So as we all wait for the superdelegates to play out, it’s time to think a little more about why they are there. To do this, we have to go back in history a little bit and walk it through to the present day. I know we’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating, so if you’ll just step into that Dr. Pepper machine over there…yes, I know it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, that’s not the point…
(click the jump to depart!)
The notion of choosing a candidate for President by way of a series of primary elections is a pretty recent development. The idea that you’d know who the candidate was before the convention would have been judged madness as late as the mid-1960s, because the convention is where the selection process happened. Delegates were picked by whatever means – usually by the local political bosses – and as often as not were committed to their state’s governor, or senator, or some other “favorite son”, and their support at the convention was essentially up for sale to whoever could do the most for said favorite son. That’s where the famous “smoke-filled room” came from (1924, if you must know). The selection process was a wide-open wheel-and-deal amongst the delegates, and that was the way of things until 1968. That year, there were a whopping thirtee primaries – four won by Bobby Kennedy and five by Gene McCarthy – and Hubert Humphrey didn’t even compete in the primaries, instead rounding up favorite sons in non-primary states. And nobody thought this was unusual at all – in fact, the night he died, Kennedy was on 393 delegates against 561 for Humphrey.
So in the aftermath of the disastrous convention, the Dems went through an overhaul of the process, one that would privilege the primary and caucus system above everything else. The architect of that system was George McGovern, and he went on to use it to win the nomination, and to go on to achieve the worst beatdown in the history of Presidential politics. The Dems never forgot it, and immediately instituted the “superdelegate” system, by which elected Dem officeholders would automatically become delegates – with the idea that they would keep the party from going off the rails with an unelectable candidate. The only time they have previously come into play was to cement the nomination for Walter Mondale against the Gary Hart insurgency in 1984…and Mondale went on to take the beatdown.
And yet, the proportional allocation of delegates has worked out – it let Obama stay in the game and slowly build up, much as it did for Jimmy Carter in 1976 (who would never have gotten on the radar under the old system). The alternative is to go to a system topheavy with winner-take-all delegates, like the GOP uses. And yet…
New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida – all pivotal milestone states in the early days of the process – actually lost half their delegates each, stripped by the RNC as punishment for staging their elections before February 5. Coming into Super Tuesday, a ridiculously small number of Republican delegates had actually been handed out, and the percentage of votes casts in all GOP primaries and caucuses went like this:
McCain 32.8%
Romney 30.6%
Huckabee 16.4%
And yet, because of winner-take-all allocation, McCain came into Super Tuesday with 47% of the delegates despite having won less than a third of the votes. He won all the Missouri and Florida delegates, 80% of the Carolina delegates, and 84% of the Oklahoma delegates – each with less than 40% of the vote in each state. By contrast, Mike Huckabee only beat McCain by 2% in Georgia, 34-32 – but got 51 delegates as against McCain’s 9. All in all, on Super Tuesday, McCain won nine states where the winner receives all or at least an overwhelming majority of the allocated delegates – and since those 9 included California and New York, he essentially wrapped up the race. (While Obama has been heavily criticized in some Democratic circles for building his delegate lead in states where the Democrats are not expected to win, similar criticism of McCain for clinching the deal with California, New York and New Jersey – Republican graveyards one and all – has not been forthcoming, despite the role those states played in shutting out the party’s remaining factional standard-bearers in Romney and Huckabee.)
Thanks to winner-take-all, McCain – who finished in a 3-way tie in Iowa with Fred Thompson and “Uncommitted”, who was the preferred candidate of exactly no factions in the GOP, who was flat broke and left for dead in autumn 2007 – came into Super Tuesday as the designated frontrunner with momentum to spare. Once he won California, the jig was up. And unlike the Dems, the Repubs have no superdelegates to correct for that sort of result. John McCain was the choice of nobody this election cycle – except for television blowhards, low-intensity independents and pundits who make a fetish of the willingness to publicly crap on one’s own party – but there he stands, the duly selected standard-bearer of the GOP for 2008. This is clearly not what the faithful had in mind. But as the saying goes, “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” All of the gasbags wailing about how they’d rather vote for Clinton than McCain will be in the booth on election day, pulling the lever for the Great Maverick, and you can take that to the bank.