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A (very modest) defense of super delegates

By pharrell

Judging from the cable network talking heads blabbering on about the election returns last night and today's headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post, super delegates have emerged as the political issue du jour. There are nearly 800 of these in the Democratic party--congressmen and senators, governors, state party officials, and garden variety "insiders"--who may hold the balance of power between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here at Yale Law, there's been a lively email discussion about how undemocratic these super delegates are, and how unfair it would be for the "unelected insiders" to reverse the will of Democratic voters around the country. While I have a great deal of respect for that position, I'm also sympathetic to the existing Democratic nominating process.

The Democratic Party is a strange sort of hybrid, part private political association and part public entity. While it exists to express the political preferences of Democratic voters , it is a political party, not a debating society, and as such exists first and foremost to elect Democrats to political office. Understood in that light, I can understand why party insiders might be justified in having some say in selecting the party's presidential nominee. The overwhelming majority of super delegates are men and women who will have to stand for their own elections with that nominee at the top of the ticket or local party officials working to build their own, local democratic organizations, and that nominee will serve as the party's public face. In a case where the voters are essentially deadlocked, it seems not unfair to me that people with a direct stake in the outcome should have the power to break that tie.

I probably wouldn't have super delegates, or at least many of them, if I was designing a primary system from scratch. And I hope that many of this year's super delegates will vote the way their states or district did. But I can also see why, back in the 1980s, we chose the system we did, and the system does not--at least right now--strike me as a deeply unfair one.

UPDATE: Tad Devine has an interesting op-ed about super delegates in today's Times.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on February 10, 2008 (boomark / email).