threatened by a candidate to vote for them. Nor is it as some are now trying to spin, "so they and regular people can both feel warm and fuzzy by being part of the convention."
You see he superdelegates are supposed to support the one that will win the GE and not lose it, current trends show that Sanders would be that guy, of course in order to keep the people fooled that believe they are supposed to vote mostly as tie breakers, (that is not their actual intended purpose)
Sanders will have to bring down that 250+ pledged delegate deficit to a much smaller margin, one in the single digits or double digits perhaps depending on just how unelectable Clinton is in the GE at the time of the convention.
For the record however, again - the superdelegates do have a purpose and it is not a "feel good, I get to be involved!" purpose. It is "about the business of winning again" to quote one of the Committee members that formed the rule change that brought the Superdelegates into being.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Rohde, could you explain why the Democratic Party came up with the superdelegate system and whether the Republican Party follows the same system?
DAVID ROHDE: Let me take the second part first. The Republicans have—do have some superdelegates, but it’s—I believe the number is three per state. So it’s not very important. It’s for the national party representatives from the state.
The reason that the Democrats adopted the superdelegate plan was really because of the possibility of insurgent candidates, not for their own sake, but insurgent candidates who might not be successful in general elections. So it doesn’t do the party a lot of good to nominate a candidate that reflects the wishes of the party and then to go on and lose the general election. And the poster child for this, of course, was George McGovern, and that—who was an insurgent candidate, won out against the party establishment and then got beaten by 20 points in the national election in a gigantic landslide.
So, the Hunt Commission, the commission that was looking at various aspects of the way the party was organized, after the 1980 election, thought that having superdelegates—and they—in the Democratic Party, they are the members of the National Committee, of which there are a little more than 400, Democratic members of the U.S. House, Democratic members of the U.S. Senate and Democratic governors. And that adds up to 712. And the Hunt Commission thought that having those elected officials play a part in choosing the nominee would be a partial balance that would give more weight to the considerations of electability than might otherwise be placed by the delegates that were elected in the primaries and caucuses.
AMY GOODMAN interview FEBRUARY 11, 2016
DAVID ROHDE
professor of political science at Duke University and co-author of a series of books on every national election since 1980.
MATT KARP
assistant professor of history at Princeton University and contributing editor at Jacobin. His most recent article for Jacobin is "The War on Bernie Sanders.
Some history I've been reading regarding the supposed purpose of the Superdelegates and the reason for there existence:
To nominate a candidate who can win.
While the first two rationales are more procedural, the latter two have a somewhat more specific outcome in mind. For one thing, in light of what had happened in 1972 and 1980, there was some surprisingly frank discussion about the electability of the eventual nominee:
Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina is chairman of the 69-member commission reviewing party nominating rules for the fourth time since 1969. He began the first regional hearing by saying that the goal was to give ordinary Democrats ''greater faith and confidence in the nominating process.''
Victory Is the Objective
''We're about the business of winning again,'' he said, in describing the objective of the commission, which is to present recommendations for action by the national committee early next year. (NYT, 9/25/81)
Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, who heads the latest Democratic rule-changing group, an unwieldy, 29-member agglomeration of the innocent and the experienced, describes its task as one of writing ''rules that will help us choose a nominee who can win and who, having won, can govern effectively.'' The rules will probably matter less than the unemployment rate to a Democratic victory in 1984. But the comments underscore a traditional motive for the task of rule-changing the Democratic National Committee will finish in March. Much of this year's deliberations have seemed infused with a desire to deny future nominations to political reincarnations of the Jimmy Carter of 1976. (NYT, 1/27/82)
The concept was spawned at a meeting of party leaders after the Republicans scored smashing victories in the 1980 elections. ''There was a strong feeling,'' he said.
One should also not count one's chickens before they are hatched and the MSM is using fraudulent numbers despite being told directly not to by the DNCs Communications director.
And just recently told by DWS herself not to include superdelegates in their counts on election coverage (I apologize for not finding that clip yet)
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