I wonder why not, actually. Caucuses limit and distort participation. I suspect it’s placating New Hampshire and its insistence (in its own state constitution, AIUI) on having the first primary in the nation, meaning that placating Iowa means they have to hold something that isn’t a primary.
I wouldn’t say “zero issues.” There’s going to be sore losers who’ll find some pimple to hang their complaints on. And there’ll be an echosphere in which those complaints sound reasonable and reverberate loudly.
But you’re probably right that HRC will end with a triple majority. So legitimate issues will be minimal.
I’d be real happy to blow them up. They are also undemocratic.
I still think Bernie can win it. It will be tough, but it’s doable. Not everybody out there LURVES Clinton like many here do. She represents the present Democratic Party all too well, a party that has largely served as a punching bag for Republicans while slurping money from the same trough the Republicans do. Not a lovable party at all.
Actually I don’t.
The superdelegates serve a purpose. If they were allocated by some formula based off the popular vote there’d be no purpose in having them at all.
There is no procedural guarantee, especially in a multi-way race, that *any *candidate can secure a majority of pledged delegates. That’s the shotgun the Rs are staring down right now.
Conveniently for the Ds, they have a 2.0001 candidate race, not a 3.25 candidate race. So a pledged-delegate majority is all-but assured to accrue to somebody.
As **DigitalC **almost said, there are at least five potential measures of winning: total public votes cast, total states won, total pledged delegates won, total superdelegates promised, and total pledged+superdelegates. Only the latter is the one that matters.
Disappointed folks can and will cherry-pick the other ways to deliver their desired outcome. But it’ll speak volumes if, say, Sanders wins only the “total states won” metric and we don’t hear any cry by Sanders or his supporters for any of the other “more-democratic” options. You know, the ones that are actually more, not less, democratic.
As to your other point not quoted above, politics seems to be the only field where some folks decide catering to the least informed and most confused people is in fact the important thing to do. Will some rubes awake from their sitcom-induced stupor long enough to blink in confusion and belch “That ain’t right!”? Probably.
Should we rearrange how we run elections because of that? IMO no. Play the game or get out of the pool. Trump is a fine example of what we get when we encourage folks to play the game with no knowledge of the rules.
Then why is Bernie running as a Democrat? Shouldn’t he be truly honest & run as a Whatever He Is?
The pre-primary purpose of the superdelegates, collectively, is to give an imprimatur of Party approval. That’s what they’ve done.
The rest is about a (unlikely but possible) situation in which Sanders accumulates a slight majority in pledged delegates, but the supers putatively aligned with Clinton are a larger margin.
I’m saying, in that case, it would be a political problem–it would be harmful to the Party’s overall prospects in the fall, and beyond–were the supers not to realign with Sanders. It’s not a rearrangement of how the election is run for them to do so at that point, it’s entirely within the existing procedure. Just making the best decision at that (post-primary) time. Presumably, the overall success of the Party is more important to most of them than any one candidacy.
To change the party.
No, that’s called, “Being a spoiler.” In the sort of winner-take-all election that we will have this November, such a stance would be unethical, as it would only help whatever ultra-conservative the Republicans currently believe in serving up.
Bernie understands politics. So he will fight hard now, then rally around Clinton later. It’s the best way of pushing his principled fact-based perspective.
Shouldn’t the Democrats want Bernie and the many, many, many, many, many people who have voted for him under their tent? Do ya REALLY want another 3rd party running against the Democratic contender?
Agree completely that the supers “prime the pot” by defining the winner presumptive before the primary balloting gets underway.
Also agree completely that the purpose of the supers is to back who they think will win in Nov plus/minus any tweaks considering better or worse coat tails & such.
Which naturally opens the possibility that who they favor in Jan & who they favor in Aug are two different candidates. Either individually or as a collective group they’re free to change horses and change how enthusiastically they back any given horse. I agree that’s a legit part of the process too.
Where it appears we disagree is whether the supers as a group are somehow *obligated *to support the pledged delegate winner. Or in whether something is broken within the D primary+convention system if the supers don’t do so.
I hold that their whole and entire purpose is to be a “thumb on the scale” of the pledged delegate process. Not one so huge as to make a mockery of the primaries, but enough to place a steadying hand on the passions of the masses.
A bit like the “winner take most” features of the R primaries, they’re also there to lend a greater aura of unanimity to the process when the voters collectively mumble and produce a nearly dead heat.
With the current design of the delegate numbers, the supers are about 15% of the total delegates; the pledged delegates are about 85%.
So to break the 50% total required using only pledged delegates one needs about 59% of the pledged delegates.
Bottom line is any two-person race closer than roughly 60/40 is going to be subject to the supers either endorsing or potentially overriding the pledged delegate result. The closer the result is towards 60/40 the more unanimous the supers need to be in going the other way to actually override the pledged delegate result. Once somebody wins the pledged delegates by 60+% the supers can only watch helplessly; even them voting unanimously the other way won’t be enough to affect the outcome.
In a more realistic 52/48 pledged delegate situation the supers still need to lean roughly 37/63 the other way to override; that’s a pretty tall order politically unless the supers are convinced the public was totally bamboozled.
My take is the supers are a great topic for armchair theorizing and scenario-izing. The events where they truly override the pledged delegate totals are few and far between. IMO 2016 will not be one of those times, but I can’t as a matter of math rule it out. Yet.
More people have voted for Hillary than for Bernie.
But sure, we want Bernie supporters. Most Democratic voters like both Hillary and Bernie. We also want the Democratic business class. And since unions are weak, we need well heeled funders unless we get massive campaign finance reform. Which won’t happen. Even incremental campaign finance reform is a heavy lift.
That said, the number of uninsured Americans has dropped by millions since Obama took over. We prevented a second Great Depression. We’ve mostly pulled out of the Iraqi and Afghan quagmires: Obama made key decisions in this regard with little political credit. Decisions that most Republicans wouldn’t have made. (I’m referring to the hard line he took with his generals: “You’re not going to come back to me in another year, are you?”)
Insurance companies can’t yank away your coverage just because your cancer treatment got expensive and you didn’t disclose past cases of acne. They used to do that. Fortune 500 financial companies are trimming down because they don’t want to be requlated as Too Big To Fail - thanks to Dodd-Frank.
I could go on. Obama has accomplished more than we have any right to expect. Hillary or Sanders will accomplish some, but not as much as Obama. None will do something cockeyed like demand tribute from other nations like Trump.
Healthcare reform was a game changer. A game changer that extreme members of America’s hard left opposed. The good news is that there are a lot of reasonable lefties like elucidator and Sanders.
Overall, we have a 2 party system. So we need to practice big tent politics. I’d prefer a multiparty system, but winner take all elections don’t make that likely. I’d support efforts at electoral reform. Oddly enough, so might the tea party. Maybe. But Bernie isn’t pushing this anyway.
Let’s be honest here - he ran as a Democrat because the soapbox of “Independent” or “Democratic Socialist” would have been very small. Run as a Democrat and you get access to all the tools and all the microphones. Don’t run as for that and few will listen or even hear what you have to say.
Not sure if feelthebern.org spoke for him but their take was
Despite that perspective from his supporters, the DNC felt he met the party’s requirements:
(Emphasis mine.)
Hopefully he actually will be “faithful to the interests, welfare and success of the Democratic Party of the United States.” It was part of the qualification to run as a candidate for the party’s nomination.
Yes, Democrats want the supporters of both candidates to vote for and to work for the party’s nominee’s success in the general election.
I want the work Obama has done (against difficult odds, with an opposition highly motivated to be obstructionist at any cost) to be continued and grown upon.
Yes, I believe that Clinton can do that the best and that she has a more intelligent and nuanced command of the issues (not however the ones that make the best slogans), and that Sanders would be ineffectual, but end of day either of them would be trying to push in the same general direction, the opposite one than any of the potential GOP contenders.
This process may be about to get nastier. From Team Clinton’s POV she’s been being punched hard and a bit below the belt and she has hardly tapped back out of concern over the sensitivities of his supporters and the desire to have them rally to her in a few months. My sense is that his hitting her without her hitting back has worn thin.
Personally I am not sure which of hitting back or letting these hits continue unabated without hitting back is the worse or better choice. But those who hang on to thoughts that he will be the nominee should welcome his having the opportunity to demonstrate that he can handle even a light version of the sort of campaign that is assured to be out tenfold heavier in the general.
That too, no doubt, but it’s not the goal, only a means to it. The goal is not the WH. I’m sure Sanders never expected to get this far and even now does not expect to be president, and yet he is succeeding.
For a very generous definition of “succeeding”. 
I’m not talking about Bernie switching now–which I doubt he would do.
But some of his fans appear to have nothing but contempt for the Democratic Party. Why didn’t he begin his campaign on his own? Without going into primaries as a Democrat or appearing at the Democratic Debates?
Minnesota is likely to move to primaries for Presidential election cycles.
Right now what he is succeeding in doing is to help make the possibility of a GOP victory greater than it otherwise would have been.
He had succeeded in moving the conversation, the Overton window for fans of that concept. But he got himself surrounded by too many worshippers and minimally started to believe the hype. Moreover it does not seem to me that he had any such noble of an ambition in the first place.
Brian, I think you are completely wrong. Initially the goal was to get attention. It was not a means to achieve a goal; it was the goal. He’s been spouting the same platitudes for many years with few paying him any mind and the goal was to have a soapbox from which he’d have a bigger megaphone. Not any farther than that.
And he got hooked on the attention. Having finally become relevant, having gotten crowds to cheer him, he will do whatever is needed to keep getting his new found fix.
This next phase … him calling her “unqualified” to be president … his now repetitive spouting off untrue accusations in addition to his ongoing portrayal of her as a bought stooge of corporate interests and dishonest … and her beginning to punch back, albeit still in a very restrained manner (for now) … will cause harm. It serves no additional value to advancing any progressive agenda, that goal had already been maximized and a sit down with Clinton Warren and him at any point after Super Tuesday would have gotten the same promises (or frankly more) out of Clinton as they will get going any farther.
No, he will not get the nomination. No, I am not “afraid” of that. But yes an increasingly ugly process can cause increasing levels of general election harms from here. And once the harms are done they are not easily undone, making the value of his embrace once given worth less and less.
My take is, the Democratic Party can set things up however they like. If they want to have a few people with much greater power than the rest sitting in smoke-filled rooms and deciding what’s best for the teeming masses outside, they can do that. They just can’t call themselves democrats any more, because that’s just the opposite of what democracy is all about.
Now what do you call a system where a few have a concentration of power and make all the decisions on behalf of the masses? Oh, right, an oligarchy! You can call yourself the Oligarchy Party! Perfectly describes what you’re up to.
You’re welcome!