How Many Delegates In Missouri Are Up For Grabs?

The Show Me State will be voting along with four other states and one overseas territory on Tuesday, March 15 in what some are dubbing Super Tuesday 3. Missouri has the fewest delegates up for grabs out of all of the states. Only the Northern Mariana Islands will have fewer delegates at stake than Missouri — so just how many delegates does Missouri have?

On the Democratic side of the aisle, the votes of Missouris' 71 delegates will be decided by the people in an open primary; voters are free to chose to mark any ballot — Democratic, Republican, or Libertarian — they choose. Missouri's Democrats have a somewhat convoluted procedure for assigning delegates for this summer's convention in Philadelphia; 47 of the delegates will be awarded on a proportional basis to any candidate who captures over 15 percent of the vote in the state's congressional districts, of which there are eight.

The rest of the delegates will be divided proportionally based on each candidate's share of the vote statewide, with a 15-percent threshold in place as well. In a state with a predominantly rural character, what this type of allocation scheme does is give more weight to the voters in the sparsely populated rural congressional districts (MO-3, MO-4, MO-6, MO-7, MO-8) while affording less-than-equal representation to voters in more urban and suburban areas of St. Louis, Kansas City and Independence.

While Missouri does have 13 Democratic superdelegates, all but two have come out in support of Clinton. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, only Missouri DNC delegates Matthew Robinson and Roy Temple haven't said publicly whom they plan to support.

In Missouri, Republican delegates will be competing over 52 delegates, who will be awarded via an equally convoluted process. First, only actively campaigning candidates can get delegates. This means that anyone who made the ballot filing deadline but dropped out of the race will be ineligible for delegate support. Should anyone get more than 50 percent of the vote, then it's winner-take-all. If that isn't the case, then they are split up another way. Twelve will be awarded to the winner of the statewide popular vote, and five will be awarded to the winner of each of Missouri's eight congressional districts. Just like in the Democratic primary, this system gives a heavier weight to the five rural congressional districts over the more densely populated urban and suburban areas. There has been a dearth of polling in Missouri; given the frankly ridiculous behavior at their frontrunner's Missouri rallies, how the election will turn out for the Republicans is completely in the air at this point.

The Black Lives Matter movement sparked in Ferguson, as well as the ongoing controversy over former Mizzou assistant professor of media Melissa Click, are likely to weigh on the minds of Missouri voters on both sides of the political spectrum. The results that the Show Me State will show the nation are anyone's guess at this point.

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