Superdelegates Undermining Our Democracy

Work Play said:
That the parties are not "the government" is virtually a technicality, and has been for decades. The whole presidential election process undermines an aspect of democracy (people) whenever it can get away with it, for the benefit of political elites. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it's as cheap a way out of the argument to blame it on the parties, as it is to weasel out of free speech arguments by standing on corporate rights.
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It's not a technicality, it's the end result of what I wrote - people who are too lazy to decide on their own preferred candidate. So they've outsourced it to the Dem's and GOP. But they're also too lazy to actually learn what a political party is. So after years of being too lazy to take control of their own democratic responsibilities, they complain that the companies that they've hired to provide them with candidates are following the companies' rules. What did they expect?

These are the same people who generally ignore all of their local elections. They don't inform themselves on who's running for the school board or the local comptroller. They ignore "democracy" for almost every election except the Presidential one. Then they complain about the very process they've empowered and then ignored.

Put the blame where it lies. On the American people who refuse to self-educate and refuse to become politically involved except every 4 years when they start crying that their specific candidate isn't winning. "Oh boo hoo, the process that elected the last 10 Presidents isn't working in my favor this time - democracy has been undermined." Hilarious. :rolleyes:
 
BVG said:
Which is exactly why it's in place.
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That's why it confused me. It seems too blatantly obvious that it can be abused for me to easily believe that the understanding I have is the entire story.
 
panamaican said:
Hmm, a thread where people question the democratic process but also conflate political parties with government entities.

There are no preselected candidates. The Dems and the GOP are not government entities. You are not obligated to pick from their candidates. They are not obligated to follow the popular vote.

What has undermined our democracy is people who rely on private organizations, like the Republican Party and Democratic Party, to provide them with candidates and then complain when the private organization follows it's own internal rules for doing so.
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Ah! Thank you for this.
I was trying to understand your guys' process, and coming up short.
 
PrinceOfPain said:
That's why it confused me. It seems too blatantly obvious that it can be abused for me to easily believe that the understanding I have is the entire story.
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The entire story is that this is the party's internal system, nothing official in term of government. If Democrats (or Republicans ) decided to pick their nominee according to height they could, or just go down a list. If you dont like who the party picks to represent them vote for another party
 
Bernie could have ran as independent...but then his chances of getting this far would have been nil because the American population is most certainly conditioned to vote red or blue.
 
BVG said:
Bernie could have ran as independent...but then his chances of getting this far would have been nil because the American population is most certainly conditioned to vote red or blue.
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That's the fault of the population though.
 
JDragon said:
The whole electoral college system can be criticized from many angles.

For example, your vote counts much more in Wyoming (187k votes per elector) than in California (677k per elector). This violates the democratic idea of one man-one vote.
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The rationale is that if 1 man = 1 vote candidates would only have to campaign in states with high populations.
 
BVG said:
if 1 person had 1 vote you would need a huge amount of people that are democratic to waste their vote and troll repubs.
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Depends on the state and their primary system, you dont necessarily need to be registered to a party to vote in their primary. So you could conceivably vote in the Republican primary and Democrat primary
 
panamaican said:
It's not a technicality, it's the end result of what I wrote - people who are too lazy to decide on their own preferred candidate. So they've outsourced it to the Dem's and GOP. But they're also too lazy to actually learn what a political party is. So after years of being too lazy to take control of their own democratic responsibilities, they complain that the companies that they've hired to provide them with candidates are following the companies' rules. What did they expect?

These are the same people who generally ignore all of their local elections. They don't inform themselves on who's running for the school board or the local comptroller. They ignore "democracy" for almost every election except the Presidential one. Then they complain about the very process they've empowered and then ignored.

Put the blame where it lies. On the American people who refuse to self-educate and refuse to become politically involved except every 4 years when they start crying that their specific candidate isn't winning. "Oh boo hoo, the process that elected the last 10 Presidents isn't working in my favor this time - democracy has been undermined." Hilarious. :rolleyes:
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Can't dispute any of that.

My angle is that we simply do not have the sort of democracy that people think we do, and it comes up every 4 years the same way. Same outrage about delegates, same frustration at the stranglehold by the parties. People who get interested around election time look at our system and can't believe it. This year I'm trying to take the approach that there are many layers of protection against popular majorities built into the system. Even though the Dem superdelegate process seems to have been designed to promote a more democratic approach, people have strong negative reactions to it. It's something they would think to expect from the Republicans rather than the Democrats. But even though a feature of the superdelegate is the undermining of the will of the people (intended by the party or not), it's a very small insult to the idea of a more direct national democracy compared to something like the Senate, which actually has big pointy teeth, and may well go against the general public.

Maybe I'm taking a bad approach on this.
 
Work Play said:
Can't dispute any of that.

My angle is that we simply do not have the sort of democracy that people think we do, and it comes up every 4 years the same way. Same outrage about delegates, same frustration at the stranglehold by the parties. People who get interested around election time look at our system and can't believe it. This year I'm trying to take the approach that there are many layers of protection against popular majorities built into the system. Even though the Dem superdelegate process seems to have been designed to promote a more democratic approach, people have strong negative reactions to it. It's something they would think to expect from the Republicans rather than the Democrats. But even though a feature of the superdelegate is the undermining of the will of the people (intended by the party or not), it's a very small insult to the idea of a more direct national democracy compared to something like the Senate, which actually has big pointy teeth, and may well go against the general public.

Maybe I'm taking a bad approach on this.
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I don't know if you're taking a bad approach or not but I do disagree on your conclusions.

People who only get involved every 4 years are like people who randomly decide to see how sausage gets made. The process has not changed in decades. Yet every 4 years, after seeing the process, they complain for a few weeks and then go back to ignoring it. The way the parties run their primaries is a state by state internal matter and if someone wanted to change it, they could.

For reference sake, between 2010 and 2014 I held a small, inconsequential, elected position in my city (as a Republican). I got out there and met with the party leaders and walked the streets talking with people. All of the generic stuff. It's a small amount of people making these rules. But it's not small because it's inaccessible. It's small because most people don't care enough to actually get involved. If people really cared about democracy or even just about how their political party operated then those meeting would have more than 50 people. The candidate signing parties would have more than 50 regulars and hundreds of random people who show up, sign a petition, and then leave for home or drinks or dates. I met my entire local power structure in a matter of weeks. I met the money guys, the power guys, the powerful money guys and the guys who teach you how get things done. I met the people you need to influence and the people you need to remove. It didn't take 4 years to do so. Weeks.

I've seen first hand that most people, even those who claim to be politically informed and active, have no interest in the business of getting someone elected and even less interest in shaping the political party they claim to be affiliated with. They want someone, someone like me but more ruthless, to do all the hard work and they just want to show up and vote.
 
Work Play said:
Can't dispute any of that.

My angle is that we simply do not have the sort of democracy that people think we do, and it comes up every 4 years the same way. Same outrage about delegates, same frustration at the stranglehold by the parties. People who get interested around election time look at our system and can't believe it. This year I'm trying to take the approach that there are many layers of protection against popular majorities built into the system. Even though the Dem superdelegate process seems to have been designed to promote a more democratic approach, people have strong negative reactions to it. It's something they would think to expect from the Republicans rather than the Democrats. But even though a feature of the superdelegate is the undermining of the will of the people (intended by the party or not), it's a very small insult to the idea of a more direct national democracy compared to something like the Senate, which actually has big pointy teeth, and may well go against the general public.

Maybe I'm taking a bad approach on this.
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It sounds like everyone is aware and gets upset once a year but no one does anything about it. Which means that people aren't actually thay upset.

And how does the Super delegate support democracy. Other than Republicans and everything they do it bad and everything Democrats do is nice.
 
panamaican said:
I don't know if you're taking a bad approach or not but I do disagree on your conclusions.

People who only get involved every 4 years are like people who randomly decide to see how sausage gets made. The process has not changed in decades. Yet every 4 years, after seeing the process, they complain for a few weeks and then go back to ignoring it. The way the parties run their primaries is a state by state internal matter and if someone wanted to change it, they could.

For reference sake, between 2010 and 2014 I held a small, inconsequential, elected position in my city (as a Republican). I got out there and met with the party leaders and walked the streets talking with people. All of the generic stuff. It's a small amount of people making these rules. But it's not small because it's inaccessible. It's small because most people don't care enough to actually get involved. If people really cared about democracy or even just about how their political party operated then those meeting would have more than 50 people. The candidate signing parties would have more than 50 regulars and hundreds of random people who show up, sign a petition, and then leave for home or drinks or dates. I met my entire local power structure in a matter of weeks. I met the money guys, the power guys, the powerful money guys and the guys who teach you how get things done. I met the people you need to influence and the people you need to remove. It didn't take 4 years to do so. Weeks.

I've seen first hand that most people, even those who claim to be politically informed and active, have no interest in the business of getting someone elected and even less interest in shaping the political party they claim to be affiliated with. They want someone, someone like me but more ruthless, to do all the hard work and they just want to show up and vote.
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I'm happy to leave it there because that's such a good point.
 
PrinceOfPain said:
That's the fault of the population though.
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Not entirely. Because of our election processes the US is pretty much locked into having two parties. What those two parties are can change over time but you're only going to see two dominant parties. It's certainly fair to point out, as Pan did, that we can affect how those parties are run, who runs them, and what the platforms are but it is overly simplistic to simply dismiss the two party framework via comments like "people need to not vote party line" or "vote for something besides R or D" or "conditioned to vote red or blue".

I actually post about this all the time but few people bother to pay attention.
 
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Dochter said:
Not entirely. Because of our election processes the US is pretty much locked into having two parties. What those two parties are can change over time but you're only going to see two dominant parties. It's certainly fair to point out, as Pan did, that we can certainly affect how those parties are run, who runs them, and what the platforms are but it is overly simplistic to simply dismiss the two party framework via comments like "people need to not vote party line" or "vote for something besides R or D" or "conditioned to vote red or blue".

I actually post about this all the time but few people bother to pay attention.
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How so?
 
PolishHeadlock said:
The rationale is that if 1 man = 1 vote candidates would only have to campaign in states with high populations.
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Technically that is true today, too. Winning the 11 largest states is sufficient, I don't need to win the rest.

California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey. 270 delegates. If I win all of those, it's over. And it is thus technically possible to win the Presidential election with only about 23 or 24% of the popular vote (did a quick calculation).

So I don't need to campaign in a single small state. The only reason this needs to be done is the fact that the large states are split among parties. Georgia and Texas are solid Republican states, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are swing states.

Let's assume for a second that Florida, Ohio and North Carolina become stable Democratic majority states over the years due to demographic reasons or whatever. Now the only reason to campaign in the smaller states (just from a calculation point of view) is the fact that I need the 54 votes from Texas and Georgia.

If Texas ever becomes a stable Democrat state - sounds crazy from today's point of view, but it could still happen - you guys will hope you'd have an actual popular vote system.
 
democratic republic not direct democracy
 
Dochter said:
Not entirely. Because of our election processes the US is pretty much locked into having two parties. What those two parties are can change over time but you're only going to see two dominant parties. It's certainly fair to point out, as Pan did, that we can certainly affect how those parties are run, who runs them, and what the platforms are but it is overly simplistic to simply dismiss the two party framework via comments like "people need to not vote party line" or "vote for something besides R or D" or "conditioned to vote red or blue".

I actually post about this all the time but few people bother to pay attention.
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I get the impression that the US voter is largely trapped in a mindset of "red or blue", and that the thinking of the people strongly reflects the two party system which they simultaneously uphold and are trapped in. This is obviously an impression based on a view from afar, but other than the mindset of the population, what else locks America into a two party system?
 
PrinceOfPain said:
I get the impression that the US voter is largely trapped in a mindset of "red or blue", and that the thinking of the people strongly reflects the two party system which they simultaneously uphold and are trapped in. This is obviously an impression based on a view from afar, but other than the mindset of the population, what else locks America into a two party system?
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Because we operate according to a "first past the post" system, we're going to always tend toward having two parties. What those two parties are can change and has changed. If voters really did object to the coalitions/platform combinations presented by the democrats and republicans, a third party would be successful or a change in party ideology would be observed. This has happened to equally entrenched parties and the democrats and republicans have seen major internal changes as well.
 
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