Richard Stengel: The Superdelegate Conundrum

By Rick Stengel, Managing Editor

James Madison, the architect of the constitution, always maintained that America was not a democracy but a republic. A democracy was government by the people (something many of the founders considered akin to mob rule), while a republic, Madison wrote in "Federalist No. 10," is "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place."

This scheme of representation is where it gets tricky. The inherent tension in a representative democracy is, Should our elected leaders vote according to their judgment--or their constituency? Political theorists have debated this for two centuries. These days, you generally hear candidates say we should choose them for their judgment; they don't say, Vote for me, and I'll vote the way you tell me to. "I don't listen to polls," candidates boast, but polls are the way the people speak to their officials--and if you simply substitute the words the people for the word polls, candidates would be saying "I don't listen to the people."

So, who should the 796 superdelegates in the Democratic Party listen to? A group of Representatives, Senators, governors, party members and ex-officials, these folks represent 20% of all the delegates needed to be nominated but are not bound to vote according to any constituency. Exactly none of them were elected by primary voters to be delegates. The superdelegates were created in 1982 to bring some power back to the party establishment after the primary process had gotten a little too democratic and unruly--and had succeeded in nominating some unelectable candidates for the general election.

But until this year, nobody much cared about the superdelegates. They were superfluous. A nominee can win--and usually does--without the vote of a single superdelegate. Since the inception of superdelegates, no race has ever been as close as this year's contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or gone this long without being decided. So there was no reason to think these party insiders might have to resolve it at the convention. But that's the scenario being raised now.

And that is the problem. We like our leaders to have won a majority of the vote. The difficulty will come if one of the candidates wins a majority of the delegates during the primaries and caucuses but not enough to win the nomination. What should the superdelegates do? If they combine to elect the candidate who came in second, voters would feel cheated and suspect the whole process was undemocratic. Democratic voters remember those feelings from 2000. Primaries are not necessarily meant to be democratic. They are the creation of the political parties and are in effect private clubs run by the members, who decide the rules. But if the Democratic Party wants to have a strong future and retain all those young voters coming out for the first time, the results need to seem and actually be democratic with a small d.

The good news is that the superdelegate conundrum is likely to resolve itself without much drama. The thing to remember about superdelegates is that they are pols--and tend not to be all that independent-minded anyway. The last thing they want is to act as referees who call the winner of a grueling 15-round championship fight. In fact, for most of the superdelegates, choosing--in public--between the heroine of one set of Democratic voters and the hero of a different set is a nightmare. What is most likely is that the superdelegates will stay on the fence. They will sit tight as the voters of Wisconsin and Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania go to the polls and hope the voters themselves resolve things, as they should. As Yale political scientist Donald Green says, "We are deeply suspicious of anything that does not ultimately trace its institutional roots back to an election." And there is no doubt that we have a real election going on.

Rick Stengel, Managing Editor