Considering that five out of six people in the debate stage last night openly expressed their willingness and intent to try to overrule the voters,* I think it’s important to get this out there now.
Edit: I was misled by some of the reporting about this, and after a close re-watching of the clip, I think the statement I made above is wrong. Thanks @KathyPartdeux forpointing that out.
I still stand by the part below about the superdelegates.
If the DNC uses superdelegates to take the nomination away from the candidate with the most votes, I will emphatically not vote for the person that they select, even if it is someone I would otherwise have been ok with.
Doing something that openly anti-democratic would make it as clear as it could possibly be that working “within the system” is a sucker’s game, and that the Party needs to go, to make room for something new.
I know a lot of people who feel this way, and we need to get this out there, and make it clear, now, so that nobody can say the people doing this didn’t understand how a significant percentage of their potential electorate feels about “one person, one vote” after the fact.
Can I suggest that, in the event the DNC does that and the candidate is someone you would have other wise been ok with, that we tear the DNC down brick-by-brick after the election? I will gladly help you and scatter the remains to the four corners of the globe; but it’s going to be tough to do it in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Leave Pyrrhic victories to the Epirisians (who, you’ll note, no longer exist.)
Apart from the effect of superdelegates, I think that a plurality is much less of a mandate than a majority. If we had five progressive candidates and one centrist candidate, and the centrist got 17% of the delegates and the progressives 16.6% of the delegates each, would you still think that the centrist should get the nomination?
If there’s no majority; there is no will of the voters. In the last primary there were lots of people arguing the opposite of what you’re saying now. Even though there actually was a candidate with a majority of the vote.
Edit- maybe it was this guy?
“ Senator Bernie Sanders defiantly vowed again on Sunday to take his campaign to the Democratic National Convention this summer, even as Hillary Clinton edged closer to clinching the party’s presidential nomination and the final primary contests drew near.
Two days before Tuesday’s primaries in California and five other states, Mr. Sanders repeated his pledge not to concede even if Mrs. Clinton acquires enough delegates to reach 2,383, the threshold for securing the nomination.”
Expressing the potential willingness to participate and collaborate in an openly anti-democratic power grab like that is bad enough. Actually going through with it would make them (even people who I’ve been bullish enough on to donate money to) people that I was totally not ok with.
Also, doing something like that would make it clear that working within the party to tear it down after the election would be impossible, because they are fundamentally not dealing in good faith.
When the alternative is the Sisyphean task of eternally trying to play by the man’s rules, all the while knowing full well he’s rigged the game against you, that’s not as obvious a choice to me as it is to you.
Pyrrhus was, from all accounts, a better king and military leader than most, but didn’t have the resources to stop the Romans. He tried to fight, and lost, but the Romans were more than happy to conquer and enslave peoples who didn’t fight, too, so there was no reason for him not to roll the dice.
So - you’re arguing that candidates who get less votes than the front runner who doesn’t have a majority have no reason not to try and win at the convention?
I didn’t say anyone shouldn’t go to the convention, and I don’t see anything there endorsing the idea of superdelegates.
I am aware that a lot of people have argued in favor of superdelegates in the past. I’m arguing against them.
In FPTP, a plurality wins. You can also avoid some of the problems with this by either having a runoff between the top two, or doing instant runoff, but I’m not going to buy that superdelegates with way more votes than anyone else doing backroom deals is an acceptable alternative.
I’m really taking about the superdelegates here. It boggles my mind how many people will profess to the highest democratic ideals and then try to convince me that, not only should I be ok with a system where a group of people strongly beholden to a corrupt establishment each get 40,000 times as many votes as anyone else, but that I somehow owe these people my support.
Sorry about that. You’re right.
I corrected the post above.
I still stand by the part about superdelegates changing the vote, and Sanders tried to get them removed, so there’s no blaming him for the fact that they’re still around, but my interpretation of the candidates’ answers was colored by the reporting, and you are right that they were not endorsing superdelegates, and I shouldn’t hold their answers to that question against them.
The supers can’t create a majority on their own, but one benefit of the supers is that they can add to a candidate’s count and create a majority without pledged delegates for other candidates needing to backtrack on their pledges (which is against some state party rules).
If Biden+Bloomberg+Klobuchar+Buttigieg get 55% of the pledged delegates and Sanders+Warren+Steyer get 44%, and the supers all vote together to give Biden a majority even if Sanders or Bloomberg have the plurality, then that is fully consistent not only with the rules but with the will of the voters and the democratic intent of the primary.
Even if the progressives together get a scant majority with Sanders ahead of Warren, and the supers go with Warren on the second ballot, an argument can be made that that is more in line with the will of the voters than just going with the guy with the plurality. (This seems a likely scenario to me at this point in time.)
The current role of the superdelegates was worked out in a committee with all factions on board, and all factions (including representatives of the 2016 Sanders campaign) signing off on the process. If they function within those agreed parameters during the convention, but one group or another objects to their actions, then it is that group who are objecting to the small-d democratic process.
I have to say, it seems like we’re talking past each other.
For me, any attempt to describe a system where a group of insiders get 40,000 times as many votes per person as everyone else as “democratic” is going to fall flat, no matter how skillful the sophistry used to back it up.
I am far from alone in this, and any party that tries to go with some scheme like that is not going to get support from people who fundamentally have a problem with it, and is not in a position to demand it.
I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m saying I won’t go along with it.
Volume plus amount of pure drivel. I hated seeing someone win that way, after all those years I spent in speech and debate crafting my intricate, nuanced arguments.
Might I also throw in one teensy wee little idea? How about while we are at it, we also dismantle the GOP? It doesn’t have to be brick-by-brick. I wouldn’t mind, say, a controlled demolition. Who wants to push the plunger down?
