Name: Smerconish: 'Are superdelegates really undemocratic?'
Uploaded: 2020-03-09T09:23:23.000Z
Duration: 10 min 42 s
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five out of six of the Democratic candidates were able to agree on one thing at Wednesday night's debate that the winner should obtain the required 1991 delegates to secure the nomination.

With so many candidates still competing after Iowa and New Hampshire, the prospect of any of them securing the nomination on the first ballot is increasingly unlikely.

Mike Bloomberg is privately lobbying Democratic Party officials and donors allied with his moderate opponents to flip their allegiance to him and block Bernie Sanders in the event of a brokered national convention.

The effort, largely executed by Bloomberg senior state level advisers in recent weeks, attempts to prime Bloomberg for a second ballot contest at the Democratic National Convention in July by poaching supporters of Joe Biden and other moderate Democrats, according to two Democratic strategists familiar with the talks and unaffiliated with Bloomberg.

So get ready to hear a lot about superdelegates, an informal terms term for the position by which party leaders and elected officials are guaranteed an unbound delegate role at their convention.

It's a uniquely democratic party phenomenon and its origins lie in tryingto offset populist nominations that can't win general elections.

The intent is candidate quality control through a form of peer review.

Use of superdelegates follows a tremendous shift from the nomination being an affair strictly controlled by party elites, toe one predominantly decided by public participation and the understanding that an inherent risk was being taken.

Party leaders fear their own voters nominating a disastrous general election choice.

And so super delegates were created to mitigate this risk as a hedge against a populist surge that would not survive a general election.

The thinking was that with more political experience, understanding of the competition and concern for the long term success of the party elected officials and party leaders, the two forms of superdelegates should maintain a say in the nomination.

The debate moved from the theoretical to the practical after grassroots nominee George McGovern was blown out in the 1972 election, winning only 17 of the 538 electoral votes against Richard Nixon, and often repeated criticism of superdelegates is that their participation is undemocratic.

Thought of one way these unpledged delegates actually function as a means of preserving maximum voter participation and enhancing the level of competition in the general election.

The majority of superdelegates are themselves elected.

Most are current or former members of Congress, their senators, their governors.

They are mayors who were selected based on their elected position.

Those who were not have instead served in some significant leadership role within the Democratic Party to warrant the position.

Superdelegates themselves have succeeded in mass elections.

They've been with the Democratic Party for an extended period of time or some combination of these traits.

It's as a result of these positions that they represent the nomination choice of constituents.

This year, superdelegates won't have a say until the second ballot.

That's a change instituted after the last convention, which followed a primary in which super delegates overwhelmingly sided with Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.

Now there are concerns over Bernie's prospects in a general election against Trump that is placing renewed emphasis on what superdelegates might do on a second ballot in Milwaukee.

Sometimes the collective wisdom of the party establishment is wrong.

As Nate Silver pointed out in the last cycle.

If 2016 Republican nomination were contested under Democratic delegate rules, Donald Trump would have found it almost impossible to get a majority of delegates, and a floor fight in Cleveland would have been inevitable.

Go to the website it Smerconish dot com Answer today.

Survey question, Which asks, Should Democrats nominate the candidate who arrives at the July convention with the most delegates, even if it's not the required majority?

Joining me now is Ron Brownstein, senior editor at the Atlantic, where he recently wrote this piece.

Bernie Sanders is the front runner, but his opponents still aren't treating him like one.

Hey, Ron, I read the piece with interest.

What explains why they avoided Sanders and trained all their political weaponry on Mike Bloomberg, by the way, First of all, good morning, Michael, I wrote also last week.

I believe that is going to be the central question facing Democrats in the weeks ahead.

Do they have to nominate someone who arrives with a plurality, but not a majority.

Look, I think this goes all the way back to 2016.

I mean, you've had a view in the Democratic Party that Bernie Sanders support is capped, that it's ultimately to small toe win, and that as a result, their principal goal is to maneuver to be the last person standing against him on the theory that then you would have a majority of the party with him.

The problem with that theory was demonstrated both by Trump in 2016 and what we're seeing now, which is that it is not guaranteed that even if a candidate has a majority of the party that is skeptical of him, that majority will ever coalesce behind a a single candidate.

And even though the Democratic rules are not as favorable to a front runner as the Republican rules, the reality remains that you can win Ah, higher share of delegates than your share of the vote.

As long as long as your opposition is divided and many of those candidates don't reach the 15% threshold of the vote, you need to obtain any delegates.

Let's make sure that everybody understands it.

In other words, that vote that lower than threshold vote then gets folded in with that which exceeded the threshold and could, in this instance, inert a Sanders benefit, right?

So Democrats allocate delegates based on the results and individual congressional district as well as statewide and on Lee.

People who reach 15% of the votes are counted in the way those delicates are allocated both of the district and state level.

So if you just take one example, if you have a congressional district where Bernie Sanders gets 30% of the vote, Joe Biden gets 20 and nobody else gets 15 it's on Lee that 30 and 20 that go in.

So with 30% of the vote, Bernie Sanders would get 60% of the delegates.

And so you know that is why many a Democrats fear that if Sanders kind of goes into Super Tuesday with a head of steam and the center does not consolidate, the model in the middle does not resolve Maur.

He could emerge with a lead that is in Super Bowl on on on delegates all the way through Milwaukee.

What he may not be able to do however, is obtained a majority of delegates without expanding his support beyond the roughly 1/4 to 1/3 that we are we have seen in the results so far.

And in polling of the upcoming states, I recognize that we're only two states in today.

But in Ron Brownstein's crystal ball, does Bernie appear headed for a plurality?

Ah, you know, I'm kind of in the conventional wisdom here.

Absent, Um, you know, just something very hard to imagine that the center quickly consolidates around an alternative candidate.

The big question is, can he expand his reach beyond what we have seen so far?

As I said, he's somewhere to 1/4 of 1/3 of the vote.

He is doing very well with young people, as he did in 2016 he's doing.

He's leading among blue collar whites in the Democratic primary, as he did in 2016.

The thing he has added Michael from 2016 is that while Hillary Clinton was the dominant candidate among Latinos last time, Sanders does seem to be the strongest candidate among Latinos in this race on.

That's gonna provide him a lot of benefit in the next few weeks because almost all of the states with big Latino populations including Texas, California, Florida, Arizona and Colorado are all voting between now and March 17.

So it is entirely possible he will come out of these next few weeks with a substantial lead in delegates.

But again, absent, expanding his support beyond the coalition that he has so far.

He's got a very uphill climb, I think, to get to a majority of delegates.

And then you get to the issue not only if superdelegates but whether the other candidates who are trailing if they cumulatively have a majority, can come together at the convention in a way to deny him the nomination on whether the party could sustain that kind of turmoil.

So on that subject, which was also the focus of my opening commentary, let's put up on the screen what Senator Sanders tweeted and let everybody take a look at this because from his perspective, it's a rather simplistic analysis.

The person with the most votes should be the Democratic nominee is it that simple?

I mean, you know, said that he said that the superdelegates should pick him because Hillary Clinton could not win the general election.

And all the other candidates, you know, said at the debate stage, The rules are that someone has to get to a majority Now.

If Sanders gets close to a majority through the primary process, it's almost inevitable that support will drift toward him and that he will end up as the nominee with all of the kind of roll of the dice that that represents.

The real question is, what is there some sort of cut off?

I mean, you know in the mind of but not only superdelegates but the other candidates.

If Sanders is it, 40% say of the delegates.

If Buddha Judge Biden and Bloomberg say combined for 55% could they come together?

I think it would be especially explosive to pick a nominee, however, who finished below the person with the most delegates.

I think it's kind of harder to make that case.

You do wonder if we get into this scenario where the Democrats will look towards someone who could be seen as possibly a unity candidate of some sort who was not part of the whole process, understanding how difficult it is to parachute someone in.

But you kind of wonder whether news, who has not been part of the who has not been part of the process other than there are right.

Sharon Brown Sharp Brown from Ohio is some kind of a bridge between the modern.

I thought you were thinking I thought you were thinking Hillary.