Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Please make it stop



Been wondering about this for a while; an article finally makes the argument clear.

Bernie's argument over the weekend is that he should get the super delegates of the states he won "by a landslide."  Which states are those?

"But we won states -- you know -- like Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire in landslide victories," he continued. "And I do believe that the super delegates, whether it's Clinton's or mine -- states that we won -- super delegates in states where a candidate wins a landslide victory should listen to the people in those states and vote for the candidate chosen by the people."

Only New Hampshire held a primary; the rest are caucus states.  Among other problems with caucuses, they don't have a vote count.  I've always understood "landslide" to indicate an overwhelming popular vote count.

In three of those four "landslide" states, there is no popular Democratic party vote count.  So this argument makes sense, why?  I mean, in three of the four states he's citing, he won caucuses by getting more people to show up and argue for his candidacy; not by moving the general public to go to the polls and vote.  The whole idea of a "landslide" is the popular acclamation it brings.

No one has ever confused caucuses with the vox populi.

3 comments:

  1. I'd always thought all caucuses kept a record of that. As far as I know they do in Maine, they did this year. They had a friggin' paper ballot for the first time ever. I know the guy who ran it and the one who acted as secretary. They had to report the numbers, I think to the Democratic Party. Though the caucuses are so screwed up a lot of the things we do here they might not do other places. The multi level local-county-state thing in Nevada and elsewhere is seriously screwy. Only an obscure, disinterested and uninteresting committee could come up with that nonsense. That is unless it made some kind of twisted sense in the age of communication by mule train or something.

    I hope whoever can get it done can dump caucuses and we can finally leave the tail end of the English feudal age.

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  2. I'd always thought all caucuses kept a record of that. As far as I know they do in Maine, they did this year. They had a friggin' paper ballot for the first time ever. I know the guy who ran it and the one who acted as secretary. They had to report the numbers, I think to the Democratic Party. Though the caucuses are so screwed up a lot of the things we do here they might not do other places. The multi level local-county-state thing in Nevada and elsewhere is seriously screwy. Only an obscure, disinterested and uninteresting committee could come up with that nonsense. That is unless it made some kind of twisted sense in the age of communication by mule train or something.

    I hope whoever can get it done can dump caucuses and we can finally leave the tail end of the English feudal age.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I dunno how many showed up for any caucus, but I understand those numbers don't count as "votes" for any vote count (i.e., Clinton leading Sanders by X votes).

    And, of course, there are the primary/caucus states. Texas used to be one, as recently as 2008. I think they finally qui because it wasn't working as the party building measure they'd hoped it would be (getting people to caucus as a way of encouraging beleaguered Democrats in Texas).

    I'm happy to get rid of them. They create nonsense like what happened in Nevada.

    ReplyDelete