been assigned delegates in states that haven’t yet had primaries or caucases. Am I reading it completely wrong, or do they get a certain number of delegates assigned right from the start (presumably based on some arcane formula), or what? To make things even more confusing; they also have an “Unpledged Delegate Scorecard” which seems to be assigning unpledged delegates to candidates. I’ve been unable to find any clear explanantions of how any of this works.
All members of Congress, I believe, are automatically invited to the Convention.
I’m assuming you mean all Democratic members, rather than all members, is that correct? Do they all get to vote at the convention? If so, can they decide ahead of time who they’re going to vote for and then vote that way regardless of the results of their state’s caucus or primary? Is that a personal decision or based on something else? What are the differences between a pledged and an unpledged delegate? I would have thought that pledged meant that they were pledged to a specific candidate and unpledged meant that they were not. But both types seem to be associated with specific candidates in these charts.
Each state determines how they choose delegates (subject to national party rules). A certain number of delegate slots are set aside for prominent state politicians – congressmen, state representatives, unelected party leaders, etc.
These are theoretically free to choose whoever they want. If they don’t make their choice known, they are unpledged. Some do announce in advance they will be voting for a particular candidate, so they are listed in that candidate’s column.
If it’s a close race (and there hasn’t been one for over 50 years), the unpledged delegates can broker the convention. Nowadays, though, they fall behind the leading candidate after the primaries.
This is being discussed in another GQ thread today, so I’ll close this one and direct further comment to the other: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=236946
bibliophage
moderator GQ