molbiogirl writes:
quote:
40% in the superdelegate's hands? WTF?
Actually, only about 20% of the Democratic delegate count is in the hands of superdelegates. They exist for very specific reasons in an attempt to get the people who are the most active in the party to take part in the selection of the nominee. That is, primaries don't actually vote for the nominee any more than the general presidential election actually votes for the candidate. Instead, you are voting for a delegate and the delegate will be the one who casts the vote for the nominee.
But for someone of importance in the party to be a delegate in the normal election process would require that he run against his own constituency. Thus, we have people who have actually run in elections and won their seats against not only other Democrats in the primary process but against Republicans in the general election being put in a poor position when it comes time to be active within their own party. By taking them out of the primary process and making them "superdelegates," they can bring their experience in actually running and winning a campaign to bear.
That's the rationale behind it whether one agrees with it or not. The Democratic party (like most other parties) used to have backroom methods of selecting nominees but then shifted to a primary system in order to open it up. In the early 80s, it was felt that the most successful Democrats, the ones who had won elections, were not participating enough and a system was devised to get them involved.
Now, even if we were to eliminate the superdelegates, your vote is fairly diluted with the delegate method if there is proportional representation as the Democratic party uses. Because the number of delegates for your particular district is so small, it requires a nominee to get much more than 50% of the vote in order to get more delegates than another candidate in order to get more delegates.
That is, if your district has only four delegates, then you can win with two-thirds of the vote but you're still only going to get two delegates while your opponent, with one-third of the vote, will get the other two. It's not enough to simply win...you have to win decisively.
Compare this to the Republican primary method which has no superdelegates and a winner-take-all process.
Rrhain
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