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Discussing superdelegates after Trump
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: October 21, 2016
The current general election cycle has, among other things, warmed my feelings about superdelegates.
It may be a little difficult to remember after months of rally violence, tweetstorms and leaked audio, but once superdelegates were among our leading political controversies. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders listed superdelegates high on their bill of particulars as they accused the Democratic Party of rigging the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. The primary ended with vague promises to reform the system.
Superdelegates are party regulars who are named to attend the convention and participate in selecting the nominee. Unlike the pledged delegates, superdelegates are not bound to vote for a particular candidate, but ultimately choose the candidate they like best. Including superdelegates as 15 percent of the overall delegates available puts a thumb on the scale in favor of the party establishment.
Bernie Sanders’s supporters objected to superdelegates as part of a system that makes the rise of a reform candidate more difficult. His campaign questioned the established dynamic in American political life with its ambiguous call for a “political revolution.” His was an insurgent campaign burdened by his weak support among superdelegates (although in the end Hillary Clinton would win without them).
But Donald Trump’s candidacy has shown the dangers that an insurgent candidate can pose. Like Sanders, Trump questions the norms and institutions that make up American political life. His self-styled fight against political correctness represents a refusal to follow the norms of political discourse about sex or race. In his predictions that the election will be rigged against him, he threatens the legitimacy of the entire process.
Granted, many of his promises to upend the political order appear based on ignorance as much as on a considered theory of governance. Consider, for example, his promise to replace many of the military’s top generals. But even his argument from ignorance represents a meta-critique of American government—that actually knowing how government works is fundamentally wrong and useless.
Trump also has eroded the longtime conservative practice of marginalizing overtly racist people and groups. He has resisted criticizing avowed white nationalists who support him and offered only soft criticisms when pushed to do so.
One lesson to draw from the current cycle is that party nominees are leaders, whether or not they win. And Trump is leading his followers into some very dark places. The Trump campaign exerts a coarsening effect on people who align with him, or the Republican Party in general, both by questioning myriad political institutions and norms and with a platform that encourages its followers to blame problems on members of minority groups.
Locally, we saw a direct effect of this coarsening recently when a Kent State fraternity taunted a Latino student group by chanting “build the wall.” Trump is giving his followers both license to follow their baser impulses and a new vocabulary for expressing those impulses.
The reaction of his followers to the recent revelations of his comments about women and allegations of sexual assault have shown another side of this. His followers have reacted by minimizing the import of the statements, ignoring his bragged-of attempt to sleep with a married woman and attacking the reputations of women who leveled accusations.
While it is easy to criticize Trump’s followers, the consistent variable here is Trump himself. Whenever a candidate aligns with a segment of the electorate, they will elide his flaws. And when a candidate broadens what is politically possible, his followers will fill that new space.
As of now, it looks extremely unlikely that Donald Trump will be elected. The general election offers the electorate a means for ensuring that a candidate who threatens the nation’s political institutions cannot come to power, and that will work to keep him out of office.
But we also have seen a great deal of damage done by his candidacy. We have learned that we need political leaders on both sides who respect the basic apparatus of American democracy.
Which is why I like mechanisms like the superdelegates in the Democratic primary system which offer a small backstop to lessen the odds of nominating a genuinely troublesome candidate. To be sure, neither superdelegates nor the proportional awarding of delegates would have prevented the rise of Trump, if the results of the primary elections had been the same. But they could have prevented the air of inevitability that propelled him through the last few primaries.
In any event, the Trump campaign has offered a lesson in potential hazards of an unchecked electorate. As the Democratic Party considers reforming its primary system, I hope that they consider those lessons.