Well, on current trends, with the pledged delegates essentially tied and no sign that will change quickly, it seems unlikely there will be a 20% spread in pledged delegates at the convention. So it will in theory be in the superdelegates' hands to swing it.

One hopes that they'd be too embarassed to actually do it, though.

How many delegates would each candidate pick up if Florida and Michigan get seated? I'm wondering if there's a chance that we'll have a situation where Obama has more committed delegates, and the superdelegates are in a position to throw the race to Clinton but don't want to look like spoilers, so the Clinton committed delegates and superdelegates team up to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, pushing the committed delegate count over the edge in Hillary's favor and thus creating the illusion that the superdelegates didn't thwart the will of the voters.

I don't know enough about the process to know if this is even technically possible -- anybody know? And if it is it would still only work in a fairly narrow set of circumstances. But it would be interesting.

Good for Barbara Boxer! I'm an Obama supporter, so it seems like she'd be voting against my candidate, but I *really* don't like the idea of superdelegates. When they don't make a difference in an election, who cares? And if they do make a difference, everyone will feel like the election was stolen.

the Clinton committed delegates and superdelegates team up to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, pushing the committed delegate count over the edge in Hillary's favor and thus creating the illusion that the superdelegates didn't thwart the will of the voters

I'm not sure this would really be an illusion. Michigan's delegates are perhaps illegitimate because the other guys weren't on the ballot, but Florida's DO represent the will of the voters.

"Florida's DO represent the will of the voters."

Except that nobody campaigned in Florida -- unless you count Clinton's advocacy, right before their primary, for seating their delegates. Maybe Clinton would have won Florida anyway (does FL do proportional or winner take all?), but it wasn't a fair contest.

But it would be a real shame if the end result of overwhelming voter participation and a contested primary was to throw the election to unaccountable party elites.

You know, that was my first reaction, but upon reflection, I'm not so sure it's so indefensible. The rank-and-file members of the party -- i.e., the voters -- are plainly split pretty evenly. Maybe it's perfectly reasonable to say that in such a case, the choice should be made by the experienced pols in the party, who -- and I know this is highly disputable -- theoretically have some greater political acumen than the average voter? Obviously such pols shouldn't be able to thwart the clear will of the party members, but where there is no such expressed will, how else are you going to decide things? Is "50%+1 rules" really such a principle that it cannot bend lest democracy be broken?

Right now, there are a large number of undecided superdelegates. Clinton does currently enjoy a slight edge (somewhere between 50-90ish).

Undecideds tend to break for the challenger, though. Stands to reason superdelegates should alerady know enough about Hillary, given her name recognition, to have decided for her. So the longer the campaign goes on, the more likely they are to vote for Obama.

Novel question: prior to the candidate selection votes, aren't parliamentary motions possible at the convention? Isn't that how the delegates might choose to seat FL and MI? Couldn't the pledged delegates also move to bar the superdelegates?

Except that nobody campaigned in Florida -- unless you count Clinton's advocacy, right before their primary, for seating their delegates.

This. As the front-runner, she enjoyed incumbent status, plus name recognition. Letting that result stand is as disenfranchising as not seating their delegates.

Except that nobody campaigned in Florida

Doesn't matter. It's Florida, not New Hampshire; you're not going to retail-campaign your way to victory in a state with 18 million people. It's not like people there weren't familiar with the candidates; this is probably the most covered primary campaign in history.

The idea that a few campaign stops would have dramatically altered the race (as opposed to having no effect at all, or canceling each other out) is pure speculation. It's preposterous to say that a primary in which millions voted doesn't represent the will of the people there, just because you think they might have changed their minds if the candidates had been allowed to campaign there.

I mean, since when do primaries only represent the will of the voters if the candidates actually campaign there? I doubt anyone will be campaigning in Hawaii or the Virgin Islands; should their delegates not count?

I suspect the superdelegates will go with whoever has the lead in delegates. Doing anything else would risk claims of disenfranchisement that the party can't afford.

This is a huge mess. What if Clinton has more popular votes, but less pledged delegates? That is what happened yesterday. Wouldn't that undermine the legitimacy of the system on the basis of democratic principles? This whole situation sucks and just shows the need for a national primary. The winner of this race will most likely have questionable legitimacy no matter what. Everyone should be very worried no matter what the outcome winds up being.

The winner of this race will most likely have questionable legitimacy no matter what.

I really don't think that's right. I'm pretty sure (and see Digby today for further discussion) that Dems will gladly coalesce behind the nominee and won't carp about "legitimacy." (Outside the almost-certain spate of GBCW diaries at dKos, of course.) This isn't Bush/Gore 2000.

The problem with Florida is that people didn't vote because they were told the results were non-binding. I know my family in Florida (elderly) weren't going to schlep themselves to vote in a meaningless election.

I am not saying it is likely the percentages would change, but I am sure the Obama camp could argue that their activist had no reason to rally their supporters and that cost them important votes that could have swung additional delegates their way.

While not as tainted as Michigan, Florida's primary shouldn't be given any more legitimacy than Michigan's.

"The idea that a few campaign stops would have dramatically altered the race (as opposed to having no effect at all, or canceling each other out) is pure speculation."

But that's the whole point -- because Florida wasn't contested we're left to speculate about what might or might not have happened. The candidates not campaigning in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands are making a strategic choice, whereas in Florida they all agreed not to. Plus, it's not just about who would or wouldn't have won Florida -- results from early primaries impact campaigning down the road, and time and money spent in Florida is time and money not spent elsewhere. Even if we assume that Clinton was essentially guaranteed to win Florida had it been contested, that contest still might have changed results. Maybe Clinton would have spent a lot of time and money making sure that Florida was a blow-out but missed out on campaing time elsewhere that would have cost her other states. Maybe Obama would have campaigned hard in Florida for a better-than-expected finish and lost additional later states due to lack of campaigning. Or Maybe Obama would have in fact done better than expected and Clinton worse than expected and that would have given Obama a bigger advantage and he would have picked up more states last night. We'll never know. So it's not fair to change the rules after the fact.

Galen, all of those are not illegitimate concerns, but I don't think any of them rises to the level where seating Florida's delegates would be to thwart the will of the voters. If it comes down to a narrow enough margin where Florida could make the difference (Oh god horrible horrible flashbacks), the results will be tainted no matter what. The question is: are they more tainted by the fact that nobody campaigned there (which was also, incidentally, a choice on their part), or by simply deleting the preferences of voters in the 4th largest state in the country?

One thing I think we can all agree on is that this is turning into an enormous clusterfuck.

How much money is going to be wasted deciding this nomination instead of going towards defeating the GOP?

I suggested before that if Obama really means his 'unity' shtick, he ought to drop out in exchange for a spot on the ticket. In retrospect, this seems unfair; I imagine his supporters would regard it as something of a betrayal - we've worked this long and this hard for you, now you're quitting?

Still, I wonder if something couldn't be worked out - a deal which gave one of them not only the VP slot, but also a guarantee of more than typical VP authority once elected. A pipe dream, I realize.

Theres a big difference between super delegates 'deciding the election' and super delegates changing the results of an election. If neither candidate has the delegates, the super delegates are the only way to decide the election and should do so according to the current(at that future date) delegate count.

If they decide to throw the election to someone who did not win the most delegates in those states where they delegates count, then we can all declare McCain the winner and we can all give up. We will have absolute 0 black/female support and we will get no indepentants, as they will se us as so corrupt that even the Republicans come off as angelic choir boys by comparison.

Jasonh c, Clinton agreed that florida and Michigan wouldn't count. EVERYONE did. You will lose the general election if you win that way. Hell, we will probably lose EVERY election for 2 decades if a nominee wins that way. The 84 convention had more to do with our 88 loss than some doofus in a tank ever did.

Jason, Florida doesn't counht for anything unless you think campaigns don't actually make a difference in voting patterns. Clinton was the default, and she won because of that.

I can point to 9 states last night where that turned out not to be true. Perhaps Obama wouldn't win, but he'd likely do a hell of a lot better. Clinton's little game of calvin ball is doing serious damage to this party and someone needs to stand in and do something.

Maybe "thwarting the will of the voters" is the wrong way to articulate the problem. Obviously the people who voted did so voluntarily and the people who stayed home did so voluntarily, and the people who voted had free choice to express their will. But I wasn't talking about thwarting the will of the Florida voters, I was talking about thwarting the will of the voters who participated in the official contest.

I don't think following the rules as originally established and keeping Florida and Michigan out taints the results, but I agree that if the results are close enough that Florida could make a difference the results will _appear_ tainted to a lot of people, and that's a significant problem. But personally I'm more comfortable accepting a result that seems tainted because the party and the candidates made and enforced a set of rules at the beginning which in retrospect may seem like they were a bad idea (for the record, I think they were fair, but there are legitimate reasons to feel otherwise) than a result that's tainted because people changed the rules after the fact, especially given that the people who would benefit from changing the rules would be the ones proposing it.

I've heard it suggested that Florida could run another primary that would count, and in which the candidates could campaign, as a way to solve the problem, and that seems relatively fair to me. But that decision should be made now, before the campaigns know how the results without Florida are going to look

Clinton agreed that florida and Michigan wouldn't count. EVERYONE did. You will lose the general election if you win that way.

And Hillary Clinton is not going to force anyone to go back on that decision.

Accusations of Calvinball don't make any sense. No one's changing the rules. If the decision regarding Florida gets reversed, it will be done in a procedurally correct manner - i.e. according to the rules that everyone agreed on. It's not like Hillary's going to lead the Beer Hall Putsch here.

The decision to strip delegates was a fucked up one, and it was only made because people assumed it wouldn't matter. Whether and how to rectify that fuck-up is something the party has to decide. There are competing considerations pushing both ways; Galen articulates one side of them aptly.

The ideal situation would indeed be to run another primary in Florida and Michigan, but it is my understanding that this is simply not possible.

Ergo, clusterfuck. There is no good solution; the question will be which bad solution sucks more.

I'm with you in spirit but you lose me in the rhetoric. Congressmen and governors don't sound unaccountable to me.

Also, what happened in West Virginia (Iowa too, I guess) sounds a lot more offensive to the spirit of voter participation than how you describe superdelegates, but that seems to be way down everyone's bitch list. Talk about a gathering of elites. I'm sure my actual job would preclude me from attending a caucus.

"Clinton was the default, and she won because of that."

Well if you say so, it must be true.

Clinton also must have won every other big, heterogeneous state because Obama didn't campaign there either. I mean, you say so, right?

Are there actual delegates who were selected by voters in the Michigan and Florida primaries? Were they listed on the ballots as pledged to specific candidates (or "undecided" in the case of MI)?
If so, the candidates' national organizations must have had a hand in selecting them, and thus been in violation of any pledges not to campaign. Right?

Kelly, please show some self-respect. Soullite's point may or may not be correct, but it wasn't unreasoning, and it directly addressed the very point you so contemptuously raise. To blockquote him:

Clinton was the default, and she won because of that.
I can point to 9 states last night where that turned out not to be true. Perhaps Obama wouldn't win, but he'd likely do a hell of a lot better.

Pretty clearly, Soullite has already conceded the valid part of your complaint, but you might do Coullite the favor of considering the valid part Soullite's point.

P.S. If that blockquote didn't work I blame this horrific and preview-free commenting system.

Jason C.,

You never did respond to my concern that Florida's primary doesn't represent the voters' wills because some didn't vote because they were told the vote was non-binding. Under what rationale do you disenfranchise those who did not vote in an election because they were told it had no effect on the presidential race?

Kelly, nobody elected governors to pick the next Presidential nominee. That was never an issue in any of those primaries, and you know it. EVERYONE expected that we ourselves would pick the next nominee, not some other random official who was elected in some other election that had NOTHING to do with the current one.

Your contempt is a badge of honor. The difference between someone like you and someone like me is that I wouldn't be arguing any differently if the situation is reversed. You need to learn the difference between righteous indignation and whining like a child because you're not getting your way.

The most I would do is refuse to support your candidate in the general election. You want to scrap our democratic process and have this decided by a select and elite few. Which of those sounds like the appropriate democratic response to losing an election to you?

Hillary' 08 is starting to sound a lot like Bush'00 to me.

Jason, I'm not going to respond to your drivel. Instead I'm going to ask you the question again: Do you think campaigns make a difference in how people vote or not? The only way you can argue what you are arguing is if you think that two competing campaigns would always lead to the same result as non-competitive campaigns. You clearly believe that the fact that Hillary has been a household persona for 2 decades did not give her any kind of an advantage over someone these voters saw on the news once or twice.

To be more honest, you don't believe that at all. You're a hack who argues whatever is more convenient to your candidate. None of us believe for a second you'd be arguing this if Obama had won Florida. There was a time to make this argument, and that was when these delegates were stripped in the first place. IF you think of using your super delegates to seat these delegates, and then using these delegations to justify having the super delegates side with Clinton despite a lead by OBama, there will be a whole lot of hell to pay.

If you want to be part of the campaign that killed the Democratic party for a generation on the cusp of what is likely to be an era of unprecedented success, then go right ahead. I hope you like hearing the name 'Hubert Humphrey' because thats who your candidate is going to compared to for the rest of our republics history.

Here is a clear way to ensure that the rules everyone agreed to are followed- the Florida and Michigan delegations should be barred from even attending the convention. If we accept the premise that everyone agreed that these states would be stripped of their delegates, then the only way to stick to those rules and not change them in the middle of the game is for the Florida and Michigan delegations to never count. If this is a matter of principle and fairness, and following the rules; then Obama and his supporters should come out right now and say that the Florida and Michigan delegations should NEVER be seated. That is what they are claiming was agreed to. Not that they would have no sway in deciding the nomnation, but that they would have no delegates. Period. Giving them delegates after the nomination is decided would be changing what was agreed to after the fact. If we are going to insist on following the rules everyone supposedly agreed to, then we should at least have the decency to save the delegations from Florida and Michigan from having to waste their money coming to the convention. If we are at all open to seating these delegations at anytime, then clearly it was not agreed that they would never be seated. It was understood that they very well could and would be. That understanding is now be thrown out because the Obama people understand what that would mean for their chances. Obama after all was the one who promised last fall to do right by the voters of Florida. He fundraised there under that promise. He ran ads there as part of a national ad run. (The only candidate to do so. There was no reason he couldn't have waited till after January 29th to go national.) If the delegates from Florida and Michigan are ever seated then the rules will have been changed. The only question is are thr rules going to be changed in favor Obama at the expense of voters in Florida and Michigan, or are they going to be changed in favor of Clinton. There is no good solution to the problem. The DNC has created a nightmare that will cause either candidates victory to be called into question if the vote winds up being close.
This situation is only going to be further inflamed by the controversey over superdelegates. The Obama campaign is basically arguing that we should defacto scrap the superdelegate process. Superdelegates were intentionally set up not to be determined by the popular vote. If they were meant to relfect the actual vote then they could have just been determined like all the rest. By arguing that they should not play a role in decidiing the nomination the Obama people are basically asking us to change the entire system and the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It would have been the equivalent of Gore demamnding in 2000 that the electors for Bush change and vote for him because he won the popular vote. It is simply not how the system works and to claim it should work that way is dishonest.

"Pretty clearly, Soullite has already conceded the valid part of your complaint, but you might do Coullite the favor of considering the valid part Soullite's point."

Searching for the valid part of the complaint. Still searching.

Oh you mean the part that was pure conjecture as to why Hillary won the state and Obama didn't?

"Kelly, nobody elected governors to pick the next Presidential nominee."

Eh, that's a completely different argument than saying "OH NOES SUPERDELEGATES ARE COMPLETELY UNACCOUNTABLE" when the majority of them are elected officials. The act of being elected implies some degree of accountability. No one elected Arlen Specter to scrutinize the NFL's dealings with the New England Patriots either.

"Hillary' 08 is starting to sound a lot like Bush'00 to me."

Way to push the unity message, Obama is a straight shooter isn't he? He's absolutely perfect.

Kelly, I'm not some Obama-pusher. I'm my own person. I don't have any messages to push. I favor Obama, but I don't care any more about unity than you do.

It's simply not contestable that Obama would do better in a campaign where he was allowed to compete. That is the entire point of holding campaigns. The state or federal parties could hold their own primaries or caucus's. The problem is that primaries are probably prohibitively expensive, and I doubt the Clinton campaign will accept Caucuses. The mature choice is to do one or the other, though.

Kelly, soullite is a bitter, angry person driven by passions, not reason.

To be fair, I'd imagine that caucuses in states the size of Michigan or Florida would be a complete nightmare.

SuperDelegates are CRIMINAL.

The entire concept is ridiculous and contrarian to democracy.

If the DNC allows a reversal based on SuperDelegate votes --- they had better prepare to be upended.

for word sure.
that ain't no kinda democracy, no how.

But a political party isn't a democracy, exactly. They have no particular obligation to let their nominee be decided by popular vote. The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, etc. all choose nominees without primaries.

As it happens, the Dem. Party has chosen to open up the process a bit. But only a bit. If you think it's unwise to leave it to superdelegates, fine, but it's hard to argue that it's some great injustice.

Quite true indeed, Jason C. Parties are not democracies, that title being reserved for actual government structures. This is, however, the "Democratic" party we're talking about and that particular name, 'democratic', smells vaguely delusional given their unflinchingly wonky vote-tallying and blatant tendency toward elitism.

So, is it some great injustice? No, probably not.
Is it a drop in our nation's bucket of systematic disenfranchisement of the proletariat via subtle social oppressions perpetrated by a self-interested and disproportionately powerful elite? ABSOLUTELY.