It’s hard to find a defender of superdelegates these days. They’re undemocratic, elitist, and stacked up against against a candidate who is running on themes of participation and populism. And I sympathize with the frustration people feel. In fact, for all that I’m making ‘the case for superdelegates’ here, at the end of the day, I’d be fine with scrapping the system. If only because the appearance of impropriety that they create is a problem.
But I do think it’s worth making clear why I find the attacks on the system to be significantly overstated. Put simply: I don’t think that superdelegates are particularly problematic, and I especially don’t think they pose any meaningful practical threat to democracy.
That’s true for the obvious reason that is already much-discussed: at the end of the day, even if one candidate (Sanders in ’16, Obama in ’08) trails badly on the superdelegate front early, that tells us almost nothing about how those delegates will actually align themselves once the convention rolls around. It’s difficult to envision a scenario where a Sanders-like candidate won the majority of pledged delegates only to have the result overturned by the superdelegates. Which means the gnashing of teeth about stolen results is almost certainly unnecessary.
“But,” you might reasonably respond, “if the superdelegates will invariably side with the eventual pledged delegate winner, then they serve no purpose at all and should still be scrapped.”
But this is where things get more complicated. Because I said it’s ‘difficult’ to envision a world where the superdelegates tipped an election. But difficult is not impossible. Those cases where this might take place are exceptional, and those exceptions are very much the issue. To explain:
The temporal rescue
Consider the following scenario: Candidate A wins 55% of the delegates, but accumulates that lead entirely in the first half of the campaign. In early April a scandal emerges that causes her popular support to drop like a stone. A previously weak challenger (Candidate B) suddenly starts winning huge margins, but doesn’t have enough time to make up the gap.
The superdelegates could tip the balance and nominate Candidate B, if they so choose. And it seems to me that they absolutely should do so. The primary calendar is long, and there’s a reason for that. But the temporal gap does matter in some cases. In this scenario, it’s almost certainly the case that many of the people who voted for Candidate A now wish they hadn’t. And they will likely appreciate the superdelegates rescuing them from the choice they made in the fog of uncertainty.
The Trump problem
Another exceptional case doesn’t require any fanciful imagination. You only have to look at the current Republican race, where Trump is wrecking havoc with a system that lacks any strong mechanisms for reasserting control.
If the Republicans had superdelegates, blocking Trump’s nomination would be far easier. And that would be a much better world. Both for the country, who escapes the danger of his election, and for the party, who escapes the shattering of their internal mechanisms for stability.
Primaries are about parties, not ‘democracy’ as such
This brings me to another point, one which I’m sure will be more contentious, but which I think people really ought to take a little more seriously. And that is: the purpose of the primary system is for the party to select its nominee. It’s very likely that they will want to do so using democratic mechanisms, but this isn’t an absolute requirement. Parties aren’t governmental institutions themselves; they are private organizations with motives, goals, ideological commitments, and institutional relationships. And they need all of those things to preserve their internal coherence and therefore achieve the objectives they’re promising to pursue.
It is of course true that a party might grow so corrupt that shattering its hold on its institutions becomes necessary. But this is definitely a case where people should be careful what they wish for. Unless we undertake massive constitutional reform, parties are an inevitable feature of our electoral structure. You might shatter one, but a new one will quickly emerge to fill the void. And it will employ almost all the same mechanisms to establish internal control on its agenda and power apparatuses. I completely understand why these things make people angry, but blaming the parties themselves misses the origin of the problem. These incentives are part of our constitutional order.
The point here is: parties use devices like superdelegates to maintain some degree of control on potentially unruly actors (the Trumps of the world), and this is both natural and (often) necessary.
It’s also important to remember that parties aren’t simply the elites. Parties are broad coalitions that involve millions of people, the actual rank and file. Which means they can be given new marching orders and new motivations. And it is often the case that this sort of internal reform works better than a Trumpian coup, where a bare majority, in the heat of the moment, blows apart all of the restraining structures that held things together.
I want to be clear here. I’m not arguing that primaries shouldn’t be democratic. I think they should! I’m just arguing that ‘democracy’ shouldn’t serve as an absolute decision rule. There will come circumstances where the decisions of millions of independent actors will be less optimal than the decision of a unified party apparatus. This is true for precisely the same reason that unregulated free markets can produce horrible inequalities. Markets are efficient in many respects, but sometimes centralized control is a good thing.
As with all things, balance is the watchword. It may well be that the superdelegate system errs by moving too far in the direction of centralization. And perhaps less coercive means can be found to permit the will of the people to find its best expression in selecting a nominee. But for the reasons I stated at the top of this piece, I don’t think that’s the case. Superdelegates are party actors and elected officials. They are enormously sensitive to the people, and accountable in quite a few other ways. If they ever did choose to put their finger on the scale of an election, it seems likely that it would be for very good reasons.
The actual convention matters, in ways that have nothing to do with the identity of the nominee
On a related note, it’s worth remembering that superdelegates exist for reasons that have nothing to do with picking the nominee.
Their ‘super’ status means that they’re unconnected to specific electoral results. And that’s the case partly because this system is simply a way to ensure that key actors in the party have a role to play at the convention. That is: the key thing is just to make sure that they’re delegates. Because the delegates at the convention have lots of other tasks beyond signing off on the nominee. They help write the platform. They shape the agenda of the party. And it seems quite reasonable to me that governors, members of the National Committee (who spend their whole lives working to promote the interests of the party), prominent mayors, leaders of important party interest groups, etc. have a reasonable role to play in that process.
Final point: the problem of pluralities
I’ve saved the simples argument for last. This one involves much less convoluted discussion about the nature of democracy and political parties, and doesn’t require that you buy into any premises about the proper function of elite mediators.
The simplest case for superdelegates is that they provide a device for producing a majority candidate in a system that might otherwise only give us a plurality winner.
To illustrate:
- Candidate A wins 45% of the pledged delegates (while coming in first in most of the states)
- Candidate B wins 20%
- Candidate C wins 20%
- Candidate D wins 10%
- Candidates E-G combine to take the final 5%
In this hypothetical, we started with a very divided field. The normal process of winnowing took longer than usual to exert itself, and quite a few candidates stuck around through Super Tuesday. In a proportional system (the right way to run a primary, I think), they can easily gather quite a few delegates without necessarily winning many (or any) contests.
I think it’s quite clear that Candidate A is the ‘winner’ of this contest. But absent superdelegates, they have no way to guarantee the nomination. Which means you might end up with a series of arguments over the summer and a contested convention, in which a bunch of factional candidates squabble amongst themselves, and do serious damage to the party in the process.
Conclusion
I started out by saying that I’d probably support efforts to eliminate the superdelegate system. I completely understand the reasons why it bothers people, and I’m not insensitive to the concern that it threatens the spirit of democratic selection.I’d also add that there are other ways to achieve most of the benefits I’ve talked about here. I’m not positive those workarounds would ultimately be any more ‘democratic’ in nature, but there are probably ways to manage the system with a little bit more sensitivity to the frustration of those who on the outside of the ‘room where it happens.’
But in a world filled with things deserving our genuine outrage, this ought to be on the extreme low end of our priorities. I understand why this system feels aggravating, but I implore my Sanders-supporting friends out there to find more significant targets for their opprobrium. There is a lot that’s genuinely wrong with our system, and which is far more worthy of the polemic that’s currently being wasted on this subject.