The most underappreciated rule in the Democratic presidential primary race is the 15 percent threshold. To get any delegates from a congressional district in a caucus or primary, the candidate must win at least 15 percent of the vote. The same 15 percent threshold applies for at-large delegates.

Take the current RealClearPolitics poll average for Iowa. Only two candidates statewide clear the 15 percent threshold. Behind them, a candidate such as South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 11.3 percent might meet the threshold in some districts to qualify for delegates.....

What does this all mean? There may be very few candidate who get any delegates in Iowa. While a candidate such as Buttigieg or former congressman Beto O’Rourke might claim bragging rights for third place, he might not get delegates. Failure to get delegates wouldn’t necessarily doom candidates going into New Hampshire, but if the pattern repeats in New Hampshire, you’ll see lesser candidates dropping out....

Second, Sanders is languishing in a distant second place. It’s not unforeseeable that he could be passed by Buttigieg and/or Warren and denied delegates in one of the first two states. That would be disastrous for his campaign, maybe fatally so

Former vice president Joe Biden is embracing his role as the leading moderate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary field. He has at times adopted an almost curmudgeonly tone about his opponents’ embrace of more progressive policies, preferring a nostalgia for the way things were back in the good old days of, say, 2015.

It’s an approach that, at first, seems at odds with where the party is going. We’ve noted previously that Democrats are increasingly likely to identify themselves as liberals, a trend that probably helps explain why so many of the 2020 candidates have embraced progressive positions — and why more progressive candidates have entered the race.

Polling, though, suggests that this may not be a foolproof strategy. For one thing, a crowd of more progressive candidates (an admittedly nebulous designation) will compete for the same voters, freeing Biden to vacuum up support from moderates. But polling also shows that Democrats overall aren’t necessarily prioritizing a candidate who espouses progressive policies. The data below are from a recent CNN-SSRS poll: More Democrats think it’s important for a nominee to work with Republicans than to support liberal policies.


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Like Nebraska, Kansas will no longer award delegates to Democratic presidential candidates via caucuses.

The state’s Democratic Party announced the decision Thursday.

It will switch to a party-run primary a year from Thursday — May 2, 2020. With caucuses, voters gather in a place and discuss the candidates, as opposed to a primary, in which voting is done privately like in a general election.