By Sally Kohn, CNN Political
Commentator
(CNN)You might think, from
their title, that superdelegates are better than regular delegates.
Actually, they're worse.
The process for presidential
elections in the United States is governed by the Constitution. Primary
elections, however, are not. They are controlled by the political parties
themselves. In fact, until the 1820s, members of Congress chose the presidential
nominee for each party. That elitist system started to buckle with the advent
of national conventions, though delegates were still selected through state and
local convention processes controlled by the parties.
It wasn't until the mid-1900s
that parties embraced primary elections as part of the process for deciding on
presidential candidates. But to ensure that the voters themselves didn't have
all the power, in 1982 the Democratic Party adopted what are called
superdelegates, who today control 15% of the final nomination process.
The Republican Party has
superdelegates, too, but they have a lot less power. GOP superdelegates are
only about 7% of the nominating vote, and according to Republican convention
rules, superdelegates must vote in accordance with their state primary
outcomes.
It's in the Democratic Party
that the outsized power and lack of accountability of superdelegates is
supremely, well, undemocratic.
Specifically, after the
Democratic caucuses in Nevada, CNN estimated
that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were almost tied for pledged delegates,
with 52 and 51 of them, respectively. And yet Clinton was leading by a much
wider margin in the total delegate count because a whopping 445 superdelegates
-- out of a total of 712 -- pledged to support her. By comparison, just 18
superdelegates pledged to support Sanders.
In other words, while Clinton
and Sanders were almost perfectly split in the tally of voter-determined
delegates, superdelegates threw their weight behind Clinton by an almost
25-to-1 ratio.
Any liberal who has ever been
at a protest march for social justice has heard the popular chant: "This
is what democracy looks like!" Well, superdelegates are definitely not
what democracy looks like. Anything but.
So here's where it gets really
interesting: In the 2008 Democratic primary, by at least some measures, more people actually voted for
Clinton than for Barack Obama. But because of the way pledged delegates are
counted and because Obama's team led an effort early on to lock down
superdelegates, the math ultimately favored Obama, and Clinton dropped out.
Clinton, in turn, learned not to dismantle the superdelegate system but to
better play it, hiring the architect of Obama's superdelegate strategy to
marshal hers this time around. And so fans of Sanders -- as well as,
presumably, fans of democratic participation in general -- have launched
efforts to call on superdelegates to reflect the will of the voters they
represent and promise to support whichever candidate their state voters back.
One such petition by MoveOn.org, has over 179,000 signatures. Another similar petition
has almost 200,000 signatures.
Not so fast, says the
Democratic Party. The uproar about superdelegates started after the New
Hampshire primary. Sanders won 60% of the vote and, therefore, 15 of the
state's pledged delegates. Clinton won just nine delegates. But nonetheless,
Sanders and Clinton remained tied vis-a-vis New Hampshire delegates because six
of the state's eight superdelegates backed Clinton.
CNN's Jake Tapper asked
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz why the
Democratic Party would embrace such a plainly undemocratic process. Here's what
she said:
"Unpledged delegates
exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have
to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."
In other words, the Democratic
Party's superdelegates exist to preserve the power and influence of the
Democratic Party's elite. Well that makes perfect sense -- if you're, say, the
inherently elitist, pro-big business, rich Republican Party. But not if you're
supposed to be the party that protects the interests of regular Americans.
And sure, there's an argument
to be made that both parties should have a fail-safe way to prevent the sort of
cataclysmic disaster of the kind Donald Trump
is creating by becoming the GOP nominee. But democracy is democracy, folks.
We're supposed to stand by the process even if we don't like the outcome.
According to a new poll, nearly one in three Trump supporters in
South Carolina supports banning gay people from entering the United States.
That's horrifying. But the Republican Party has to reckon with those voters --
and the way in which Republican policies and rhetoric over the last several
decades have given succor and solace to those views. Sweeping them under the
rug via a superdelegate trouncing would be convenient but wrong.
Most of us know the quotes
about democracy being messy or imperfect or the worst form of government except
for all the others. Here's another quote: "Democracy is beautiful in
theory; in practice it is a fallacy." That one comes from Mussolini, who
was a fascist, and, perhaps if he were alive today, would be a superdelegate.
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