An office in Oxnard. Here’s how presidential candidates are working to collect California delegates
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, coming off popular vote wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, has also surged to the top of the presidential polls in California.
No matter how well Sanders does statewide in the state’s March 3 primary, however, the majority of the California’s 494 delegates will be awarded at the local level – as was the case in New Hampshire, where he split the state’s delegates with former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
That’s why Sanders’ campaign is holding unconventional events in unusual places to drive turnout in California. His team has talked over tamales with Latino voters, held organizing sessions with Filipino Americans and conducted a press conference in Cantonese.
After all, said Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, “California could be six states.”
California is home to one-tenth of the nation’s delegates, giving the Golden State an outsized role in selecting the Democratic nominee. For the eight Democratic candidates still in the race, it offers more than twice as many delegates as the four earlier voting states, combined.
What happens in the state’s 53 individual congressional districts will determine how most delegates are awarded, leading candidates to adopt strategies aimed at specific regions or demographic groups.
Presidential candidates can pick up delegates by getting at least 15 percent support across the entire state. They can also woo party leaders behind the scenes to secure their support in a potential contested contested convention. But the biggest slice of delegates will be calculated one congressional district at a time.
Even if Sanders wins statewide, other candidates could still rack up delegates by gaining at least 15 percent in the districts.
“If the ultimate outcome of the district voting is that the candidates share the spoils relatively evenly, I don’t know how you could come into California and say you conquered the vote,” said Darry Sragow, who has served as campaign manager for five statewide races in California.
How the top candidates can win
In Sanders’ case, the campaign is cultivating support from voters who typically don’t typically cast ballots, an approach that could help him avoid a potential three-way delegate tie. His effort is more wide-ranging than other candidates on the ballot.
Rafael Návar, Sanders’ California state director, said the campaign regularly hosts “barnstorming” sessions to help develop a “cultural relevancy” in diverse communities.
At these events, campaign staff members encourage organizers, volunteers and potential supporters to generate their own ideas about how to best engage potential voters who have not been reached out to in previous elections. Traditional house parties, door knocking and phone banking efforts are another priority.
The campaign has also opened offices in places like Bakersfield, Visalia and Oxnard — a 210,000-person coastal city near Los Angeles whose population is 74 percent Latino.
“We’ve built operations in areas that are normally neglected by a statewide campaign,” Návar said. “You traditionally don’t have this level of focus with Latinos. ... Maybe you translate some material in Spanish and it’s not really relevant. What we’re gonna see and show in California is because we integrated at the beginning, Latinos are gonna come out for the senator.”
Other candidates are banking on voters in their strongest demographic groups that can be counted on to participate.
Because former vice president Joe Biden polls particularly well with older black voters, Sragow said, he would be best served visiting or placing a lot of campaign resources in Rep. Barbara Lee’s district in Oakland and the districts of Rep. Nanette Barragán and Rep. Maxine Waters in the southern part of Los Angeles.
California’s 40th Congressional District, currently represented by Los Angeles Democrat Lucille Roybal-Allard, has the largest share of Latinos in the nation, according to data from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Latinos also account for 80 percent of the district’s voting age population and 75 percent of its 2016 primary voters. It also has a sizable youth population, which could play well for Sanders.
Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project at USC, said the district will be a key area for candidates vying for the Latino vote.
She added that campaigns must also focus on winning over Asian voters in California.
“Both Latinos and Asian Americans are going to have an impact on this primary,” Romero said. “Any presidential campaign that doesn’t pay attention to both electorates is going to be at a disadvantage.”
Michael Bloomberg’s team is hoping the division in Iowa and New Hampshire and Biden’s poor performances in those states will help drive their momentum.
He’s putting millions of dollars of advertising on the air in California, along other delegate-rich states like Texas and New York.
“Iowa and New Hampshire show there is not a clear-cut candidate, and Michael Bloomberg will fill that void,” said Chris Myers, Bloomberg’s California state director.
Counting the California votes
Yet victory could be defined in multiple ways in a state with California’s permissive voting rules, which allow voters to mail their ballots as late as election day.
It could take weeks for California to count the couple million ballots expected to be outstanding after election night. A little more than half of the ballots are expected to come in on March 3, with the complete results certified by April 10.
As a result, it’s entirely possible that the candidate who does best in early voting is considered “the winner” in the national news, even if the math adds up differently when the final votes are tallied, said Paul Mitchell, a political consultant and vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data.
“Whoever is on top (the night of or day after the election) will get the benefit of momentum going into the rest of the March early primary states,” Mitchell said.
This story was originally published January 30, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "An office in Oxnard. Here’s how presidential candidates are working to collect California delegates."