The concept still confuses me and makes me feel like my vote is easily cast aside.

Politics is so brutal and confusing.

in 1982.

Carter (and McGovern before him) were seen as "outsiders" to the party power structure, and that power structure wanted to avoid the kinds of losses we saw in '72 and '80 in the future. Hunt's committee ushered in a series of changes through which elected Democrats as well as some party officials would also have a vote at the convention. Ironically, the two electoral fiascos which were used as the justification for superdelegates, '72 and '80, were also bracketed by electoral fiascos ('68 and '84) which suggests that party insiders aren't particularly better at selecting candidates than voters are.

Anyways, the idea was to prevent a plurality candidate like McGovern or Carter from simply achieving the nomination without getting buy-in from the party infrastructure. Hunt's committee hadn't really foreseen the way that modern primaries tend to winnow down to two candidates pretty quickly, and it's not clear what relevance the supers actually have in this situation.

It seems to stifle pure democracy by dampening change. (Philosophical).

Give the choice of voting for vanilla or vanilla I write in pistachio since I'm a rebel heart.



PS: I like your icon choice. Stained glass? Frank Lloyd Wright?

They earned the chaos they have created. They're not conservative, they're anal retentive.

I have a friend who does stained glass, I think she's done that painting in jewel tone stained glass as a window insert. I like it because it's not symmetrical.

To ensure an "established" candidate never has to face a grassroots challenge, basically. And yes, it's basically laughing in the face of the people's vote. I don't care who you support, superdelegates are BS, and I've said it every primary.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/15/457181/-

Political parties are private institutions. They aren't democratic institutions. Hell, any party could nominate a ham sandwich if they wanted to.

The process of allowing voters to have a say in the nomination is not something that happened a lot prior to recent history.

Abraham Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot at the convention.

Many prime ministers who serve as executives in a number of western European countries aren't directly elected by the people either. They are the leaders of the majority party or coalition in parliament.

small "d" democracy.

The party is losing members at an alarming rate, it will lose a great many more after such a blatantly rigged Primary this cycle, perhaps down from 30% of the population down to somewhere around less than 25% of the population, they are making themselves more irrelevant and obsolete every day.

The only way the party does not become irrelevant is to become the Republican party (named the Democratic party) against an actual Fascist party (named the Republican party), which appears may be the plan.

If that happens, the majority of people that actually do not agree with a right wing nation or an extreme right wing nation will form and likely hold the majority of the population under a new "labor" party of whatever name is used, just a theory based on trends and MHO.

You don't get a Democratic Party state chair or vice chair by primogeniture, and you certainly don't get a Congressional or gubernatorial seat by lottery.

When this is over, I intend to be an unaffiliated progressive voter. In my state, unaffiliated voters can choose to participate in the primaries by choosing a Democratic Party ballot so therefore, nothing changes except I can have a free conscience.

They've previously dismissed the undemocratic nature of having super-delegates by pointing out that they've never swung an election. The implication was always that they would support whoever the electorate supports.

This election, however, they are actively using them against the populist Sanders campaign, making sure the superdelegates are included in running delegate counts to show that Sanders can't catch up after locking up the superdelegates for Hillary before the race even began and before Sanders announced. Complete bullshit and as undemocratic as it can be.

I don't think they misread the feelings of the electorate at all, I think they feel they have the mechanisms in place to manufacture consent without giving people what they want, and if they fall short in doing so, they have the superdelegates anyway so it is a huge tool to weight power in favor of monied elites and away from regular citizens.

No thanks, and honestly going forward I don't want to belong to a party that operates that way.

A: Too many.

Most people here would be cool with that.