Superdelegates

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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Tennessee’s Governor Bresden offered a pretty good idea on how to nail down a Democratic nominee for President before the Denver convention. Quoting Bresden’s op-ed in the New York Times:

Here’s what our party should do: schedule a superdelegate primary. In early June, after the final primaries, the Democratic National Committee should call together our superdelegates in a public caucus.

Of the 795 superdelegates, over 40 percent have not announced which candidate they are supporting; I’m one of them. While it would be comfortable for me to delay making a decision until the convention, the reality is that I’ll have all the information I reasonably need in June, and so will my colleagues across the country.

There will have been more than 20 debates, and more than 28 million Americans will have made their choices and voted. Any remaining uncertainty in our nominee will then lie with the superdelegates, and it will be time for us to make our choices and get on with the business of electing a president.

I’ve got to say that, even though I’ll be voting either third-party or for McCain (see note below), I like the idea a lot. Intraparty squabbling will only detract from the seriousness of the general election, and I’d like to see some real debate emerge between McCain and the eventual Democratic nominee.

Besides…after the questions surrounding the 2000 and 2004 elections, the last thing that needs to happen is for a national decision to be based seemingly on the back-room discussions of a Democratic cabal. The Dems would be well-served by having at least the appearance of openness with regards to the final steps of their nominating process.

Of course, for such an idea to work, closure needs to be reached on what to do about Michigan and Florida delegates. That’s another discussion where intraparty squabbling is distracting at best, and damaging at worst.

There is one little catch to all this, however. Considering some of the vagaries involved…what happens if the Clinton-Obama race is still close—a handful of delegates apart—at the end of a superdelegate caucus? Would the two camps continue to fight all the way to Denver, trying to sway individual delegates here and there?

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?

I realize that given the vagaries of superdelegatedom, it’s very difficult to keep an accurate running count of how many delegates the Dem candidates have ahead of the convention.  However, could we perhaps get some consistency in the reckoning?

PoliticalWire has a comparison that highlights the discrepancies:

NBC: Obama 1,078, Clinton 969
CBS: Obama 1,242, Clinton 1,175
ABC: Obama 1,232, Clinton 1,205
CNN: Obama 1,215, Clinton 1,190
AP: Obama 1,223, Clinton 1,198

Over on the GOP side, Reliable Politics quotes McCain’s campaign manager as observing:

The results from [Tuesday's] primary elections in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC, make it mathematically impossible for Governor Huckabee to secure the Republican nomination for president. He now needs 950 delegates to secure the required 1,191. But in the remaining contests there are only 774 delegates available. He would need to win 123% of remaining delegates.

If I’m not mistaken, unless something dramatic happens, for the next six months, we’ll be hearing stories about the increasingly (in)famous Democratic superdelegates.

Seen in the New York Times:

“We have all been bombarded with e-mails from everybody and their mamas,” said Donna Brazile, a senior member of the Democratic National Committee. “Like, ‘Auntie Donna, you’re a superdelegate!’ My niece called me today to lobby me. I didn’t know what to say.”[...]

The Clinton campaign has established a system, overseen by one of the party’s most seasoned behind-the-scenes operators, Harold Ickes, to have superdelegates contacted by carefully chosen friends and local supporters, as well as by big-name figures like Madeleine K. Albright, a former secretary of state. For particularly tough sells, the campaign has former President Bill Clinton or Chelsea Clinton make the call.

Mr. Obama has enlisted Tom Daschle, the popular former Senate majority leader, as well as Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the party’s 2004 presidential nominee.

Well, I suppose that it’s slightly better than letting 9 Justices of the Supreme Court decide….

Via Political Wire, I’ve come across an assessment by WaPo’s Paul Kane that succinctly says what many of us already know:

Here’s the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination. To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process—with Clinton and Obama roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece. That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.

So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.

Ain’t gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they’ll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and both finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates. And then the super delegates decide this thing. That’s the math.

If I were Howard Dean, I’d be very tempted to start working on a deal between Hillary, Obama, and with the superdelegates to identify the nominee-apparent, now that the picture on the GOP side is virtually set. I mean, if it is going to come down to the superdelegates, why wait until August?

An alternative strategy would be to achieve some sort of gentlepersons’ agreement between the Hillary and Obama campaigns, to use the lack of a clear nominee-apparent to co-campaign for the Dems’ ticket in general, keeping interest up, but hopefully not inflaming intra-party squabbling that would only serve to benefit the GOP.

I suppose that such a play-nice-until-the-convention arrangement would have one added potential benefit, from the Dems’ point of view—would the lack of a clear Democratic candidate affect Bloomberg’s interest in running?

Mmmm…political strategery: fun stuff to consider (at least until your head explodes from the complexity).

Heading into Super Tuesday, the mainstream media seems to be abuzz with talk of just how close the Democratic nomination contest could be all the way into the convention.

(Considering how the polls look in some of the larger Super Tuesday states, I’m not quite as optimistic….but a week is a long time in the current political climate.)

Part of that buzz is over the role of superdelegates in the Democrats’ rules. From a New York Times article on the subject:

National party rules give special status to a select political group, including members of Congress, governors, members of the Democratic National Committee, past party officials, and former elected leaders like Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and their vice presidents, Al Gore and Walter F. Mondale.

Officially designated unpledged party leader and elected official delegates, members of this high-powered group are usually known by a catchier term: superdelegates.[...]

At the Democratic National Convention in August, there would be 796 superdelegates, assuming the convention sustains the national party’s penalties against Florida and Michigan for moving their primaries earlier in the year. In total, there are 4,049 Democratic delegates; to win the nomination, a candidate must secure 2,025 of them.[...]

Superdelegates were created after the 1980 election and were intended to restore some of the power over the nomination process to party insiders, keeping a lid on the zeal of party activists. They immediately came in handy for Mr. Mondale in his 1984 presidential bid, when they gave him a cushion over the upstart campaign of Gary Hart.

If the Hillary-Obama race remains tight that long, superdelegates would easily form the swing constituency…and in a sense, could render all the primary races effectively moot (except in their roles of weeding out the also-rans and ineffective campaigners).

If that happens… does anyone want to take a bet as to how quickly supporters of the un-nominated candidate will start drawing comparisons between the Superdelegate Cabal and the Supreme Court’s deciding the 2000 elections?

However, I suppose there is one advantage to having superdelegates. Consider the Republicans, where, if Huckabee and Giuliani don’t fade, and McCain and Romney keep battling for the front-runner position, it’s entirely possible that no candidate could achieve a majority of the delegates.

The GOP doesn’t have as many superdelegates in their process.

Without the Superdelegate Cabal at work, I wonder how many ballots it might take… to name the GOP nominee under such a scenario.