Superdelegates were a pretty controversial thing during the 2016 cycle, with all sorts of progressives and Sanders supporters writing and sometimes shouting (yes I was at a Senate District convention where people started shouting) about why they are bad. The arguments are numerous but they largely boil down to the idea that unpledged delegates for the national party convention are "undemocratic" and "corrupt" and that the key to winning future elections is to embrace political "reforms" because that's what voters really want. See Bernie himself for the full argument.
My view is that this is total hogwash. Superdelegates fulfill an important roll and getting rid of them would be bad for the Democratic Party for a number of reasons while yielding few if any tangible benefits.
Let's start with the history. Superdelegates such as they are are a relatively new concept in Democratic politics. They were only introduced in 1984 in an attempt to solve very real problems that had emerged after the presidential nomination system was "reformed" under the McGovern-Fraser Commission's reforms in the run up to the 1972 presidential cycle.
The general view of Democrats by 1984 was these reforms, whatever their good intentions, had led to some major problems emerging when it came time for the party to select presidential nominees. In 1972 the party had been stuck with a unpopular liberal nominee, George McGovern, who presided of a very contentious and bizarre convention and then went on to lose in one of the biggest landslides in American history. To make matters worse the "reformed" system in 1976 produced a nominee whose dysfunctional relationship with his own party was the stuff of legends and led to another inter-party brawl in 1980 that helped pave the way for Ronald Reagan's triumph at the polls and all the legacies that flowed from that.
In other words superdelegates didn't begin as some nefarious plot to "rig" the nominations process against Bernie Sanders, but rather as a sensible reform to make sure that pushes for what the late great political scientist Nelson Polsby liked to call "factional candidates", be that an ideologically liberal factional candidate like McGovern or a candidate like Jimmy Carter's whose backing was largely based on his own personality and personal relationships, could be tempered by party actors who would want candidates more interested in coalition building and be able to appeal to broader swathes of the electorate that committed liberal activists.
But that was a long time ago right? Well yes but the whole point of superdelegates remains very real, even if Jimmy Carter isn't a powerful political force anymore. Jonathan Bernstein summed this up pretty well recently this way:
Supers have several practical functions. Their votes for the winner of the primaries and caucuses extends the delegate lead, adding both legitimacy and certainty to the nominee. That's something they've done in close contests, such as the 2008 cycle. But they're also a fail-safe if something goes wrong. The proportional system of delegate allocation makes it possible that the winning candidate will fall just short of a delegate majority if one or more spoiler candidates hang on and accumulate delegates even after they no longer have a chance to win. Supers, if that happens, would presumably put the plurality winner over the top, avoiding an ugly and counterproductive deadlocked convention.In other words Supers don't just act as a way to bind the nominee and the party together, but as also a way to pick a winner in a more functional way overall, and especially to avoid a convention meltdown. Don't get me wrong, journalists and political junkies would love something like that, but political parties have strong incentives to write rules that will prevent another one of these from happening.
Moreover supers exist as an important backstop, even if the Democrats have never had to use it. Again Bernstein:
More controversially, it is possible to imagine the supers as the last line of defense against a Trump-like candidate -- one who is a true party outsider, had won with a factional campaign that alienated everyone else in the party, and who party actors believe would make a weak candidate and a terrible president. Supers will not be eager to act in such a case, in large part because the supers are almost all either directly or indirectly chosen by party voters. That's why they wouldn't normally overturn the results of the primaries and caucuses. But in an extreme case, a Trump-like case, they might.This isn't an abstract danger. There's good evidence Mark Zuckerberg is looking at running for president for example and it's easy to imagine him using the Trump play book to stage a "hostile takeover" of the Democratic Party in the 2020 cycle. The media coverage of him could easily follow the "Missing Airplane" genre of Trump coverage in 2015-16 where the story becomes Trump, not the actual race. As political scientist Matthew Dickinson pointed out in the summer of 2016, there's good evidence that just getting lots of coverage, of any kind, is a winning strategy when it comes to presidential primaries.
I can imagine it now. It's the fall of 2019 and things are heating up. Kamala Harris is giving a series of speeches about her campaign's new white paper on how to close the achievement gap in primary education. Meanwhile Kirsten Gillibrand is working on key union endorsements and barnstorming New Hampshire about increasing middle class wages. While Cory Booker is cramming food into his mouth at a never ending series of coil boils in Iowa....and reporters just don't care because Mark Zuckerberg is going to do an insane media event with lots of giant screens where he will say crazy nonsense ("Why have a Congress? Let's just all vote for laws by liking or angry facing things on Facebook...disruption!")
Journalists and some of the public would probably love such a race, just as Trump, while hated by most reporters, is a pretty great news story and seems to be driving a lot of people to subscribe to newspapers again. But for parties? Well for the GOP Trump is already something between a disaster and an epic disaster, just as I think Zuckerberg or Oprah would be for the Democrats. I can assure you, Democratic party actors would much rather have a nominee with a grasp of the issues and proven political skills, things that come out in a contested presidential nominations contest, than someone who is great at hogging the media spotlight.
Whenever I raise these points on Twitter or in comments threads I still hang out on (yes I still do that) I often get a number of arguments pushing back. Let's go through them bullet point style.
- "Superdelegates are undemocratic." This is a pretty common argument but I think it's thinking about these things the wrong way. To begin with lots of supers are themselves elected officials and thus obviously are "democratically elected" in a way. But more importantly this is just a weird bar to raise. Most people can't be bothered to cast a ballot in presidential primaries, so whatever system you use it's not going to represent "the people" but rather those most motivated people who turn out. Moreover in a system of sequential primaries the first ones are much more important than later ones. So the system is going to be "undemocratic" any way you slice it. To paraphrase political scientist Hans Noel giving power to party actors with strong incentives to winnow the field and settle on a nominee that can win and will act in accordance with the party's wishes strikes me as being a lot better than relying on eccentric gazillionaires or news directors at CNN to do the winnowing.
- "Okay but that just shows we need a national primary." This is a common response to points about how the "undemocratic" arguments don't hold up when you're talk about low participation in a sequential process. We could do this, but a low turn out national primary to determine the nominees would probably make all the problems out outlined above worse. My view is if we are going to do this we might as well just have it in April of the election year as a reality TV show (we could get Blake Shelton the "The Sexist Man Alive" to host) and just all vote via text message after everyone does a sing...uh...speech/debate competition. Trump was inflected on us in no small part because the GOP treated their nominations process in the 2016 cycle as a sort episode of The Voice and I think that's bad. But your millage may vary.
- "But superdelegates can rig the process against the will of the people!" I find this argument curious. After all members of "the expanded party network" that is elected officials, campaign and governing professionals, party aligned interested groups, activists, and hangers on like me are already working hard behind the scenes to try and advantage their chosen candidates. Bernie Sanders is clearly trying to pitch himself to the same "insiders" who "rigged" the process last time after all. In other words party actors and candidates will work hard to line up support for very real reasons, ending superdelegates won't change this, but will end the positive outcomes they are responsible for.
- "If superdelegates did overturn the choice of most voters there would be a [insert bad thing here]!" Don't get me wrong, this would be an extreme step and it hasn't happened before, but it's not clear that the party would die or whatever at all. After all the Democratic Party didn't end after the 1968 or 1924 fiascos. No more than the GOP would have "ended" if they had superdelegates and they stopped Trump at the convention. In fact in someways Democratic style rules, that is proportional representation for delegates and supers, might very well have stoped Trump either during the primaries or at the convention! Marco Rubio or whoever might very well have rallied the party in the aftermath of such a convention and won anyway (Hubert Humphrey came very close to winning after the 1968 debacle after all). I'm no fan of "Lil' Marco" but I think he'd make a better president that Trump. Certainly he wouldn't be Tweeting about starting World War III every other week. The big point is the GOP would probably be fine in the long run in this scenario and would be focusing on 2018 and 2020. In the universe we live in the GOP sticking to the "choice of the people" has raised some very real short and long term problems for them. Problems that will probably only get worse.
- "You're just a smug party hack opposed to democracy aren't you?" I'll cop to the first two points, but I think this is a narrow and limited version of what "democracy" is to begin with. In other words I follow the Achen/Bartles theory of "democracy" when it comes to these sorts of questions, and find the "folk theory" of democracy to be wrong in a lot of ways. For more see noted political theorist "Super Hans" from the great British comedy Peep Show.
Eliminating them entirely, however, would eliminate something that's worked pretty well for over 30 years. It would eliminate some of the fail-safes built into the system and leave the overall process more vulnerable to catastrophic errors. In the short term, it would be destabilizing -- parties thrive on stable rules and processes.I think that's exactly right. Supers have done a good job of staving off disaster for 30 years and getting rid of them poses short term destabilization and a more long term threat that a "long tails" disaster type scenario could play out. I get that some people are still mad at Hilary and think Bernie Sanders was morally entitled to the nomination, but lots of people think that about their candidates. You may think the key to winning elections is for the Democratic Party to embrace your policy preferences and favorite style of politics, but there's no reason to think you're anymore correct than Martin O'Malley dead enders.
Process reform because process reform because process reform may sound like a good strategy but it has real costs in terms of long term political outcomes (see Carter, James Earl) and saps energy that could be used for something else more productive.
In other words Superdelegates are, well, super.
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