Proportional Delegate Allocation versus Winner-Take All

Republican Don Pesci asks an interesting question:

Should Democrats End Proportional Primaries? [...]

All this was predictable after the Democrat Party had put forward two strong candidates for the presidency, one a woman and the other a black American. The Republicans, relying on winner take all primaries, put their primary season to bed early. The Democrats, relying on proportional primaries, are still going at it, arousing fears in the Democrat Party of a real nominating convention and a foreshortened general election.

The obvious solution to this problem is to revert back to winner take all primaries, and yet no one has asked the leading Democrat contenders whether they would approve such a party reform.

You know, I think that’s a question Al Gore would be particularly well-qualified to answer.  After all, he won the popular vote in 2000…but lost the Electoral College.

There is one and only one advantage to a winner-takes-all system: a victor will likely be identified faster.

That speed, however, comes at the expense of discincenting candidates from campaigning in jurisdictions where a plurality is out of reach.   Under a proportional allocation system, viable candidates have an incentive to campaign in areas where they are unlikely to win, if only to limit the lead their opponent can take.  In so doing, the necessarily develop experience in campaigning in “hostile” territory, as well as have the opportunity to build organization in those areas….both of which will come in handy in a general election if there’s an intention to try to win a few states away from the other party.

In a winner-take-all system, the party runs afoul of the same problem some of us see in the current winner-takes-all-electoral-votes system of the presidential elections — there is no incentive to run in “safe” or “no hope” jurisdictions, and therefore only relatively small number of voters in a few key areas of the country matter.   That can’t be good for the republic.

I do, however, agree that the current spectacle of Hillary and Obama bashing on each other as the primary season drags on can’t be good for the Dems.   However, is the attrition of voters’ good will a result of the bashing itself, or the pointlessness of it, given that we know that the race will come down to the superdelegates, who won’t be bound until the convention at the end of August.

If there’s a problem with the Dems’ primary structure this year, it is with the scheduling of the primaries (too front-loaded, too much time beginning-to-end) and with the wild-card nature of the superdelegates.   Most participants in the Dems’ primaries voted two months ago…and they still will have to wait another month for the remaining primaries and caucuses to straggle in, plus an unknown amount of time until the superdelegates are nailed down.

If the Dems had followed a back-loaded primary schedule, one in which a majority of the delegates aren’t awarded until the final wave…I’d bet that this process wouldn’t seem as grueling.