What are delegates in the American political process?
A delegate is a person selected to represent a group of people in some political assembly of the United States.
There are various types of delegates elected to different political bodies. In the United States Congress delegates are elected to represent the interests of a United States territory and its citizens or nationals. In addition, certain US states are governed by a House of Delegates or another parliamentary assembly whose members are known as elected delegates.
Prior to a United States presidential election, the major political parties select delegates from the various state parties for a presidential nominating convention, often by either primary elections or party caucuses.
Presidential Conventions
Democratic Party
The Democratic Party uses pledged delegates and unpledged delegates (generally known as superdelegates or sometimes as automatic delegates), a combined system which had been introduced in 1984. Between 1984 and 2016, a candidate for the Democratic nomination had to win a majority of combined delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention.
Republican Party
The Republican Party utilizes a similar system with slightly different terminology, employing bound and unbound delegates (also known as automatic delegates, but rarely as superdelegates, as their influence is much smaller compared to those in the Democratic Party). Of the total 2,472 Republican delegates, most are bound delegates who, as with the Democratic Party, are elected at the state or local level. To become the Republican Party nominee, the candidate must win a simple majority of 1,276 of the 2,472 total delegates at the Republican National Convention.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_(American_politics); accessed on August 15, 2024.
What are superdelegates?
In Democratic National Conventions, superdelegates—described in formal party rules as the party leaders and elected official (PLEO) category—make up slightly under 15% of all convention delegates. Before 2018, Democratic superdelegates were free to support any candidate for the presidential nomination in all rounds of balloting. (This contrasts with pledged delegates, who were selected based on the party presidential primaries and caucuses in each U.S. state, in which voters choose among candidates for the party's presidential nomination.) In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.
In Republican National Conventions, three Republican Party leaders of each state, territory, and Washington D.C. are automatically seated as delegates, but they are pledged to vote according to the results of their party branch's presidential primaries at least on the first ballot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate; accessed August 15, 2024.
Thousands of elections are taking place in 2024 across the United States, including primary and general elections at the federal, state, and local levels. These include the 2024 presidential election as well as elections for all 435 seats in the U.S. House, 34 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, and 11 of 50 state governorships.
This page presents Ballotpedia's ongoing research and curation on 2024 elections in the United States, including:
The content on this page is organized by level of government (federal, state, local) and then by office type within those levels.
This is the 8th annual analysis hub published on Ballotpedia. To review a previous year's version of this page, click one of these links: 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
From https://ballotpedia.org/Ballotpedia%27s_Election_Analysis_Hub,_2024; accessed August 27, 2024.