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American elections update: superdelegates in flux
23rd February 2008
Today’s paper contains an excellent article offering a fascinating insight into the weird and wonderful world of the process of intra-party competition that is the race to become the Democratic nominee for president.
Want to know more about superdelegates?
Reading through this morning’s papers I came across a story that links in with an article by William Storey in the latest edition of First Past the Post magazine – which should be uploaded early next week.
Apparently superdelegates are drifting away from Hillary Clinton towards Barack Obama as the latter has taken the lead in the delegate count following a string of victories in recent weeks.
According to the Guardian:
“Hillary Clinton is starting to lose her overwhelming lead in superdelegates, the Democratic party officials whose votes she is counting on to help her close the gap with Barack Obama. He has received a steady flow of backers in recent days while building a streak of 11 straight primary victories. After once leading Obama by a 2 to 1 ratio in the superdelegate chase, Clinton now has 241 to his 181, according to the latest Associated Press tally.”
Want more background on these superdelegates?
“More than half of 795 superdelegates had declared as of last week. As about 20% of a total of about 4,000 delegate votes, superdelegates are current or former elected officeholders or party officials; they vote according to their personal view, though they may face pressure to echo some presumed local or national consensus. When the primary delegate totals become evenly split, superdelegates and how they decide to use their vote become proportionately more important - and their choices are increasingly liable to be seen as “backroom deals”.”
And the great thing about today’s article is it carries a number of interviews with actual superdelegates. One, Jenny Greenleaf, a superdelegate from Oregon, says:
“We have a long way to go - Oregon hasn’t had its primary yet. I want to see if there’s a clear winner. As a superdelegate, my job is to ratify the choice of the people ... having seen [the process] close up like this it’s inconsistent, full of contradictions from state to state. Lots of rules have been set up to make it more fair, but also more complicated. There’s a lot of interest in looking at it, seeing if we can’t make some improvements. I really like both our candidates. I’m not going to have a problem supporting either of them. [The superdelegate question] is being written about and talked about; really, what people ought to be thinking about is John McCain. It’s a distraction.”