Delegates

I have CSPAN on as I type, after having sweet-talked the remote away from my wife.

Looking at the "every vote counts" protest, I’m still left to wonder — whatever happened to belief in the fairness of playing by the same set of rules?

Last week, I posted my back-of-the-envelope arithmetic to double-check the sanity of Hillary’s delegate math.

In case anyone’s interested, here is an update to that reckoning:

Last week, the “% unpledged Hillary needs to win” figures were 80%, 56%, and 64%.

If Hillary could pull off an bigger rout of Obama than is expected — say by getting a margin of victory beyond 225,000 — she would have a better claim to winning the popular vote.

However, it looks like she hasn’t gained much traction with that argument among the superdelegates, so far.  That bodes ill for her candidacy, since in the end, it’s the delegate count that matters.

In the wake of the vigor the Clinton political machine has been putting into Hillary’s campaign since Indiana, I’ve been wondering “why”?    I’ve seen various pundits talking about different scenarios in which Hillary could stage a come-from-behind coup…but I haven’t yet seen a nice, clean description of how it might occur.

So, borrowing data from RealClearPolitics, RedState (which I might frequently disagree with, but their projections on the remaining primaries pass the sniff test), and Wikipedia, I’ve put together the following table:

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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.

There has been quite a bit of discussion on many blogs and other media about what to do with the Florida and Michigan delegate mess.

Although I still think that a policy of “the rules are the rules; to change them retroactively would be unfair” is the best policy, it seems increasingly unlikely that political pressures would permit such a stance.

As a result, there are all sorts of schemes proposed on how to “fairly” seat the delegates from those two states. They range from letting the primaries and delegate rules stand as-is, without sanction (significant benefit to Clinton); to counting FL and MI delegates as half-votes; to enforcing FL and MI delegates to vote either a 50/50 split, or according to the national popular vote.

I offer one other idea: Permit Michigan and Florida Democrats to pick their delegations in the usual way, seat the delegates, permit them full votes…but do NOT require the individual delegates to be bound to vote for the candidate they would normally be pledged to.

To the extent that Obama may have been disadvantaged by actually honoring the pledge to not run in states violating party rules, he would have the opportunity to woo over a few of Clinton’s delegates, much as he likely would have fared a little bit better in those states, if he had actually campaigned there. And, of course, Hillary, could campaign to protect her delegates…or even sway a few delegates that would otherwise go to Obama.

It’s not as clean as holding a new vote, and changing the rules mid-campaign is still unfair to Obama…but this would have the advantage of allowing a reflection of popular sentiment in those two states, while giving Obama a chance to do something akin to retroactive campaigning in those two states.

What a clusterfudge the Democrats’ nomination battle is tuning into. From Politico:

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination.

This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.

Apparently the pledged delegates (admittedly, many of whom still haven’t been formally picked or allocated) aren’t bound by their pledges. And, given the potential lack of a clear front-runner….well, all’s fair in love, war, health insurance claims handling, and politics, right?

I hope that before 2012 some serious primary reform can be achieved.

In the meantime, perhaps the Democrats’ nomination battle could be settled by more civilized means….perhaps by tapping Vince McMahon to put on a pay-per-view extravaganza?