[QUOTE=Polerius]
[ol]
[li]Eliminate superdelegates (since the system seems undemocratic)[/li][li]Eliminate caucuses (due to a host of issues, e.g. they do not provide voter-choice privacy, since others see who you vote for)[/li][li]Shorten the primary season so that it doesn’t last this long (since a long fight is more likely to harden the warring camps’ supporters)[/li][li]Rotate which states get to be first in the primaries (so that other states don’t feel left out and push their primaries so early that they violate the party rules and lose their delegates)[/li][/ol]
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I’d divide reforms into two categories: calendar and noncalendar.
Calendar, of course, is about which states hold their primaries when: all at once? Regional primaries? A few early ones, then a free-for-all? Who gets to go first? All that stuff.
The range of options for calendar ‘reforms’ is so extensive, and intelligent people have such widely varying views on the subject, that I despair of getting any sort of consensus on this, ever. For instance, to me the idea of a one-day national primary is crazy, but every time the idea of how to reform the primaries comes up, people who have a goodly number of brain cells to rub together propose it.
The noncalendar reforms, OTOH, are a more fertile ground. Even though there’s still plenty of room for disagreement, it’s not quite as extreme.
1) Proportional representation v. assorted forms of winner-take-all: I happen to like the idea of proportional representation, just as I like the idea of the Presidential election being decided by popular vote. But there’s not much to debate: you either like it or you don’t.
The one argument I’ll make for it is that, at least IMHO, it should help a candidate just as much if his/her support in State X goes from 55% to 65% as when it goes from 45% to 55%. Why should that next 10% count less than the middle 10%, when it’s the same number of people involved?
*1a) How to do proportional representation. * Not the way the Dems did it this year - proportional by district and statewide, with two different pots of delegates statewide. I never did figure out why the PLEOs were treated as a separate pool with respect to proportionality.
Just have one big pool of delegates in each primary state that are apportioned to the candidates proportionally. If Dems are worried that somebody or another won’t get represented as a result, they should find another way to deal with that. They could lower the 15% threshold in larger states, for instance. But take Ohio: Hillary won that state, 54%-44%. She won the delegate competition by a distinctly closer 74-67 margin, and stuff like that made it harder than it should have been for her to get back in the race. If she’d won by 78-63, in keeping with her and Obama’s relative proportions of the vote, it would have still been very hard for her to catch up, but at least she would have had a chance.
Even though Hillary’s people should have been able to play the delegates-by-district game as well as Obama’s did, the fact is, the voters are the ones being gamed, either way. (You know me: I’m a small-d democrat. I don’t like it when the players can play games to maximize the effect of some voters, and reduce the effect of other voters, for their own ends.)
*2) Superdelegates: * I’d keep some, but I’d limit it to elected Congresscritters, Governors, Presidents, Veeps, and ex-Presidents and ex-Veeps. That would cut the size of the superdelegate pool by more than half, putting them in a position to only be able to decide really close races. And the ‘deciders’ would be people that had gotten to that position by being nominated to high office by their party, and elected by the voters, rather than being dominated by a bunch of state Democratic Party officials you’d never heard of.
*
3) Caucuses: *I’m personally partial to having a handful of caucuses in small-to-midsized states that don’t have NFL/MLB-sized cities. (It’s just too hard to do caucuses when you get too many people in one place involved.) I think caucuses measure the enthusiasm of supporters, and I think a system that puts some weight on that, even if most of the weight goes to the sheer numbers of people voting for a candidate, isn’t a bad idea. Some candidates have broad support within the party, but few enthusiastic backers. They look like Dukakis in 1988, or Dole in 1996.
I’ll give my idea of a good alternative primary calendar later; I’ve got to go do some work now.
