Public Address - Legal Beagle (Home)

Hillary Marches fourth | Feb 27, 2008 09:04

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

If Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wins 100% of the delegates in 100% of the remaining primaries and caucuses, they'll net the Democratic Party nomination. Much short of that – or a concession – and the Democratic nominee won't be decided until the August convention.

I don't discount the prospect of a concession, if one candidate does particularly well in the remaining races (Obama taking Texas could clinch it for him) a concession may even be likely, but absent this – or some major scandal – the elected delegates aren't going to be enough to decide the race.

Which brings us to the rules. And to attempts by both Obama and Clinton to reshape the rules to help their chances.

For her part, Clinton wants to allow delegates selected in Florida and Michigan primaries to vote at the convention. These states – stripped of their delegates when they held their primaries in breach of national rules (and knowing in advance the consequences of such a breach) – voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Behind Obama, she'd like all the delegates she could get, and Florida and Michigan would narrow the gap.

The democratic candidates weren't permitted to campaign in these states (if they did they wouldn't get any delegates ever), and in Michigan Obama's name didn't even appear on the ballot. Every vote should count ... you can't change the rules to suit you after the game has started ... the voters of Florida played by the rules ... ad infinitum.

It's insoluble – the view of anyone with insight into the situation seems so bound up with their view on the nomination (I don't doubt that, were the situation reversed, the arguments the two camps are making would be too). For myself, I'd say that the delegates selected should not be able to vote at the convention, but that the moral victory Clinton can claim, and the effect the votes cast would have on the nationwide popular vote, should be factors the super-delegates consider if they get to determine the victor.

You can't help but wonder if the Democrats bought themselves a whole bunch of trouble with so strong a penalty for this breach of the rules. The Republicans faced a similar problem – and punished states holding contests too early by removing half their delegates, and no-one – not the voters in those states, nor the candidates seeking their votes, seems to have a problem with it. The democratic punishment applied only to primaries (caucuses elect people to state-wide conventions, which chose the actual delegates during the permissible time)

For his part, Obama isn't trying to change the rules, so much as get people to ignore them – pushing the idea that superdelegates are there to confirm the choice of the elected delegates, and that it is not their place to exercise independent judgement or over-rule the will of the voters. Except that's exactly their role. A role they played in 1984, when they gave the nomination to insider Walter Mondale over insurgent Gary Hart. Maybe it shouldn't be their role, but they're there – as people with a long association with the Party, and a lot invested in its future – and they act as guardians, to prevent a candidate in a close race from securing the nomination if it's not in the interests of the party.

The role of the superdelegate is to question "is this the best person for the job?", "does this person – popular within the democratic party – actually have the better chance of taking the White House?", "will this person do damage to our chance of holding or taking Congress, or Governor's mansions, in the election?", or "will the leadership of this person damage the party into the future?".

Superdelegates are not rubber stamps. In the words that preceded this post, they owe not just their industry, but their judgement. That judgement will take account of the view of the democratic primary voters, and caucus-goers – if the view is clear, but not quite overwhelming enough to win without some superdelegate votes, they won't go against it. And the superdelegates who are members of Congress may consider it political suicide to vote against the overwhelming wishes of their constituents (some African-American Representatives, for example, who publicly came out for Clinton early, have subsequently seen their congressional districts come out 70% or 80% in favour of Obama). There will be numerous matters taken into account, but ultimately the question is a matter for the super-delegate, and those who argue that their role is perfunctory are dissembling.

The race is not over – if Clinton does well in the remaining races, and makes a close contest in the elected delegates – or a close contest in the popular vote – then she may be able to make the case that she is best for the party, and best for the country. If she can convince enough superdelegates of that, then she deserves the nomination – whether she has a slight lead or a slight deficit in the elected delegate count.

Maybe she'll pull something else out of the 1984 primary season, and gain traction over Obamania with "where's the beef?".

But maybe Obama knows the answer.

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The Magic Number | Feb 06, 2008 00:01

With my beloved Patriots falling at the last hurdle, we move from the Super Bowl to Super Tuesday. A recent poll found that 40% of Americans were more interested in Super Bowl Sunday than Super Duper Tuesday – but 37% were more interested in the primaries this week. It's about the best for which they could hope.

If it was ever about votes before, and wins, and states, now it's about convention delegates – 2025 is the magic number for the Democrats, and 1191 for the Republicans – very few have actually gone. In the early races, across small states with few (sometimes no) delegates at stake, it was about momentum – votes, money, media attention, and recognition. The two democrats and two republicans with serious prospects have made it this far – they don't need media attention any more. They don't need wins in the popular vote to gain momentum, they need delegates. Because delegates, not states, not votes, and not media glory, decide presidential nominees.

Delegates were nice before – while his opponents focussed on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Romney picked some extras up in wins in largely uncontested early races – Wyoming and Nevada – to lead the early delegate race – but small leads in delegate counts don't get you momentum, and Romney couldn't capitalise.

Now delegates are everything. As a follow-up to my earlier piece looking at how caucuses and primaries work, I thought I'd go a bit into the delegate race we'll see tomorrow, and the weeks following.

There are over 20 contests today, and I'm not going to go into all of them – there are caucuses, primaries and conventions again (some open, others closed or in between) and myriad ways of divvying up the delegates.

For the Republicans, a number of states are winner-take-all – whoever gets the most votes getting all the state's delegates. This is expected to favour John McCain: the states he is supposedly certain to win – New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Connecticut, and Delaware – are winner-take-all, while some the states his chief opponent Mitt Romney is expected to win – such as his home state of Massachusetts – are proportional at the state level, or have winner-take-all votes at the smaller congressional district level (which may see the runner-up snare some delegates).

All the Democratic races are proportional – with delegates apportioned between the candidates at district level and state-wide. A narrow win is nice, but it's not necessarily all that much better than a narrow loss.

I'll explain using California.

Each of California's 53 congressional districts (the constituencies for the congressmen in the US House of Representative) has an election, at which between 3 and 6 delegates are up for grabs (most have 4 or 5). Although each congressional district has roughly the same population, they don't all have the same population of democrats – upon which each district's delegate value is largely based.

These district level delegates are awarded proportionately across the candidates reaching 15% of the vote within that district. It's useful to note that with the small number of delegates available, achieving real proportionality isn't always that easy. In a district electing four delegates, a 59% - 41% vote sees each candidate get two delegates (which may seem wrong, but it's closer to true proportionality than three delegates to one would be: my opponent got less than 50% more votes than me, why's that 200% more delegates?).

For California, that's how 241 delegates are given out. A further 81 at-large delegates are awarded proportionally across the whole state to candidates receiving 15% state-wide, and another 48 are awarded proportionally (again to candidates receiving 15% state-wide) to state party officials who make their preference known (democratic mayors and state legislators etc. – called party leader and elected official delegates or PLEO delegates). These are all pledged delegates, who promise to vote for their candidate in the first round at the convention.

This system, even though it's technically proportional, can lead to anomalies. It will usually even out, but a similar system saw Barack Obama win more delegates in the Nevada caucuses than Hillary Clinton, despite her state-wide triumph in the vote.

Each state in the Democratic process is basically the same – 75% of their pledged delegation is awarded proportionally at the district level, 25% is awarded at-large across the state, and 15% is awarded to pledged PLEO delegates (yes – the Democratic Party rules actually use these percentages).

There are unpledged PLEO delegates too, the superdelegates we looked at last time, but when you're trying to work out who's winning Super Tuesday, it's the pledged delegates at which you should be looking. The proportionality across the Democratic race means they're less likely to have a presumptive nominee at the end of the day, but there's a reasonable prospect of a true front-runner emerging in the Republican race – small victories in the popular vote can lead to large victories in delegate counts in some states which can quickly add up.

Super Tuesday has grown in size over the years, and this year sees it at new heights – in size, importance, and spectacle. The national primary is an institution – almost as American as the Superbowl, which bookends this post. An integral part of the spectacle of the Superbowl for the millions watching it at home are the advertisements, and this – embracing another great American tradition – the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade – is the pick of the bunch. I misted over, and it even got props from the folks at Cartoonbrew – despite the presence of an arch enemy:

Repeat after me: In America, as in New Zealand, it's only an election.

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