I was listening to CBC Radio’s As it Happens show yesterday and they had an interview with former Colorado senator Gary Hart, who was comparing this year’s Democratic contest to his own battle with VP Mondale in 1984. Link . Hart contended that he went into the convention neck and neck with Mondale, and that it was the superdelegates who backed Mondale that cost him the nomination.
This doesn’t gibe with my memory, which had Mondale having clinched the nomination well before the convention.
Is my memory correct and is Hart retconning the facts, or is Hart correct?
According to the sparsely written Wikipedia page on the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mondale received 2191 votes compared to Hart’s 1200, a difference of almost a thousand delegates. I don’t know how many superdelegates the DNC had that year, and unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a list of primary results from that year yet.
My recollection is that while Hart and Mondale were pretty close in the pledged delegate count, a vast majority of the superdelegates had committed to Mondale well before the convention. So it’s not like Mondale’s win was a surprise – the greater surprise would have been if hundreds of superdelegates had reversed themselves at the convention.
Did Hart still have a chance at the convention? No, no, and hell no. Mondale clinched the nomination on the day after the last primary, in early June.
Would Mondale have won without superdelegates? Probably, but they gave him the final push over the cliff.
It’s impossible to reconstruct an exact count of primary- and caucus-won delegates this long after the fact; the media weren’t as anal in reporting that level of detail in 1984. My best guess with no supers would be Mondale 1750, Hart 1170, Jackson 465, and a handful scattering–still a majority, albeit a razor-thin one. It’s also true, however, that the supers gave Mondale a momentum boost all through the primary season–most of them committed early and padded his lead from the beginning, giving him an aura of inevitability.
Link
Essentially, to answer my own OP, on the last day of primary season in June, 1984,Mondale won NJ and Hart carried California, leaving Mondale just short of the number of delegates he needed, so that night Mondale got on the horn and twisted arms of superdelegates to get them on board. The race was over well before the convention, and Mondale won the lion’s share of delegates in the primaries, but the superdelegates did put Mondale over the top. Hart was right about the superdelegates, but wrong about the fight lasting until the convention.
The relevant point here is that it’s possible to have a substantial lead in the delegate count but still not have enough to clinch the nomination before the convention. That’s a scenario the democrats and Sen. Obama could be facing again this summer.