I was reading an article recently on Politico.com about how a committee set up to look into the role of delegates in the Democratic Presidential Primary beleives the best option is to strip all Superdelegates. Here is part of the article:
A group created by the Democratic National Committee to examine the role of the superdelegates, the Democratic Change Commission — steered by the Obama campaign’s top delegate counter, Jeff Berman — held a conference call Wednesday to recommend that these unpledged delegates cast their votes based upon the electoral results of their states rather than on personal preference.
The recommendations of the commission, co-chaired by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, will now go before the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.
While the elimination of superdelegates isn’t likely to have any impact in 2012, when the party is all but certain to renominate President Obama, commission members say it will help democratize future presidential primaries.
Personally, I’m not sure how i feel about this move. The reasons being:
1) the complaint is that Superdelegates should vote the way their states vote rather than be autonomous. But by eliminating Superdelegates and just making them regular pledged delegates, you dont really affet the math of a primary too much because most Superdelegates already vote that way. Even in 2008, for all its contention, most Superdelegates voted how their states voted, or at least said they would given that we dont know for suer since Hillary suspended the roll call at convention.
2) Superdelegates, were created to balance the sometimes over zealous nature of the electorate. Lets face it, sometimes not all of our candidates are the best General Election candidates. Thats essentially what primaries are for. We take candidates that we really like and then let them battle it our for OUR hearts and minds and then we take that one and hope that he/she wins the hearts and minds of everyone else, which usually requires a move to the political center. Dennis Kucinich, for example, is a cool guy and probably really fun to get drunk off of Popav and Corona, but hes not exactly a good General Election candidate. Superdelegates are there to …compensate that kind of “enthusiasm” if your goal is to win the White House.
Yes, i understand the argument that Superdelegates take some of the democracy out of picking a nominee because they are free to vote how they personally believe as opposed their constituents, but again, my second reason is why Superdelegates are there. They are the safety valve for the times that maybe the mathmatical winner isnt necessarily the best choice to win the White House. Obviously, if the leading candidate is winning by a large margin then the Superdelegates should obviously respect that… largely as they have since their creation. Remember, 2008 was the first time that the Democrats really had a neck and neck fight to the finish.
Personally, i beleive if you want to fix the problems of the very contentious 2008 Democratic Primary, you should look into a Winner-Take-All solution. What made the primary so tight was the portioning of delegates based on the percentage each candidate won in that state. Unless a candidate handidly wins a state, the delegate ratio between them remains largely unchanged, as we saw in 2008. Under the current proposal, you would still have portioning except with more pledged delegates. So, again, the ratio between candidates in a tight race would still remain unchanged. Instead, if your goal is to solve this problem, give the winner all of them. If one candidate wins the state, even by a few percentage points, then he/she gets all the delegates of the state. Otherwise, the proposal to just make the non-pledged Superdelegates pledged delegates wont have any real affect on how things are done.
Read the story at Politico.com
