A Solution for the Superdelegates: National Pledged Delegate Vote

How should Democratic superdelegates vote? There's an easy answer that everyone should embrace: superdelegates should commit to vote for the candidate who receives a majority of the pledged delegates. The Obama campaign earlier made a tactical error by suggesting that superdelegates should vote for the best candidate or the primary winner in their district or state. This makes it difficult for them to defend Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry supporting Obama even though Massachusetts voted for Clinton.

A much better idea is to seek a pledge from the Superdelegates to follow the National Pledged Delegate Vote.

What I'm suggesting isn't an original idea. It's roughly the same idea that MoveOn.org has ("We urgently need to encourage them to let the voters decide between Clinton and Obama--and then to support the will of the people"), although MoveOn hasn't specified the idea of a superdelegate pledge or the details of this model. The biggest flaw with MoveOn's approach is that it asks superdelegates to stay silent and make no commitment. We have no way of knowing what superdelegates agree with MoveOn, since they are simply asked to be quiet. Instead, MoveOn should ask superdelegates to pledge their support for a National Pledged Delegate Vote.

Here should be the rule: the superdelegates should pledge to vote for the candidate who wins the majority of the pledged and committed delegates, no matter who they support. This would give the superdelegates freedom to decide in any election where a candidate falls short of a majority (in this election, Obama would need to defeat Clinton by 26 delegates to invoke the pledge, since that's the number won by John Edwards that would fall short of a majority). This approach would preserve the role of superdelegates to be involved when no candidate achieves a majority, while allowing the popular will to be controlling when a majority is achieved. (The Florida and Michigan primaries are excluded from this calculation under the party rules, unless they hold caucuses, as they should in order to avoid disenfranchising the voters of those states.)

The approach I'm advocating is similar to the National Popular Vote (NPV), a movement created in response to the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush was given the majority of the electoral votes by the Supreme Court decision. Passed by the legislatures in Maryland, New Jersey, and Illinois (where it was sent to the governor's desk last week), NPV works by having the states (once a majority of the electoral college votes are in NPV states) give all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

If the national popular vote is my model, shouldn't we then use the total popular vote in the primaries to decide the winner? No. It's inevitable that voting in a caucus is lower than in a primary (and this might be a good reason in the future to urge that states hold primaries rather than caucuses). Therefore, a candidate who does better in caucuses would be penalized in a comparison of votes alone. The standard should be the pledged delegates, not the popular vote.

The National Pledged Delegate Vote would allow for superdelegates to have influence in a divided election, while preserving the concept of majority will in the voting. All superdelegates should be asked to take a pledge to follow the national pledged delegate majority (or plurality, if they prefer). And by embracing this idea in the Democratic primary, the superdelegates can also help move forward the movement for a National Popular Vote which would fix the flaws of the archaic Electoral College system.

Crossposted at ObamaPolitics.

Note: I'm the author of a new book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama Campaign.

Comments

[Aaror]

You touched on a point in passing that I'd like to see Barrack fix...
Florida and Michigan should have caucuses so that thier voters are not disenfranchised, and Barrack and the Democratic party need those voters to care about the election. Still, there doesn't seem to be any movement towards setting these up.
The Obama campaign has great volunteers and a good supply of funding. Perhaps he could "sponsor," caucuses in those states. Of course then Clinton would have to get involved, and we would have real votes in those states, instead of votes where one candidate campaigns and the others follow the rules.

[RichLiberal]

Caucuses will never be accepted in FL/MI. They have proven to be a farce and Obama has used Republican support to distort their results, effectively delegitimizing the whole caucus process as far as most observers are concerned. With tensions running the way they are right now, these caucuses are a formula for chaos.

[RichLiberal]

Use the electoral college system to allocate the delegates. That's how the election is done, that's how the primary should be decided. Whoever won the state gets all the delegates, proportional to the official electoral college numbers.

Anything else is just a contrived meaningless scheme to support one or the other candidates.

Same can be said for the Electoral College, I suppose, but ... that's the one in the Constitution.

Otherwise, leave the system as it is and let everyone work it out. Wait til the primaries are all done, then slug it out.

BTW, I think you'll find the Obama people really have an awful lot of Republicans meddling in Democratic Party affairs. Maybe that's Obama's big "change", the Democratic Party will be half run by Republicans so we are not so hostile and can compromise.

[Mormondude]

The National Popular Vote is a travesty. It's like scrapping a March Madness tournament in favor of a BCS coronation.

The big states conspire and collude to effectively disenfranchise half the country.

It goes against everything that the founding fathers believed about how to make a representative republic work.

[PaulAbrams]

This was already suggested. See "Supersolution for Superdelegates", (February 9, 2008).
Basically, Howard Dean needs only 398 superdelegates to give him their proxies to vote for the person, whether Obama or Clinton, that has the most elected delegates.

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

if they are just going to vote for the leader in pledged delegates, what's the point in having them. they might as well not vote.

[wittgene]

You mean to tell me you Americans don't have any other choices than 30 years of bush/clintons. Shameful.

[Teddy12]

How about if we go with the rules as laid out? Superdelegates vote any way they want. Why are you trying to change the rules? Your man is ahead. What are you concerned about? Yes, I am an HC supporter, but I am not screaming to change the rules. Considering all the posts here you are all certain he is going to win, so why so much to do about nothing? If you want to change the rules, do so before the next election.

[legalclubs]

I would not take it as as "trying to change the rules", but more of a blueprint of how the superdelegates should vote. In fact, if the Superdelegates took a pledge to vote this way (which is perfectly within the rules) then it would avoid/reduce the possibility of a contentious and harmful convention where one side could claim the election was stolen.

[grendl]

Sorry I can't embrace the idea.

Because the system of superdelegates is intrinsically, inherently un-democratic in its inception, trying to figure out a way to make them more democratic, without their total eradiction is impossible.

Of course it's too late to look at this abomination, it's always too late. Most of the people I know had never heard of superdelegates, and these are life time voters who actually believed their votes meant just as much as Hillary Clinton's and that 22 year old on CNN. What fools we were.

Asking them to vote this way or that way is ridiculous. The system is corrupt at its core, and the only decent thing to do, short of "super" tarring and super feathering these elite individuals, is ask them to rescind their status as superdelegates. They're allowed to do that no?

Of course I don't know what they're allowed to do. The deals made by the DNC thirty years ago or today are still done in smoke filled rooms.

You can't get a little pregnant. And this baby is alive and kicking in the womb of the democratic party, like the spawn of satan. You want to keep it alive, and hope against it doesn't wreak havoc on our democracy, keep dreaming. It already has.

[legalclubs]

This system clearly needs to be changed. I would, however, suggest one possible reason for maintaining such superdelegates. Let's change the facts and say that we had 3 mainstream Democratics and one extreme canidate. Let's say the 3 mainstream canidates each garner 24% of the vote and the extreme canidate gets 28% of the vote. Let's also say through polling that the 72% of the people who split their vote between the three mainstream canidates would prefer any of the other mainstream canidates above the extreme canidate. It then seems appropriate to have superdelegates bring some rationality to an otherwise irrational numbers game and vote in one of the mainstream canidates who was favored 72% to 28% over the extreme canidate. Unlikely? Yes. Possible? Also yes. How about this -- Superdelegates only come into play if I canidate can't garner 50% of the regular delegates. In this particular case Edwards has so few that it is still very likely that Clinton and Obama will capture over 50%.