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If no candidate has a lock on the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the party's August convention, the 796 "superdelegates" would be decisive.
The superdelegates are party leaders and lawmakers, including all Democratic members of Congress and former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. As former vice
president, Al Gore gets a vote too.
Unlike "pledged" delegates chosen through primaries and caucuses, superdelegates are free to vote for whomever they chose. Many have already promised to back one candidate or another, "and most of the others will at some point before the convention," said Michael Tanner, a political analyst with the Cato Institute.
"The chances of them changing their mind at the last minute is not likely," he said.
The power given to the party bosses, not earned through the ballot box, strikes some observers as undemocratic.
For years, the Democratic nominee was chosen through deals and bargains made by party bosses. In 1960 John Kennedy emerged as the party nominee with the help of "patron" mayors Richard Daley or Chicago and Charles Buckley of New York.
After support from more radical wings of the party lead to the disastrous nomination of George McGovern in 1972, who lost every state but Massachusetts and the capital Washington to Richard Nixon, the Democrats put in rules to avoid such contention.
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