[QUOTE=Sunspace]
If people are voting to determine who their party representatives will choose as presidential candidate, won’t that be predetermined when the people in all the states and territories have voted? Why have the party convention at all, if it’s a just a rubber stamp?
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The thing to remember is that the American political process grew, it wasn’t designed.
The first thing to remember is that the people who drafted the Constitution were phenomenally conflicted people: They believed in Democracy, with that capital D, but at the same time, they also mistrusted the masses. If you don’t believe me, consider that franchise was originally restricted to propertied men. And then look at the way that the Senators were elected. And the Electoral College, today.
So, as the political party (I hesitate to call it a system) lens for American politics grew, the original purpose of the conventions was to allow for the party leaders to select the candidate. And for the conventioneers, who were either leaders in their own right, or more often either proteges or placeholders for those leaders, to basically network, for their local issues to see what should or should not be pushed to be a national issue. The working out of a party platform, was just that - where a group of influential delegates would come to the convention to support their individual points, or planks, to work a compromise platform that the party, and its candidates, would support.
Which was a workable process, if not what I’d call an ideal one.
While this was going on, many of the insulations that the framers of the Constitution had established to put government at one remove from the masses were falling by the wayside: the sanction of slavery, the restrictions based on property for the franchise, extending the franchise to women, the direct election of Senators - all were what I’d call part of a Populist thread in American politics.
By the second half of the Twentieth Century, it became noted that a lot of the power brokers at the political conventions were people who were influential without ever having stood for a single popular election, and were often choosing planks, platforms and even candidates that were not Populist. And so the next great Populist reform was to establish Primary elections where the people would be able to choose their planks, platforms and especially candidates - since the candidate they chose would have the plank and platform they wanted, of course.
Now we get towards today, where people are starting to think that maybe those smoke-filled rooms weren’t all bad, after all, and so the Democratic Party decided to have some votes at the convention that weren’t tied to the popular voting results, in an effort to allow for some moderation of the popular choice. (which I want to say, explicitly, isn’t all that much more popular if the primary process drags on for months, so that the first states to vote have a radically different ballot than the latter states…)
In this instance, I believe that the Democratic Party chose to try to have it’s cake (the Populist primaries) and eat it, too (by allowing for the party faithful to vote their conscience at the convention) and it’s going to end up giving them indigestion.
The convention’s purpose and utility, these days is greatly reduced, but just because it’s not as much official power, don’t underestimate the utility of having the party leaders meeting face-to-face, networking, establishing contacts for the next election cycle, or simply trying to look at local issues that may be growing towards national importance. The conventions still serve a useful purpose, or at least I believe they can serve one. Even if the excuse for the convention, choosing the candidate, has been obviated.
On preview: Levdrakon, that’s because the concept of the Superdelegate is a new one, specifically introduced for this election cycle.