Currently, there’s about 441,000 registered voters in DC - 336,000 registered as Democrats.
(source: https://www.dcboee.org/voter_stats/voter_reg/2016.asp )
Currently, Ms. Clinton has 15,166,502 votes for her nomination, Mr. Sanders has 11,485,956.
(source: Democratic Convention 2016 )
Bernie *really doesn’t have the hang of this democracy thing, does he?
If it were a democratic process, you wouldn’t have Superdelgates.
My Google-fu is weak today, so I’ll ask everyone in general - have the superdelegates ever gone against the popular vote, overall?
No.
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Nice Astaireing of Johns post.
“There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders…Sanders knows the ride is about to stop—but he’s going to push it as far as he can before it does.”
In other words, it’s not really about what’s best for the country, or what’s best for the principles he supposedly stands for, and hasn’t been for quite a while. However it started, it’s now all about Bernie, his enraged, daft ego, and riding that cresting wave of fanatic supporters as far as he can.
Bernie’s speech this evening was horrid, all those pronouncements about What Will Happen. Guess what, Senator: the President of the United States is not a supreme dictator. Ultimately, to get anything accomplished, the President has to get the cooperation of people who disagree, often strenuously and vociferously. Do Bernie and his supporters get that, at all? One wonders.
Bernie has inspired a brief, notably enthusiastic movement, but does he have the character to recognize the difference between the ideal, and what is actually possible? Can he build lasting cooperation among like-minded but fundamentally different people to sustain those ideals? My guess is no.
His campaign and all it represents will be without notable long-term impact, just like his all-but forgettable career as Senator.
So keep up that hoarse, spittle-riven yelling all you like, Senator. Soon enough very few, if any, will be listening, and in the end it’s all your own fault. You lost the message, inspiring as it was for a time, in the midst of bitterness, recrimination, and conspiracy mongering.
Sanders supporters harass reporters after they called the race for Clinton on Monday.
This has been the most aggravating part of this campaign. Everything is a fucking conspiracy when it doesn’t go Bernie’s way. Harassment is considered an acceptable tactic to achieve the revolution.
I’m not sure if I’m interpreting your post correctly, so correct me if I’m wrong.
I think you’re commenting to the effect that I’m dodging the question of the legitimacy of superdelegates in a democratic process.
…well, I was - it didn’t seem germane to this particular thread. I did indulge myself in curiosity as to whether it’s ever made any difference, so here goes:
At this point, it strikes me as a moot question; the rules are what they are, in this election cycle.
For future cycles? Eh, I’d like to see the whole primary system revamped, at least made more consistent nationwide. All primaries, all closed, all proportional delegate allocation.
I see arguments on both sides for the role of superdelegates, and it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever made any difference anyway.
I’d be really surprised if it ever did - that pretty much guarantees that the party using supers to override the clear choice of the voters would suffer badly in the election in question. It’s very much the nuclear option.
More clearly, I think the superdelegates are not terribly democratic, nor particularly useful, and they should be scrapped.
Hell, as much as I despise Trump, I would not support him being passed over for the Republican nomination. He’s the clear choice of Republican voters, after all, and if the party faithful don’t like it, then they should look to their own culture, constituency, and aims.
That said, I expect he’ll be confirmed as the Republican nominee for President at their convention. Since he’s about the worst possible choice, I suspect that will demonstrate the uselessness of the superdelegate system.
Answered? Or regretting bringing it up? 
I agree with you about changing to all closed primaries. And Republicans don’t have superdelegates, BTW.
I also agree that it would be a very risky move on the Democratic side, and pretty blatantly anti-democratic, to use the supers to overrule the voters in a two-way race like we have this year. But here’s the type of scenario where I think they could be useful. Imagine a three-way race, with the following candidates:
Senator Alice Anderson: a widely respected center-left legislator.
Governor Bill Barnett: Also a mainstream Democrat, and an African American from the South.
Congressman Clive Cummings: A populist bombthrower with a radical past and few political achievements who is disliked by many others in the Democratic House caucus, and is roundly rejected by older and nonwhite voters. He does have a rabid young base of support, however.
So after the primaries are over, the pledged delegate standings look as follows:
Anderson: 10%
Barnett: 37%
Cummings: 38%
The remaining 15% are superdelegates. If they unite (after, no doubt, some private discussion in smoke-free rooms at the DNC) to throw their support behind Barnett, that gets him over the line, even though Cummings won the plurality of pledged delegates from the primaries. I would have no problem with that, and I would hope that voters could be educated that a plurality is not necessarily a majority (just as appeared might be necessary with Drumpf).
It’s a rare double :smack: from me.
One - thanks for the correction, SlackerInc, on the lack of supers in the Republican process. I should have known that.
Second - I typed out a fairly long reply, then caught my foot in my mouse cord and managed to shut down my browser completely, losing everything! And it was good, too! 
I see what you’re saying in your hypothetical, but I think, in practice, it’s a situation that would hardly ever come up. By the time the supers get involved, the race has generally (always?) been over bar the official recognition of an already established fact. Perhaps there’s a place for a small percentage of supers, as a tiebreaker in your scenario, but I’d top it out at no more than 10% of the total number of delegates - or just enough to settle something like your hypothetical. Perhaps set it up so they only come into play if the candidates have only a small difference in votes/delegates - 5% or less.
Otherwise, the party should honor the wishes of their electorate, like it or lump it.
I mean, or you could just implement something like runoff voting and sidestep that issue. If you just rank a list of candidates then you obviate any argument about what the “will of the voters” was. If you have superdelegates reserved for a contested convention, there’s always going to be arguments about what the people who voted for the “overwhelmingly losing” candidate “actually wanted” and in what proportion.
On the third hand, perhaps scrap the current system altogether.
Have one day for the primary, nationwide. Say, mid-June, all party members vote on a list of candidates, the one with a plurality of votes gets the nomination, and goes on to the Presidential election in November.
Now, I’ll admit I can’t think offhand of a good way for the candidates to be selected in the first place - X number of signatures on a petition, perhaps.
Campaigning, by the way, to begin no sooner than the first of May.
Now, this is just off the top of my head - I imagine all sorts of holes can be picked in it. Still, I can’t think of any way it’s worse than the current hodgepodge of rules and general silliness.
If nothing else, the screams at the proposal, especially from the states’ rights people, would be quite entertaining.
There were several articles put to press this morning about the Bernie or Bust voters. My knee jerk reaction was more frustration, but I am beginning to suspect that a fair number of the Bernie of Bust voters are the types of people who may not make a huge difference in this election. I never want to write off voters, as I appreciate new energy and enthusiasm, but some voters essentially disqualify themselves in a moral sense when all they have to say is “She’s corrupt, she has no values! Blah! Blah!” I doubt any of these young, white film studies majors, coffee house baristas, and starving artists know a flip about anyone’s political career, other than Bernie’s. I could be wrong, but I suspect that Trump’s negatives will be so high that he divides the republican party and loses the election. I am hopeful that enough people will eventually realize that voting for this fraud is to imperil America’s future for many years to come. My other guess is that many of the Bernieway or the highway voters will quietly just not vote. And probably won’t be heard from again in a long time, which could be a problem in its own right in 2018 but there’s time to deal with that.
And yet the strong leader in the actual vote won the nomination anyway.
We know of your admiration for ineffectual, preening dilettantes like Sanders, but he lost on his own (lack of) merit, not because “the system is rigged”. Time to suck it up.
Adding to my previous comment, out of all fairness to Bernie and his supporters, it was a good run. I know I’ve said some nasty things out of occasional frustration, but I respect much of what Bernie’s done and the energy he’s brought to the table. I kinda get the feeling that, in spite of all the perceived impudence from Sanders’ begrudging acknowledgment of Clinton’s inevitable nomination, Sanders does seem to be tilting toward acceptance of Clinton as the official nominee and de facto leader of the progressive cause. By that I mean he accepts that he’s not the nominee and he is probably not going to dispute that. However, he probably does dispute or remain skeptical of whether or not the democratic party and Hillary Clinton are truly going to be the only standard bearers of progressive politics in America. And you know what? That’s completely fair. I accept Bernie in that sense, and if he can apply a little more heat to politicians and organize a true movement at various levels of government, I might even warm up to the idea of becoming a Bernie Bro myself.
I would definitely prefer either a national primary, or a calendar that is shorter, and with an order randomized each cycle. (Let people witness the ping pong balls being selected.)
I only wish runoff or other vote ranking systems could actually obviate all such arguments. But that is not my impression, thanks to the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.
There is a detailed discussion here of instant runoff voting (IRV) as it applied to the 2009 Burlington mayoral election (Bernie’s old seat!). It gets pretty deep into the weeds, but one pithy illustration of the perversity that can still persist in this voting method is the following observation:
Yes, but the time to be magnanimous toward a loser is *after *he himself recognizes that he’s lost and refocuses on uniting behind the winner. Continued frustration is entirely warranted for at least a little while longer.
All voting systems have problems. I think IRV is much better than straight FPTP/plurality systems, but I actually generally prefer condorcet methods in concept (which obviously have their own problems; especially that candidates that would be irrelevant in other voting systems can have a major effect on condorcet methods). However, IRV is an easier “sell” because of the satisfaction and simplicity of ranking candidates. It’s easier to rank candidates than to, one of the easiest condorcet methods which looks like a round robin voting scheme. While on its face simple, it is pretty foreign and confusing to suddenly switch to from a simple tick the box system. I think both of these systems are preferable to superdelegates on an emotional and electorate morale level if nothing else.
I know IRV can get into some serious corner cases, but I’m not sure how common they are.
BTW, even though it doesn’t really matter in terms of the delegates and all that, I think it’s significant that Bernie appears to be losing California big. With 69% of votes counted, he’s currently trailing 56-43 percent. If he doesn’t win an outright majority of the votes remaining to be tallied, he’s going to end up with a double digit loss. And I think the way he framed the race, the case for pressing on to the convention and trying to sway the superdelegates rested on winning California, or at the *very *least getting one of his “essential ties”. How can he spend the next month arguing, with a straight face, “I know she got millions more votes and hundreds more delegates, and she blew me out on the last day of the race in the two biggest states left, but just give it to me anyway”? It’s laughable at this point.
Whereas if he had booked a win in California, it would have been a lot more tempting to press that case. I can’t imagine it possibly working, of course; but it would have been a lot more likely that he’d try it. Desperation is one thing, but c’mon.
The SDs slant the system from the start. And the caucuses are a complete mess, what with all the different ways of allocating delegates. There are lots of undemocratic things about the whole process, not just the SDs.
But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not so sure why everyone is so hun up on democracy at the primary level. The party needs to pick the person that will win, and if that’s undemocratic, then so be it. The only reason I can see to make the whole thing more democratic is if NOT doing so would piss off too many of the party faithful when November comes around.
So let me be clear: Bernie lost. I can point you to my posts from week ago where I said it was already over for him. There are things we can point to that stacked things against him, but it’s unlikely any of those things made a difference, on the whole. I would like to have seen Bernie win, but he didn’t. It’s amazing he did as well as he did. Despite what the polls may say now, it’s hard for me to imagine he would do better against Trump than Hillary will.