Matt Bai: Superdelegates could decide the Democratic race
This Tuesday was designed to be the day when it all gets decided for Democrats and Republicans, the moment when more than 20 states weigh in at once on the chaotic presidential campaigns. In the Democratic field, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are each hoping to pile up a decisive number of delegates and end in one night what has been a protracted and increasingly unkind competition. If the Democratic voters defy the designs of the party, though, and neither candidate can achieve a clear verdict, the battle will then enter a rare and little-understood phase: the scramble for superdelegates. These are the roughly 800 Democratic Party insiders — elected officials, state chairmen, national committee members — who will make up about a fifth of the total delegate count at the convention and who can vote for any candidate they want, regardless of what the voters in primaries and caucuses have said. Superdelegates were invented by the Democrats after the 1980 election in the expectation that in any future close nomination race, they would line up behind the establishment candidate and head off the possibility of a ruinous floor fight at the convention.
I recently got a short history lesson about this from Gary Hart, who pointed out what he called “eerie parallels” between his near-upset of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Obama’s campaign against Clinton. Not least among them was that Clinton had actually gone back and unearthed Mondale’s signature line: “Where’s the beef?” (It came from a Wendy’s commercial that was all the rage at the time, but it’s doubtful that anyone under 30 had any idea what she was talking about.) Hart reminded me that by beating Mondale in the California primary, just weeks before the convention, he denied the former vice president the delegates he needed for the nomination. Had it not been for the existence of the superdelegates, who lined up behind Mondale, Hart could actually have swiped the nomination.
“Lee and I called every one of the superdelegates personally,” Hart recalled, referring to his wife. “She talked to a woman in Kentucky who said: ‘I want to vote for your husband, but my husband works for the state highway department. And I was told that if I didn’t vote for Mondale, he would lose his job.’ It was hardball at that point.”...
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I recently got a short history lesson about this from Gary Hart, who pointed out what he called “eerie parallels” between his near-upset of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Obama’s campaign against Clinton. Not least among them was that Clinton had actually gone back and unearthed Mondale’s signature line: “Where’s the beef?” (It came from a Wendy’s commercial that was all the rage at the time, but it’s doubtful that anyone under 30 had any idea what she was talking about.) Hart reminded me that by beating Mondale in the California primary, just weeks before the convention, he denied the former vice president the delegates he needed for the nomination. Had it not been for the existence of the superdelegates, who lined up behind Mondale, Hart could actually have swiped the nomination.
“Lee and I called every one of the superdelegates personally,” Hart recalled, referring to his wife. “She talked to a woman in Kentucky who said: ‘I want to vote for your husband, but my husband works for the state highway department. And I was told that if I didn’t vote for Mondale, he would lose his job.’ It was hardball at that point.”...