Right! Uh…there’s also no chance I will win hundreds of millions of dollars playing the Powerball and/or Mega Millions, then find myself in a torrid love triangle with Scarlett Johansson and Brie Larson.
Yes. Look at the front-runners: A (non-observant) Jew, aging and socialist; a black man; a blackish Tamil-Jamaican woman; a youthful Catholic Irishman with a Spanish nickname; and a woman whose Cherokee ties may be a campaign item. Even the second tier features a gay, an Hispanic and an ethnic Chinese. (Do we have a lesbian yet?) Where’s the W.A.S.P. male? (Even Biden is a Catholic, not that that matters anymore.)
I’m not saying we need a W.A.S.P. male specifically. But it almost seems like W.A.S.P. males are disqualified, lacking a politically correct identity! Absurd, but it almost seems that way.
2020 Delegate Selection Rules for the Democratic National Convention, rule 14.F, says: “In all situations where no preference reaches the applicable threshold, the threshold shall be half the percentage of the vote received at each level of the delegate selection process by the front-runner.”
The Nebraska, Idaho, Georgia, and Massachusetts delegate selection plans use the “half of the winner” rule.
However, the Ohio plan specifies the “10% rule.”
The breakdown is “about” 2/3 to districts and 1/3 to statewide. Without any bonus, a state with a “base” of 100 delegates gets 75 district and 40 (25% of the base, plus an extra 15% of the base for “Party Leaders and Elected Officials” (these are things like big city mayors; they are not “superdelegates,” but are pledged to particular candidates) statewide. Any bonus for scheduling has to be split 75/25.
Cosigned. (Just because several are running doesn’t mean they are being seen as contenders.) And I’d say this would be fine, temporarily, if we were still in 2000 and had nominated nothing but WASP men (with just a few Catholic white men sprinkled in), ever. But it’s been 20 years since we nominated a WASP man, and 16 since we nominated any white man. That doesn’t mean, as you say, that it’s got to be a white guy again this time; but it does strike me that they should now be back in the mix again. Not only is it unfair to the individual candidates if they are not; but it sends a signal to white male voters that they are not welcome in the party, and (despite what many people think), without significant support from white male voters, Democrats have no chance in national elections.
I couldn’t find info about Protestant white men specifically, but if we look at all white men, they made up 34 percent of the electorate in 2016, outnumbered only by white women (37 percent). Hillary got 14 million votes from white male voters. While 94 percent of black women voted for her, that still only represented 9 million votes. And those 9 million are not nearly as much at risk of flipping to the other side as the 14 million white men are.
BTW, Hillary got another 5.5 million votes from black men, meaning that white men are virtually tied with black women and men combined in terms of their proportion of her voting coalition. I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of people don’t realize this. And again, the white men are the most vulnerable to jumping ship. We need to make sure they know they are still welcome in the party, or we’re sunk.
Source (combined with Wikipedia raw numbers): Exit Polls 2016
I’m a 56 year old white male and I’m not living in fear of being demographically challenged or of going extinct. Or of being unwelcome in the Democratic party.
That’s great. You are probably a liberal (or progressive) white male. Another thing most people don’t know is that although white males are the demographic group most likely to describe themselves as “very conservative” to pollsters, they are also the group most likely to call themselves “very liberal”. (That is, the percentage of white men who describe themselves that way is higher than in any other demo.) Your group is not the one we need to be concerned about. But there are plenty of moderate white men who are less strongly attached, and we’ll lose them if we don’t tend to them carefully and make them feel important (even if the very notion might be nauseating to many progressives: sometimes you just have to grit your teeth, swallow hard, and do what needs to be done).
Going by the numbers listed in the 2020 Call for the Convention, which don’t include any date-based bonus delegates, 75% of which would be at Congressional district level, the average delegates per district runs from around 4 to 11, although only states with one or two districts have an average of 8 or higher.
According to the Delegate Selection Rules, each state gets the choice of one of four methods to decide how many delegates go to each of its districts:
Half are divided based on the district’s population, and the other half based on the average of the votes for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016;
Half are divided based on the votes for Clinton in 2016, and the other half based on the votes for the Democratic candidate(s) in the state’s most recent Gubernatorial election;
Half are divided based on the number of registered Democratic voters on 1/1/2020, and the other half based on the average of the votes for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016;
1/3 of the delegates based on the method 1 result, 1/3 based on the method 2 result, and 1/3 based on the method 3 result.
In 2016, California’s delegates per district ranged from 5 to 8.