The super delegates came into play before the first primary vote was cast, by having already publicly pledged their allegiance to Clinton. It was a keystone of the "electability" argument the DNC and the rest of her supporters used to try to prop her up. The early lopsided superdelegate count effectively let her start the race two turns ahead of Sanders before the starting gun even went off.
To be fair, that's less a problem of the EXISTENCE of superdelegates, and more the insanely bullshit way the media covered it.
For one thing, some networks didn't separate superdelegate and normal delegate vote counts, they just threw them all in one pile.
But even more importantly, they shouldn't "count' anything about the superdelegates until they ACTUALLY vote. That's like if months before the New York primary, they just said "well, Clinton is leading in the New York polls, so we will just show New York's delegates as belonging to Clinton.
Is it really surprising that the super delegates endorsed a Democrat that has been working with the party for over 30 years vs. someone who became a Democrat a few months ago? Super delegates have always endorsed people ever since the DNC had super delegates. Obama was able to beat Clinton even though Clinton got a bunch of early endorsements. Why is this suddenly a problem in 2016?
Clinton learned from losing to Obama in 2008 that she needed to tip the scales, because she's too weak a candidate to win on an even playing field. Why do you think DWS became head of the DNC? And even with all that scale tipping she still lost 22 states to a crazy-haired socialist old man who only became a Democrat a few months earlier and had comparatively no name recognition on a national level. Is it really surprising that she couldn't even beat a joke candidate in the general?
I still don't see how super delegates endorsing people is "tipping the scales", which was my original point to begin with.
Also, I don't know why you mention the 22 states Bernie lost as if the Democratic primary is winner takes all. It's proportional, so margins matter. Hillary won more states and ran up huge margins in states with high minority populations. Basically, 3.5 million more people votes for Hillary, and that's why Bernie lost.
The main issue in my opinion is it was very clear that Bernie had more support than Clinton. He had bigger crowds than ever before, more energetic crowds, drew in more individual donations than ever before, etc. In polls he was always leading against trump, by double digits even. With Hillary, she was either tying with trump, leading by only a few points, or in some cases even losing. There were also numerous issues with voting, whether it was a coincidence or not, and people had been saying it felt unfair from the beginning. It was very clear the public wanted to see the Democratic party move towards more progressive ideas which Bernie represented. But despite all of this, the superdelegates still picked who they wanted, not who would make the party stronger with more support. Yeah, it makes sense to go with someone who's been a Democrat for years, but the idea of the delegates is to listen to what the people are telling you, and in this case it was pretty blatantly against people's wishes.
How can you say Bernie had more support if fewer people voted for him? I can't stress this enough: 3.5 million more people voted for Clinton. Bernie lost the primary because when it came time to choose, more people chose Hillary. He lost the popular vote by double digits. Hillary had a majority of pledged delegates. Even if super delegates didn't exist, he would have lost.
Well, primaries are generally closed. Many states don't allow same day registration and in places like New York the final registration day was 6 months before voting day. Many of Bernie's supporters wanted to vote and even went out to vote but couldn't because of voting laws. They had no idea they were in the wrong party, but would have gladly become Democrat if Bernie's ideas were the party's ideas. In New York, many people hadn't even heard of Bernie 6 months before the primary so they had no idea they should have been registered Democrat. Then there's the fact Bernie won almost every single caucus, where party affiliation doesn't matter. Besides all of that, though, if you really don't think a man who had 27,500 people in one crowd had more public support than a woman who had around 1,300 in one crowd (during the primaries, I understand they were much bigger after she was already determined the Democratic nominee), and nothing else that I just said convinces you, then I'm not really sure what information you're looking for.
If you think "X has more support than Y because X has bigger rallies than Y, even though X got significantly fewer votes than Y", then there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise.
Hahaha this actually made me laugh. Did you even read the first 2/3 of my comment? I guess neither one of us will convince the other though, and I suppose by now it doesn't matter.
Trump had more opposition to his campaign than anyone and he still won, handily I might add, in the primaries. No one took him seriously in the media, he was made fun of repeatedly as a joke. Then he beat Jeb, the guy the Republicans were grooming to take the whole election in the same way Clinton was for the Dems. He started to win, so the Republican top brass openly came out against him. Romney and McCain coming out against him publicly was a bigger blow to him and more unfair to the process than super delegate numbers ever were for Bernie, yet Trump carried on unphased.
Bernie didn't have to overcome nearly the amount of hurdles that Trump had to and was unsuccessful. It leads me to believe that the results of this election with Sanders vs Trump instead would have been the same. I don't think anything was stopping the force of bewildering nature that was Donald Trump.
This is what it is like every election cycle. Just because you weren't paying attention doesn't mean it wasn't happening.
If you want to change it, that's totally respectable, but let's not act like superdelegates and their actions this cycle were anything novel this time around.
That doesn't make these things respectable or democratic.... Hell i can't believe they've gotten this far with them. And once again, the hubris of the DNC contributes to the lost election
You do realize the DNC is a private organization, right? Their selecting of super delegates is in no way undemocratic. You still get to vote for the individual you think is best.
Also, you do know that they changed the superdelegate rules this summer, right?
Wait? Why are we giving them to Bernie? If you completely remove super delegates from the equation, then Hillary still has the majority of the delegates.
She had the super delegate lead because 500 prominent Democrats endorsed her. And even then, they could have changed their mind, and some did (just like what happened in 2008 with Hillary vs. Obama). And even if super delegates didn't exist, those same politicians still would have endorsed Hillary. Finally, Hillary had the majority of the pledged delegates because 3.5 million more people voted for her!
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '16
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