New Rules

by digby

There is a lot of sturm and drang about this idea of superdelegates deciding the election, with people like Donna Brazile threatening to quit the party if they do. Here’s Chris Bowers:

If someone is nominated for POTUS from the Democratic Party despite another candidate receiving more poplar support from Democratic primary voters and caucus goers, I will resign as local precinct captain, resign my seat on the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee, immediately cease all fundraising for all Democrats, refuse to endorse the Democratic “nominee” for any office, and otherwise disengage from the Democratic Party through all available means of doing so.

This is not a negotiable position. If the Democratic Party does not nominate the candidate for POTUS that the majority (or plurality) of its participants in primaries and caucuses want it to nominate, then I will quit the Democratic Party.

Kevin Drum has the same question I do about this:

… [W]ho decides what the popular will is anyway? Is it number of pledged delegates from the state contests? Total popular vote? Total number of states won? What about uncommitted delegates from primary states? Or caucus states, in which there’s no popular vote to consult and delegates are selected in a decidedly nondemocratic fashion to begin with? And what about all the independent and crossover voters? Personally, I’d just as soon they didn’t have a say in selecting the nominee of my party at all, but the rules say otherwise. If I’m a superdelegate, do I count their votes, or do I pore over exit polls to try to tease out how Democratic Party voters voted? And how do I take into account the obviously disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, two tiny states that have far more power than any truly democratic process would ever give them?

I’m not very excited at the idea of superdelegates deciding the nomination either, but the only way that will happen is if the primaries end up nearly tied in the first place. Then factor in the number of ways in which the primary/caucus process is nondemocratic from the get go, and it hardly seems practical to insist that superdelegates should all somehow divine a single “democratic” result from a very close race.

And then there is that fact that some pledge delegates are more heavily weighted depending on their past loyalty to the party or that they represent rural districts (as in Nevada), which results in more delegates being awarded for the same number of votes in some cases. Do you want the super-delegates to count them more or less? Caucuses tend to favor certain demographics and primaries others. Michigan and Florida had a whole bunch of actual humans pull a lever whose votes, under the rules, won’t be counted. There are all these superdelegates whose presence was designed to prevent another 1972-like debacle, but which now may actually trigger one. It’s a mess.

This is the problem with this argument. I am all for insisting that the decision be based upon the will of the people. But the system is so weird that I don’t think anyone can tell what that really will be if the party remains polarized.

So while I am certainly sympathetic to the notion that the elite fat cats shouldn’t decide for us, I think somebody needs to set forth some detailed criteria about how they should go about determining a more democratic way to decide this thing if there is a tie. Certainly the candidates are both hedging bets with this, which is perfectly understandable. This is shaping up to be trench warfare.

Personally, I don’t think we’ll have a tie much longer. It’s hard to see how either candidate can unify the country if they can’t demonstrate that they can unify the Democratic Party. Something has to break and I suspect voters will be the ones to do it.

.