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Edited on Wed Feb-06-08 11:48 AM by dmallind
Despite being a fairly well informed enthusiast in politics I confess I was not until the last couple of months up on the intricate details of delegate assignment in Dem primaries and caucuses.
Now I am I am not enthusiastic about how this is done. I know it started moving in this direction after the 68 debacle and I'm not a fan of winner take all either, but it strikes me this almost enforced parity for any candidate who gets 40% of the vote even if they lose by 10% or more is self defeating, and especially the option for popular vote losers to gain more delegates than winners. We are essentially ensuring that a match up between two popular well funded candidates becomes a bruising, expensive, public internecine war for eight months or more. If this were the price of real democracy then so be it, but the delegate assignment is not all that democratic and believe me a convention-decided candidate is not - the horse trading and high pressure tactics possible there coupled with the two-tier system inherent in election by delegate are far from clean democracy.
This is not a sour grapes post either. Both candidates have been helped and hurt by this, and my preference for Obama is not overwhelming enough to be a source of partisan bias. I like both candidates. I liked all the last three and most of the others too. But I want to see the candidate be chosen by the people, and I want even more than that in a way to see the candidate positioned to win, not battered and broken and broke.
An Obama Clinton race would be close regardless - they are both immensely popular and capable with equal but different strengths and core demographics. But we should IMO have a system that identifies a clear favorite on a very clear and democratic basis. Since states are the effective unit of general elections (with a few minor exceptions like NE) I would propose a state-based delegate allocation directly in line with state popular votes. If a state has 100 delegates and Obama wins 53% of the vote to Hillary's 47% that's what I think the delegate count should be. "Odd" delegates where the math is not that clean should favor the winner of the popular vote.
What would be wrong with such a system? The district-based set up is not relevant to the GE and allows skewed totals based on gerrymandered and homogeneous constituencies. Isn't the whole point of democracy to reflect the cumulative choice of the people as a whole, and not favor one client over another because the district is non-representative and gets to assign delegates on that basis?
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