Oh, sure, if Sanders racks up enuf votes, a few Superdelegates will change horses. It happened last election. But the number was small.
852 supers in 2012, and 50 changed from Clinton to Obama. The same could happen again.
But to think a majority of the 461 currently committed will change is pretty hard to believe.
IF you understood, at any future point, that to be his expressed path forward - to get nominated with less than a majority of pledged delegates and less than a majority of the popular vote, by way of having the supers conclude that having won more individual states and in particular state that he portrays as critical toss-up ones (again, ignoring his losses in VA and presumptively FL), and good head to head polling against Trump, makes him the better choice anyway - would your support for him moving forward change in any way?
Bumping this thread after it was used as an example in this Pit thread of “Clinton supporters are frothing at the mouth”, specifically summarizing my op as
So the clarification of Team Sanders’ thoughts per Tad Devine as quoted by WaPo that I shared in that thread as well:
So yes Team Sanders has clarified: they would, if Sanders ends up slightly behind in pledged delegates and more behind in the popular vote, argue for the supers giving him the nomination, because he won more in the states he tried to win in. (The winning states “Democrats have to win” argument has quietly gone away as Clinton has won most of those …)
Personally I do not think that is trying “to overturn Democracy” … just silliness and chutzpah … but yeah, “what do you think?”
But then you’d have to take away Sanders’ wins in states Clinton didn’t try all that hard in, either. And discount caucus wins as being less representative of the electorate than primaries. I don’t think he really wants to go there.
Convincing rationalizations aren’t that easy to dream up, are they?
It is a pretty poor rationalization… it’s basically saying, “Look, we didn’t play the game very well in every state, but if you imagine a world where we did, we would have won.” I think that might actually be true, but it’s a tough argument to make when Sanders is raising and spending as much money as he now is. (And yes, it ignores the alternate reality where Clinton played the game even better and Sanders was forced to drop out months ago).
Sanders is still an underdog, though, and Clinton has benefited heavily from name recognition for her entire political career. As a lukewarm Sanders supporter, I must admit that it’s been frustrating to see this pattern play out over and over again: Sanders starts out with some ridiculous deficit in preliminary polling several months out, something like 50 points down; 2 weeks out new polling shows that Sanders has closed the gap; on the day of the primary, Sanders outperforms even those latest polls. The impression, then, is that given just a few more weeks and a few more millions to spend in each state, Sanders would have even more converts and the Clinton campaign would be in shambles.
That’s the way I feel, at least. It’s an epic come-from-behind victory where the buzzer is going to ring right before the actual victory part. And I can see the temptation to think that the superdelegates should see it the same way and put more time on the clock, but the problem, of course, is that we don’t really know if Sanders would win in overtime. It could be that the Sanders campaign has been running at 100% effectiveness all this time, and falling just short of victory is his theoretical maximum. I’m forced to disagree with Tad Devine, although it doesn’t seem that unreasonable for him to suggest it.
The very existence of the superdelegates makes such an argument reasonable. If they don’t ever vote differently from the pledged delegates, then there’s no point in having them. Or, contrapositively, if there is a point in having them, then there are some situations where they should vote differently from the pledged delegates. Is this such a situation? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s of course reasonable for the Sanders campaign to argue that it is.
What steronz just said. As bolstered by Chronos.
The supers are designed to act, and *should *act, and the rank and file *should *be glad to see them act, when the situation is ripe for them to do so.
Are we there today? No. Might we be there on the eve of the convention? Possible, but still IMO unlikely.
If we assume (insert usual caveats) that the supers are honestly working for the best possible D electoral outcome, it’s probably smart for them to begin publicly outlining their decision considerations. e.g. “If we see *this *happening, we’ll lean *this *way. If we see *that *happening we’ll lean *that *way. …”
Far better to spend 2 months now preparing the electorate (both the Ds and everybody else) for their eventual actions versus dropping a bomb at the convention. The only thing politics hates worse than losing is being surprised.
With so many disengaged maybe-voters out there they’ll never succeed in avoiding surprising somebody. Not even if they published a written decision algorithm and the actual primary results went right along one expected path through their published flow chart. But they can at least try.
Or they can tussle in secret under the blanket, drop their bomb at the convention and give the cynics the maximum excuse to be cynical.
The choice seems pretty obvious to me. But I’m not in charge nor am I much like anyone who is in charge.
Personally I am in a middle ground regarding the role of the superdelegates … I think the concept has some value but is flawed and superdelegates publicly committing before the game is played, a priori as per LSLGuy earlier on, seems like a foolish approach to me.
The total superdelegate count is I believe about 15% of the total. That means that in a two person race a candidate 59% of the pledged delegates can win even with all the superdelegates stacked against them, and that a candidate with just a bit more than 41% of the pledged delegates can win if all the superdelegates support him/her. Theoretically anything less than an 18 point pledged delegate win is up to the supers, if they spoke with one voice.
Putting that thumb on the scale to overturn a pledged delegate and popular vote majority is something that would require an extraordinary circumstance. If Sanders was to win the majority of pledged delegates and the popular vote he should be the nominee.
It seems though that the best reason for them to exist is for circumstances like those that exist on the GOP side, which is what the Democratic side had in 1972:
Just for historic interest.
Right, and if you’re a superdelegate, you know that your power is basically meaningless if you keep your vote a secret up until the convention. People will expect you to vote along pledged delegate/popular vote lines, even if you don’t want to, unless there are extraordinary circumstances. So what do you do? You do what almost all of the supers have done: you wield your power before the race has even started.
For the party, I can see the benefit – it intimidates outsider or insider-but-unfavored candidates from even running. But now, at this point, it just makes the vote seemed rigged. How would the popular vote be split today if the superdelegates hadn’t spoiled the race 4 months ago? How many of those early Clinton voters just voted for Clinton because her favored status among the party elite dissuaded people from considering alternative candidates?
Super delegates make the process less democratic. So we’re like to see the Democratic party rethink using them, and the Republican party adopt them.
No point getting into all the problems of the party and primary system, at least it’s better than it used to be, but neither party represents a majority, or even a plurality any more, in open primary states every independents feel like they’re part of the process, until they find out Super Dels get to override the popular vote.
But it’s what we have, and if neither Bernie or Hillary can reach the magic number then courting the Supes is part of the game, and they should reconsider the decision that they made before they even bothered to find out what their party members felt about it.
Supers are a safeguard that are generally unlikely to be, but can be, misused. The other case is that you have someone with a majority of the popular vote but a minority of delegates; in this case it’s very likely that supers would be swayed by the electability argument. I think it’s a highly unlikely scenario, even more so than the one mentioned above, but anything is possible.
Interesting question. Here’s a related one: The last primaries are on Jun 7 (R) and Jun 14 (D). How many Iowa or NH voters of either party will wish they could vote again in June knowing now the things they couldn’t have known then?
Imagine this (inspired by the NHL regular- and post-season):
The existing primaries go along just as they do today up through early June. Then two weeks later a single nationwide primary is held. All 50 states plus the various territories all vote again on Stupendous Saturday.
All the results prior to Stupendous Saturday are discarded and only the delegates & popular vote numbers from Stupendous Saturday go to the conventions which are held over the next couple weeks.
What would that do? Would that reward “momentum”? Would Sanders pull ahead in overtime? Would it give early drop-outs a new lease on life (e.g. Jeb?? … !!). Or would many (most?) folks simply switch their votes to whoever looks like the winner the day prior? Lots of people derive satisfaction from following a winning team and wearing their T-shirt.
My bottom line: Any mechanism other than everybody votes simultaneously and secretly and there’s a total news blackout until the polls close slants the process one way or another. It’s logically inevitable. So which deviations from the logical ideal are acceptable tradeoffs and which are not? Darn good question.
So, effectively, the votes prior to that would only be opinion polls, and we’d have close to a year of opinion polls coming in from various states, and people could watch those polls for momentum and so on and vote accordingly? We already have that.
Seems to me that a candidate would have to do a lot more national advertising in that single-primary scenario, to stay relevant in the minds of voters of those states which had already had their polls.
It’s not a serious proposal. It’s a thought experiment. One meant to highlight the fact that spreading primaries over months both empowers and disempowers voters in early-voting states and in late-voting states, each in different ways.
I was taking issue with the idea that some (far less than all) supers taking a public stance before the first primary inevitably poisons the whole process. Yes, it’s an influence, but not the only one, nor even the most prominent one.
So this is a question of degree, not of kind. As such moralist objections to supers ring a bit hollow at least to my ears.
I’d think so also, which is why I’m surprised the media isn’t pushing that idea. After all, elections are about spending 90% of those campaign contributions on advertising. The media needs our support, otherwise we could end up with unbiased people asking objective questions in actual debates.
I can’t see any reason to think this alternative scenario is favorable to Sanders. The presumption that Clinton voters (even “early” Clinton voters) voted for her because superdelegates had declared their support is unfounded. First, that’s insulting to Clinton’s voters, most of whom probably feel, as I do, that she’s the better candidate. But second, Clinton’s “inevitability” factor seems to only suppress her own vote totals. She always performs poorly (Michigan, eg) when the media narrative is that she’s got it in the bag, and then bounces back strongly (FL/MO/NC/OH) when it looks like he’s got his foot back in the door.
How do you explain the polling shift, then? On January 1st the RCP average showed at 24 point spread between the two, today it’s at 4.4. You’re right that I don’t have any data to back up my assertion, but something prompted Clinton supporters to abandon her in droves. You might feel strongly that she’s the better candidate, but clearly lots of people weren’t so strong in their convictions. Has Sanders just done a great job of convincing die-hard Clinton fans that he’s better? Or were all of those Clinton fans back in January not really that into her?
That was the narrative after Michigan, yes, but I don’t buy it. Clinton took a drumming on the 22nd and 26th, but did she get a surge of support in Wisconsin as a result? No, she was pummeled even harder than expected.
Sure, an entire campaign has been occurring since then. People tend to pay the most attention to the race shortly before their state votes. A perfectly reasonable hypothesis is that prior to a month before a given state’s race, the bulk of voters see the race as a highly qualified (former Senator, Secretary of State) woman they know well running against a wild-haired, self-proclaimed Socialist, and answer opinion polls accordingly. Then, they start paying attention to the campaign, and they see Sanders comport himself quite well. Some are attracted to his message. Polls shift. No part of this involves supers’ pre-declarations, which I think most voters are generally unaware of.
Sure, I’m not sure if it’s true or not either. But the basic narrative I’ve been hearing, even after Clinton’s drubbing on the 22nd and 26th was, “She wasn’t going to win those states; Sanders won and all, but it wasn’t enough, etc, etc.” It’ll be interesting to see some of the larger, more diverse states weighing in again later this month.
Plus Martin O’Malley. We’ll just have to agree to disagree then since all we have is hypotheses. I think O’Malley is the one who was screwed most by the superdelegates, since he’s a party insider and doesn’t have the luxury of sticking it to the system like Bernie does.
Four months ago it was “Here’s someone who’s a household name, who the press is treating as the inevitable candidate, versus 2 guys you’ve never heard of. Which one do you support?” Why the press was treating Clinton as the inevitable candidate wasn’t necessarily relevant to the people being polled, they just knew she was the dominating front runner, and the press considered her the front runner because of the polls at the time (circular feedback) and because of the endorsement/superdelegate advantage.