The Democratic Party allocates delegates using proportional representation, based on the outcomes in the primaries and caucuses, as long as a candidate gets at least 15 percent of the votes in a state or district. This means that candidates who get at least 15 percent of the vote will get delegates in rough proportion to their vote totals. For instance, if Candidate A gets about 20 percent of the vote total in a state, she’ll have about 20 percent of the state’s delegates at the convention. That means no state’s primary is winner-take-all; each state’s delegation will be mixed. As a result, as long as several candidates perform relatively well, not single candidate is likely to win big at any one moment in the voting.
