Why Sanders Will Be Able To Hang Around

After months of can­did­ate vis­its to town halls, diners, and in­di­vidu­al voters’ back­yards and liv­ing rooms, New Hamp­shire Demo­crats head to the polls Tues­day—and will de­term­ine al­most noth­ing.

To help un­der­stand why, here’s a brief primer on the Demo­crat­ic race post-New Hamp­shire:

What’s ex­actly at stake in the New Hamp­shire primary?

The primary res­ults will be used this sum­mer to award 24 del­eg­ates to the Demo­crat­ic Na­tion­al Con­ven­tion, which will choose the party’s pres­id­en­tial nom­in­ee. Iowa, which held caucuses last week, chose 44 del­eg­ates. For per­spect­ive: Win­ning the nom­in­a­tion re­quires 2,382 del­eg­ates, out of 4,763 avail­able. So these two con­tests will de­term­ine 1.4 per­cent of the del­eg­ates needed to se­cure the nom­in­a­tion.

That’s it? Then why all the at­ten­tion on Iowa and New Hamp­shire?

The states’ de­fend­ers ar­gue that mak­ing the can­did­ates spend lots of time in front of en­gaged voters serves as a use­ful first screen. And, in­deed, voters in later states of­ten look to these res­ults when mak­ing up their own minds. A can­did­ate who winds up win­ning the early con­tests of­ten be­comes the con­sensus choice re­l­at­ively quickly.

So why won’t that hap­pen in 2016?

It could—but typ­ic­ally a con­sensus emerges when the lead­ing can­did­ate cre­ates a sense of in­ev­it­ab­il­ity, which dries up money flow­ing to the re­main­ing can­did­ates, prompt­ing them to drop out. The front-run­ner in this case, former Sec­ret­ary of State Hil­lary Clin­ton, won’t be able to stop the flow of con­tri­bu­tions to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s cam­paign be­cause so little money is com­ing from the usu­al stable of Demo­crat­ic Party donors. Rather, Sanders has been able to tap in­to an enorm­ous pool of small donors who gave him $73 mil­lion through the end of Decem­ber, with $28 mil­lion in the bank as of Jan. 1. (Clin­ton raised $110 mil­lion in 2015, and had $38 mil­lion to start 2016.) In oth­er words: There is no fin­an­cial reas­on for Sanders not to keep cam­paign­ing through the com­ing weeks and months.

But doesn’t the cal­en­dar start to fa­vor Clin­ton after New Hamp­shire?

Sanders has been able to build a de­voted fol­low­ing with his simple mes­sage that the polit­ic­al sys­tem has been cor­rup­ted by big money. His weak­ness, though, is among non­white voters—who hap­pen to make up a large per­cent­age of the Demo­crat­ic primary elect­or­ate. Most of the states that come after New Hamp­shire have sig­ni­fic­ant black, Latino, and oth­er minor­ity vot­ing pop­u­la­tions.

Does this mean Clin­ton will lock up the needed del­eg­ates in the March con­tests?

She could start build­ing a sub­stan­tial lead, but the party’s del­eg­ate rules will make that a slow pro­cess so long as Sanders can win a reas­on­able share of the vote in each state. Demo­crat­ic del­eg­ates are awar­ded by con­gres­sion­al dis­trict and by the statewide win­ner—but in both cases the del­eg­ates are al­loc­ated in pro­por­tion to the vote share. Even if Clin­ton star­ted win­ning 60 per­cent of the avail­able del­eg­ates in the com­ing six weeks, she would have won few­er than 1,400 del­eg­ates through the end of March.

Mean­ing this could go on through April?

Pos­sibly, par­tic­u­larly if Sanders can do bet­ter than 40 per­cent in the com­ing states. In either case, Sanders is also up against Clin­ton’s over­whelm­ing ad­vant­age among the Demo­crat­ic Party’s 700 so-called “su­per del­eg­ates”—mem­bers of Con­gress, gov­ernors, and Demo­crat­ic Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee mem­bers, whose votes are not based on the res­ult of any primary or caucus, but rather their own dis­cre­tion. Cur­rently, ac­cord­ing to the As­so­ci­ated Press, Clin­ton has a 362-8 lead over Sanders.

And it is that ad­vant­age, ac­cord­ing to Josh Put­nam, a Uni­versity of Geor­gia polit­ic­al sci­ent­ist who main­tains the pop­u­lar Front­load­ing HQ web­site, that ul­ti­mately might wind things down in Clin­ton’s fa­vor. In fact, by late March, half of the del­eg­ates up for grabs in primar­ies and caucuses will have been al­loc­ated. And if Clin­ton has a lead among those, her large su­per-del­eg­ate lead will make it math­em­at­ic­ally dif­fi­cult for Sanders to come back.