New leadership to lead the Democratic Party for the next two years will be elected on August 17.

Attention is focused on whether candidate Kim Min-seok, who widened the gap in the Honam and greater Seoul regions, will secure the party leadership with a majority in the first round, or if candidate Jeong Cheong-rae can pull off a dramatic last-minute upset.

The Democratic Party will hold its 3rd Regular National Convention at the Daejeon Convention Center on this day to elect a new party leader and five supreme council members.

The final results will be announced by combining the party member votes released through previous regional primaries with today's delegate voting results, public opinion polls, and a 5% weight applied to the Yeongnam regional vote share.

Under the one-person, one-vote system, the reflection ratios for the electoral college voting are 70% for party members and delegates, and 30% for the general public.

The party leader election, contested by candidates Song Young-gil, Jeong Cheong-rae, and Kim Min-seok (listed in ballot order), applies a preferential voting system.

The preferential voting system allows voters to mark their 1st to 3rd choice candidates together. If no candidate wins a majority, the second-choice selections of voters who ranked the bottom candidate first are added up to determine the final winner.

As of the cumulative vote counts so far, which do not reflect the Yeongnam weight yet, candidate Kim is leading at 49.91%, followed by candidate Jeong at 41.51% and candidate Song at 8.58%.

The gap between candidate Kim and candidate Jeong stands at 64,567 votes, or 8.4 percentage points.

Key points to watch are the preferential voting system and the results of the public opinion poll, which accounts for 30%.

Candidate Kim maintained his first-place position by widening the gap with candidate Jeong through the Honam, Gyeonggi, and Seoul primaries held over the past weekend, but narrowly missed securing an absolute majority.

Accordingly, candidate Kim's camp plans to combine the public opinion poll results to secure a vote share of 50% or more, clinching victory without needing the preferential voting runoff process.

On the other hand, candidate Jeong, having suffered two consecutive losses, must win enough votes in today's delegate and general public opinion polls to overturn the margin in order to claim victory.

In the supreme council member vote for party members, candidates Choi Min-hee, Park Sun-won, Seo Mi-hwa, Lee Seong-yun, and Han Min-su (in order of cumulative votes) placed within the top five safe zones.

The vote share gap between candidate Choi, backed by the pro-Jeong Cheong-rae faction, and candidate Park, backed by the pro-Lee Jae-myung faction, competing for the senior supreme council member position reserved for the top finisher, is a mere 0.31 percentage points, leaving room for a reversal depending on the delegate vote and public opinion poll results.

Pro-Jeong faction candidates Lee (13.94%) and Han (13.77%), along with pro-Lee faction candidate Kim Yong (13.62%), who also boast narrow vote margins, are locked in a tight race, suggesting that a fierce battle will continue until the final results are confirmed.

Meanwhile, pro-Lee faction candidates Lim Mi-ae and Kim Young-ho, who ranked 7th and 8th in cumulative votes the previous day, resigned while urging support for candidate Kim Yong, raising questions about whether candidate Kim Yong can secure their voter base and land safely within the winning zone.