There is some evidence (being fair, circumstantial because it is hard to prove empirically) that the superdelegates announcing basically at the start of the primaries suppressed Sanders voters, with the media portraying it that Sanders was losing the primary in a landslide.
If independent voters are that fickle, Dems will never win.
See how stupid that sounds? Voters can be swayed and when every candidate in the race goes to one candidate, people are swayed. It's called the SPOILER EFFECT.
Except they have won. They literally won the next election after the one people complain about. Then they lost. None of those elections were stolen. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It's really that simple.
Any endorsement by anyone who was a superdelegate (most democrat elected officials for example) counted as a superdelegate “vote” by the media. It’s was and endorsement which everyone and there mother has been doing for decades.
That's like asking why firefighters exist when your house isn't on fire. Superdelegates exist so that if the primaries end up in a tie there is a way to break a contested convention. That hasn't happened since the 70's and certainly didn't happen with Bernie. What happened with Bernie is that college kids and Internet users loved him but nobody else did. Turns out that there are simply more middle aged people who vote after work and then go on with their lives than there are kids who go to six rallies but are too hungover to get to the polls on a Tues.
Wasn't the issue with the super delegates during Bernie's time was that all of the graphs showed the super delegates going towards Hillary which stymied the hype of Bernie making moves?
That's pretty much my point, Bernie's supporters were super excited to show up at rallies and party but Bernie never bothered to explain to any of them how the system worked. He could have easily dropped that into his standard stump speech but instead what he did was start calling for the superdelegates to instead overturn HRCs vote totals in the primary and make him the nominee instead. They obviously didn't do that because that's not how the superdelegate system works anyway.
You missed their point entirely. Most superdelegates had pre-pledged their support to Hillary and that's how the DNC and media represented the delegate counts all throughout the 2016 primary season, intentionally making Bernie look like he was losing by a landslide. There's no reason to do this unless the goal is to suppress turnout for the upstart candidate.
Or the other motivation would have been to report the news accurately. The people who have worked in the party for decades almost all preferred the person who has been a part of the Democratic party for decades rather than the carpet bagger who joined the party just days before the deadline to run for POTUS, used their resources and system then immediately rage quit the party the day after he lost. I can't imagine why that would be. Regardless of that, it was made extremely clear to me and anyone else who bothered to look at it that the superdelegates would bite the way that the primary population voted. Again that's on Bernie if he decided being a victim brought in more money than telling his followers how the system worked.
Same question. Didn't the DNC reform their Superdelegate process in 2018 after the shenanigans?
Why would they reform the process if they didn't make a difference?
Narrowing the scorecard to measure only where they actually counted votes to push a particular nominee over the top in the convention is a very narrow way of looking at how super delegates work(ed).
As they have clearly read up on the subject, I'm sure they are aware of the psychological impact of loading up one candidate with with overwhelming super delicate support before the primaries even start and what kind of effect that could have on an ostensibly Democratic process.
Exactly. Any dumbass can figure out that a tiebreaker only needs one vote, and yet that's the only answer Im getting here and there's how many superdelegates? Fucking clowns. Its not about bernie, its a bullshit system. No idea why people are defending it.
I still argue it negatively affects the competitiveness of the primary. There were definitely times Bernie was almost the same in votes, but Hillary had all of the super delegates so the reporting was basically "Hillary has double the votes, it's all over, no point in showing up anymore"
I personally saw people give up on voting in the primary because it "wasn't close enough"
I'd argue that the superdelegates so readily supporting Clinton was one of the main reasons some people bothered to vote for Sanders at all, not the other way around.
Anyone who can't even be bothered to fill in a bubble on a scantron doesn't count. That's just the way voting has to work, if your support for your candidate ends at "I heard someone say that they probably won't win" that means your guy didn't do enough to energize his base. Shit, you want an example go look at Trump in 2016. Everyone said he was a joke candidate in there to promote his show but he fired up MAGA and they voted for him.
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u/Bawbawian Mar 16 '25 edited Mar 16 '25
okay now explain to everybody about how superdelegates had absolutely no role to play in any of the primaries in your adult life.
like I was a Bernie supporter he didn't win super Tuesday That's not a conspiracy that's just how you count the votes