With respect to my friend and colleague Nikhil, his post earlier this week detailing the “win” Hillary Clinton actually had in New Hampshire this week is based on bad math.
Well, the first part, at least. The contention that a Trump nomination-slash-establishment implosion spells good tidings for the Democrats is certainly a valid one. As the Republicans seem to veer more and more toward nominating a candidate that evokes more Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan, any Democratic winner (but especially the establishment candidate) stands to benefit.
Where the Hillary-Actually-Won-That-Night argument falls short is on the delegate count argument. If you Google “Democratic delegate count,” you’ll see this:
Wow! How did Hillary “earn more New Hampshire delegates” than Bernie Sanders after getting a thorough beatdown in nearly every voting demographic on Tuesday?
The answer is simply that she did not. The only delegates worth counting as actual votes toward a nomination, right now at least, are the pledged delegates – these are the delegates assigned and bound by party rules to vote for one candidate or another according to the outcome of the popular vote in a given state primary. In Iowa, Clinton took 23 pledged delegates to Sanders’ 21; in New Hampshire, Sanders won 15-9.
The rest of that whopping lead Clinton seems to possess actually does not exist. These are the “superdelegates,” who essentially represent the Party Establishment – federal legislators, key party officials, and other prominent Democrats. These superdelegates, who make up about 15% of the total delegate count at the convention, sit wholly outside the voting primary/caucus framework and are free to cast votes however they see fit at the convention.
Why a superdelegate exists and has voting privileges at the convention is a little bit dry and dates back to 1980 after the disastrous nomination of George McGovern. No one wants to hear about George McGovern. Trust me.
(If you care, though, for a great summary and FAQ on superdelegates see this Paste Magazine piece by Shane Ryan.)
Importantly, a superdelegate from New Hampshire – for example, Jeanne Shaheen, the senior senator from the state, who supports Clinton – can vote at the convention for Clinton, Sanders, or Vermin Supreme if she so chooses.
What some outlets chose to do was to suddenly dump the lump sum of all “committed” superdelegates into their delegate tallies, thus giving the appearance of a huge Clinton lead. Others, like CNN, only added in the superdelegate commitments from New Hampshire, which is silly because superdelegates are as tied to their state as they are to a candidate – which is to say, not at all.
Plus, these superdelegates who say they are committed to one candidate or another mostly declared their support weeks or months before the NH primary – so this is truly old news.
The key to all this, and why it doesn’t matter right now, is that superdelegates are committed to a candidate in the same way that a high school football player may be verbally committed to play for a college. As collegiate coaches know, kids flip their commitments all the time – and superdelegates are no exception.
In 2008, Clinton held a large lead in the “overall” delegate count, which included superdelegates, through the early voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. As Obama gained momentum and started winning primaries, many of the undecided superdelegates – and not just a few of Clinton’s own “committed” superdelegates – flipped to his side. As late as early summer, though, enough factors were in play (including Florida and Michigan’s I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home behavior that invalidated their votes for awhile) that the threat of a brokered convention – where party elites would essentially decide the winner of the nomination, despite the outcome of the popular vote – still loomed.
Every time, though, superdelegates mostly go for whoever wins the general popular vote – Clinton or Sanders. Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein said it well six months ago:
…[T]he “supers” have never tilted the nomination; they always line up with the candidate who won the most delegates in the caucuses and primaries. That’s essentially what happened in 2008: Clinton had an early lead in superdelegates, but as Barack Obama started winning caucuses and primaries, he wound up picking up almost all the undecided supers and even some defectors from Clinton.
And the supers will go with the winner in 2016, too. It’s technically possible for Clinton to win the nomination by dominating the superdelegate count even if she (narrowly) loses every state: Thanks to strict proportional allocation on the Democratic side, a candidate only gains a small delegate advantage for a small edge in primary votes. Realistically, however, politicians and formal party leaders would never go against a clear decision by voters. If Clinton lost every state, she would lose her superdelegates, too.
A final note: unlike some of the links herein, I don’t actually believe that the mainstream media is engaged in a systematic attempt to cool the Bern. I just think they’re relying on poor form, bad numbers, and maybe a nudge from DNC strategists who aren’t wild about the possibility of nominating a 74-year-old socialist from the Northeast.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton will go down as one of the major artistic achievements of the decade (century?) The combination of subject matter (the Founding of the nation), social significance (a non-white cast and composer telling the story of our all-white Founding Fathers), and theatrical greatness (a mix of hip-hop and more traditional numbers) make Hamilton a work that should survive in public consciousness for as long as the United States is a nation – and maybe longer. Here are some of the highlights:
CORTEX 