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Superdelegates Created The Modern Democratic Party – Will They End It?

Superdelegates Created The Modern Democratic Party – Will They End It?

Superdelegates weren’t established to be democratic. They were established to be Democrats.

That’s what I found reading though In These Times magazine’s exclusive trove of documents from the proceedings from the 1982 Hunt Commission, in which Democratic politicians, labor leaders, and party organizers plotted a system by which insurgent progressive candidates like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter (and later, Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders) would face an additional barrier to the Democratic nomination: insiders.

More than that, though, they created an incentive structure by which they could harness the insurgent energy of young people, single-issue interest groups, and local elected officials to power a party that was, by all accounts, struggling.

“I think we want to strengthen this Party in part by making the people of this country feel better about the Democratic Party,” announced North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, early in the commission’s meetings. “One of the great things we have done—and I am proud to have been a part of it—is open the doors of our Party.”

But that opening of the party, achieved after the McGovern–Fraser Commission recommended more than a decade earlier that Democrats radically change their delegate election processes, had also weakened it: elected leaders and Democratic officials could no longer hand pick supporters, and across the country, state primaries replaced caucuses as the preferred tool for delegate selection. The People had the power, and they couldn’t agree on what the Democratic Party should represent.

The 1972 Democratic National Convention confirmed party elites’ worst fears about “opening up”: liberals and progressives of all stripes, incorporated into the party’s formal mechanisms for the first time, log jammed the convention with long fights over the party platform, delaying George McGovern’s own acceptance speech until three in the morning. Democrats would win one of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.

Midway through that dry streak, the Hunt Commission met. They had seen what a truly “democratic” Democratic Party looked like — petty ideological infighting and the alienation of a middle class that Nixon had so cleverly dubbed “The Silent Majority” — but they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

“One of the problems about linking the parties with the candidates in that instance is that since the parties have no control–one of the original functions of the parties in the two-party system is accountability,” said Xandra Kayden, then an progressive activist and now an academic.

With the party elites out of the nominee-selection business, she posited, Democratic voters didn’t feel they could register their protest votes with party leaders, and would instead support fringe candidates or movements that ran against the party. She was right.

“[I]f the Party doesn’t have influence over getting the nomination—and we have been kept out of that—then the accountability issue is a little lax,” she said.

It may seem odd — if the Democratic Party was worried about accountability — to jumpstart a program by which party elites were given unaccountable control of a significant portion of convention votes. But to the members of the Hunt Commission, the role of superdelegates was to ride the line between representing their party’s interests, local constituents’ interests, and their own opinions.

 

Superdelegates’ prominence in selecting a nominee, in other words, was meant to shine a spotlight on elected officials who weren’t engaged in the affairs of their national party — who, therefore, presumably didn’t care what their constituents thought about who should be president.

“The problem in the Democratic Party is that there’s too many in Congress that like to stand above the battle and don’t want to become involved,” lamented Doug Fraser, president at the time of the United Auto Workers.

“They don’t want to take risks like all of the rest of us have to take risks, and we have got to make them take risks […] So it is not a privilege that we are giving them, it is a responsibility that we are giving them, a responsibility that they should have and should have been exercising all the time.”

In this light — which, admittedly, is a fairly self-congratulatory read of the commission’s intentions — superdelegates are given a more prominent role on the national stage precisely because elected officials should be pressured by their constituents to engage in a discussion about the party’s nominee.

“Party officials and elected officials [are] responsive to a constituency considerably larger than that constituency which votes only for delegates to the national convention,” agreed commissioner Leslie Israel, “and each … is answerable when they go home for their actions to that very much larger constituency of the electorate as a whole.”

In this sense, superdelegates make the national party stronger even if they have to change their vote to coincide with their constituents’ interests, or to support the candidate with the most pledged delegate votes: voluntarily compromising with voters is a real concession of power from representative to governed, as symbolic as it is politically important. When superdelegates switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008, it was perhaps the most visible acknowledgment this century that the Democratic establishment had conceded.

Superdelegates, of course, also play the opposite role, able to stop a nominee that they knew would leave the party weak in a general election or wasn’t representative of non-primary-voting Democrats.

This role has become a reviled narrative of the election cycle: Superdelegates are the spoilers of insurgent candidates, the symbolically heavy hand of a national organization dictating one of the country’s two plausible options for president.

 

It’s worth noting that the Democratic Party’s incentives here aren’t much different than they were in 1982, though conditions have changed so much as to make the old system a dubious solution to a fractured party.

Democrats are still trying to control he energy of single issue constituencies: groups like #BlackLivesMatter and the movement for divest from fossil fuels are crucial to the Democratic Party, but party elites — specifically, the superdelegates who announced their support for Clinton early in the nomination process — know that they don’t represent the whole of the Democratic base (though it won’t be long…).

Superdelegate slots are also incredibly useful for keeping elected officials engaged in the party’s national business, though this time we have Citizens United to thank for the disengagement of some lawmakers: With unlimited money readily available through untraceable super PACs to do one’s political bidding, candidates have less incentive than ever to bow to a party structures rather than strike out on their own, into the open embrace of “dark money.”

Reading through the proceedings of the Hunt Commission, I wonder if today’s superdelegates see much value at all in using their vote to solidify their standing within the Democratic Party, to send a message to their constituents back home, and to strengthen a crucial national organization.

The dozens of superdelegates supporting Hillary Clinton in defiance of the popular vote back home may in fact be supporting her precisely because she is a lifelong Democrat and Sanders is not.

But this would pervert the original role superdelegates were supposed to play, as middlemen between a stubborn national organization and the voters who realized in 1972 that their hands were on the steering wheel. Superdelegates were created to save that adversarial system from itself, operating in the crucial gray area between constituent and party loyalty, acknowledging the legitimacy of radical political expression while also representing the voices, perhaps, of party regulars who don’t have three hours to wait to vote at a caucus, but who have voted in every general election for decades.

Superdelegates were never meant to silence any of these voices, nor even ignore them. They were meant to respond to the pressures of their political “caste” — a term used frequently by members of the Hunt Commission — by creating a party welcoming for everyone, strong enough to appeal to the other side.

If this year’s batch can’t figure out a way to convince Democratic primary voters — and progressive independents — of the party’s willingness to hear new and radically progressive voices, they may lose all legitimacy, becoming representatives of a party as resistant to change as it is vulnerable to collapse.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets supporters at a campaign rally in Stockton, California, United States, May 10, 2016. REUTERS/Max Whittaker

It’s The Inequality, Stupid

It’s The Inequality, Stupid

Cross-posted from In These Times.

President Barack Obama said last December that inequality is “the defining challenge of our time.” Americans agree. A Pew survey from June found that 62 percent think the country’s economic system unfairly favors the powerful, and 78 percent believe that too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.

Campaigning against the ongoing takeover of the country by the super-rich would seem to be a winning strategy for Democrats, then, as they struggle to hold on to the Senate and pick up a few governor’s seats in November. As a campaign issue, growing economic inequality plays to the Democrats’ image as the party of the little guy and to their brightest moments in power, such as the New Deal, when they made the country much more equal.

Yet with a handful of exceptions, Democrats are not talking about inequality. Raising the minimum wage — along with protecting Social Security, a campaign mainstay — may be the closest the Democratic Party has come to a national campaign theme on inequality. Overall, says Sam Pizzigati, editor of the online weekly on inequality Too Much, and author of Greed and Good, “there’s certainly no great move among Democratic candidates” to make inequality their focus.

Why not?

Democratic political strategists argue that while inequality may bother Americans, it doesn’t move them to vote. Polling seems to bear this out. In a recent Hart Research Associates poll, 60 percent of swing voters reacted favorably to a Democrat promising “economic growth,” and only 36 percent to a candidate pledging to “reduce income inequality.” Candidates seeing those numbers may be wary of making inequality a central theme.

But while voters may turn up their noses at pledges put in those terms, that doesn’t mean that any populist message is doomed to failure.

Hart polling has also found that the goal of “an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few,” beat out other popular economic goals, such as “the creation of jobs and America going back to work” and “a strengthened middle class.” Tellingly, however, it was the phrase “not just the wealthy few” that made the difference. Dropping it did not broaden the Democrats’ appeal to independents, as many “centrist” Democrats might argue; it narrowed the appeal. Given a choice between a Republican who promised to “grow the economy” and a Democrat with this more populist message, swing voters picked the Democrat by 22 points. Without “not just the wealthy few,” the Democrat lost to the Republican by 10 points. What’s more, adding “just the wealthy few” boosted support for Democrats among swing voter groups that typically skew conservative, including men, older voters and those leaning Republican.

To Hart Research analyst Guy Molyneux, this signifies that the most effective populist message today is inclusive, but at the same time draws a sharp differentiation between the 99 percent and, well, the rich.

Defining the 99 percent against the 1 percent also has the benefit of counteracting Republican efforts to divide and conquer working Americans. Since at least the “Southern Strategy” of the early 1970s, the right has sought to divide working people by drawing lines between poor and middle-income workers, white workers and workers of color, and the native-born and immigrants. In particular, they paint the poor and people of color as lazy and undeserving. Of course, most of the poor work, and work hard — for too little pay — while many businesses show signs of pathological dependence on tax breaks, government contracts and lax regulations. Putting the spotlight on the 1 percent reminds voters who is really mooching off the hard work of others.

“If it’s the working and middle class against the poor, immigrant, and ‘undeserving,’ we [populist Democrats] lose,” argues longtime political consultant Vic Fingerhut. “If you’re going to tax me to take care of this bum, it gets more difficult. But Democrats discover that a lot of little guys vote for them when they stand up to the big banks. If it’s the working and middle class against the corporations, we win.”

However, the image of the 1 percent standing against the 99 percent understandably makes some rich people nervous. Centrist Democrats, reliant on close relationships with corporate and individual wealthy donors, want to comfort and reassure their check-writing supporters. Consequently, Democratic Party leaders, including Hillary Clinton, assert that “we’re all in this together”— fast-food worker and fast stock trader, hand in hand, presumably. This brings to mind a version of the 1930s rural populist joke about the elephant who shouts, “We’re all in this together,” as he dances through the chicken yard.

To the extent that Democrats rely on funding from rich individuals and corporations, they are more likely to do their bidding. And that tends to increase with time: Labor unions are more willing than business to back first-time candidates; as time passes, business contributions become more dominant. In other words, the rich help to create a political hegemony that defines the boundaries of acceptable debate for Republicans and Democrats alike.

The politics of the possible

Some strategists on the left believe that in order to campaign on inequality, Democrats must first demonstrate that ameliorating it is even possible.

“Inequality is an abstract idea,” says AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer. “What is not abstract is that three-fourths of working people can’t make ends meet. They need to hear that candidates are going to do something about that.”

Mobilizing working-class voters is crucial for Democrats, he argues, because they determine elections. As he explained to The Atlantic, AFL-CIO exit polls show that Democrats have won big in elections over recent decades in which working-class voters (defined as those making less than $50,000 a year) come out in force for Democrats. When their margin of victory among working-class voters reaches roughly 20 percent, Democrats win; when that margin slips as low as 10 percent, they lose. And this year, the margins and mobilization for Democrats seem dangerously low among working-class voters.

“They see the rich getting away with murder,” Podhorzer says. “Voters are ready to believe.” But the Democrats too often fail to offer something in which to believe. Podhorzer suggests pushing for “higher living or minimum wages, affordable student loans, progressive taxation, and restrictions on outsourcing.” Many of these pragmatic proposals are indeed on the Democrats’ agenda. The problem with this pragmatic approach, however, is that each of these proposals faces opposition — whether it be practical, self-interested or ideological — from factions within the Democratic Party (especially the Wall Street wing), from independents who might vote Democratic and, of course, from Republicans.

For example, increasing Social Security benefits and making them more progressive would reduce inequality in a concrete way. It could be financed by eliminating the cap on wages and salaries that are subject to Social Security taxes. But such a proposal would have to contend with the propaganda that has convinced many people that Social Security is in financial trouble.

Moreover, as important as they are — and as difficult to win — most current proposals to address inequality are small in relation to the scale of the accumulated income inequity of the past 40 years. Even raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would leave the United States behind pay levels seen in comparable industrial countries, and behind where the minimum should be set given changes in both prices and productivity.

In the long run, progressives cannot avoid confronting inequality, and that showdown is not likely to get easier as wealth grows more concentrated. Without campaign finance reform, weaning Democrats from corporate hegemony on key economic issues will be even harder. Though candidates can mobilize supporters in the short term with easily understood, concrete proposals, a moral and practical critique of inequality will be necessary to a create broader political appeal in the long run. Keywords can become touchstones of political movements, cultivated to carry a particular basket of meanings.

In this 50th anniversary year of “Freedom Summer,” for example, it is worth remembering that the civil rights movement had concrete goals — such as voting rights and access to public accommodations — but it was also a political movement imbued with the broader, uplifting vision of “freedom.” Unfortunately, today the right has appropriated “freedom” to mean, among other things, unlimited rights to guns, unfettered rights of private property and a right to act irresponsibly toward others. The progressive meanings of “freedom” have been smothered.

Along with freedom and democracy, the left still draws on the Enlightenment ideals of the French and American revolutions. Liberté, égalité and fraternité serve as touchstones of progressive thought that extend beyond their embodiment in specific institutions. “Democracy” requires free speech and elections, for example, but it also carries a promise that is utopian, in a good way. Likewise, although most Americans associate the ideal of “equality” with movements of groups such as African-Americans, women and gays for civil and political rights, it also serves as an expansive touchstone, a value yet to be realized in other ways — including economic — but one that needs to be recognized as worthy of a movement.

David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at davidmoberg@inthesetimes.com.

This piece originally appeared at In These Times.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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