How Delegate Rules Explain Your Political Party

No super delegates. Plus, all states have proportional allocation of delegates, who, in turn are voted in by a general election.

If Republicans believed in science, perhaps they would realize that natural selection has its flaws. In the natural world, perfect competition produces beautiful peacocks who's feathers shine so bright that they attract predators and mates alike. Agreeing on ground rules isn't such a bad thing.

The Democratic Party process will result in the better qualified nominee. I'm not a political junkie, nor a political scientist. I follow the political races every two years, and vote based on the candidates' platforms. But I don't truly know what makes a good candidate, what in the platform is just bluster, who carries the most political baggage. I trust the superdelegates who are intimately associated with governance to understand more deeply the elect-ability and overall quality of the candidate. I also trust they will weight highly the will of the primary voters. Its only slightly different then the electoral college.

Both systems are messy. As is pointed out elsewhere about the GOP some of the elected delegates, who tend to be party insiders, must vote for a certain candidate on the 1st ballot, but really support someone else and will vote for that person on subsequent ballots. Let's face it, no matter which process, the convention delegates tend to be the party core for that's who goes to county and/or state conventions.

Bernie supporters are crying foul over super delegates (what do they not cry over), but Hillary is well ahead in the count of elected delegates.

We have many layers (too many?) in our process for we also have the Electoral College, which many consider an unfair system. If we need a change, then a Constitutional amendment to provide for direct election of a President by the voters is in order. In my view, this messy process has worked for a couple of centuries. I may like some Presidents and even loathe others, but we continue to be a democracy with peaceful transition of power time after time - something is working right.

The Democrats scheme, front-loaded with southern states a democrat won't win in the Fall (Debbie Does Dixie) combined with every 8th (or so) delegate a "Super delegate" seems a great way for the DNC to impose its will on the electorate. I suspect many Sanders supporters will not take this lightly and will either boycott the presidential part or all of the election. Too clever by half.

My take on this is both systems are flawed. The Republicans by chicanery and the Democrats with their super delegates. We should also rid ourselves of the electoral College. Quite undemocratic. Popular vote, period.
As the Democrats are going wish they had after this election.

I don't understand the analogy to the market. I don't understand how either "regulatory" or "laissez-faire" translates to this context—despite understanding what the words mean in the context of the market. It seems to me a very weak, rather forced analogy & adds nothing to my understanding.

Qualifications matter. Democrats respect people who know how to obtain results and improve lives. Those of us facing a tricky operation are well-advised to research the number of the exact procedure our choice for surgeon has done. By the same token, those professions which require certification to combat fraud have tools to eliminate the "bad apples" whose practices hurt ordinary people. Sure, licensed contractors may give you the higher bid, but the requirement to have performance bonds and insurance matters to homeowners as much as paying less and getting less does.

Why some people think that any person off the street or worse yet, any person like themselves could do the job of being President in a complex nuclear world (or on levels closer to home: teach our children, care for our frail elderly or spend our state or city tax dollars) is an amazing fact of modern politics.

It takes exceptional talent, learned skills and appropriate experience to be good at politics. It is foolish to think of choosing a business person--especially a CEO--who expects to give orders rather than a mayor, a governor, a council member (or a community organizer who understands how people learn to work with each other to get community results!!) who understands the process of building support for an idea and working the tools of the system to bring that idea into law.

Democracy in a republic like the US demands informed voters and politicians good at the profession of politics.

...or, you could dump this whole primary circus altogether, let people vote for parties' program and representatives - even the quarterback. This idea of making the voters choose the flag bearer is just another marketing centered operation, trying to get future customers involved in (sloppy) product design. And please, open up: between Bernie, Hillary, Trump, Cruz and Kasich you already have 5 parties - let alone the Green one that the U.S. seems to be the only country of the West to be lacking, although, along with the nationalistic and xenophobic far right crazies, it is probably the only place where ideology still roams. Democracy happens when you get to vote for who's going to run the country, not at the level of defining each runner's strategy.

That was a very enlightening explanation. My answer is that neither is a good system. The reason is that there has rarely been a candidate who I could wholeheartedly support (I was first able to vote in 76). The two party system has not served us well and the abysmal turnout numbers in most elections proves the point. It is hard to get (and keep) voters engaged when the only options are the lesser of two evils. This country desperately needs at least one or two more viable political parties, and a parliamentary system with multiple parties would be even better.

This election, if it does nothing else, will have shown how far out of touch both party's establishments are with "ordinary" Americans. Your paper has discussed the Trump phenomenon ad nauseum so I don't really need to comment on the Republican side of the race. The Democratic side is much more interesting; even if Bernie loses, he has performed an extraordinary service to the Party that had initially disregarded him, by showing the establishment that they continue to move rightward at their own peril, by pulling Hillary kicking and screaming towards the left, and by so deeply engaging the next generation of voters who may otherwise have never realized that we do have other options.

I much prefer the Democratic system, as I much prefer the Democratic party and its values. I think proportional allocation of delegates is a better system than winner take all, which gives the big states' voters much more say in the outcome of the primaries that choose the nominee than the smaller states. But I tend to think that superdelegates are problematic, even though they usually come down on the side of the candidate who comes out ahead. I'd like to see them unpledged for longer in the race, so that they have more data to work from.

When the elective franchise is this convoluted, it may partly explain why so many don’t vote at all.

In 2008, the Democratic super-delegates decided that Obama was more qualified than Hillary Clinton. Now, Sanders' voters are in for a major disappointment when they find out that their votes count for bubkis.
Trump is an unmitigated disaster, voters deserve what they get, and they might very well get it good and hard.
But this is democracy. What is the alternative?

Annointing "super-delegates" is not an unusual thing for the United States' method of selecting its national leaders. The authors of the Constitution were conscious of the wild and crazy voters. We don't have direct elections for President. If we had direct elections, Al Gore would have been President on 9/11. Senators were elected by state legislators. The Supreme Court justices are confirmed by the Senate. Only one body, the House of Representatives, was elected directly. (Senators were elected directly after a Senator from my state, William Clark, bribed the Montana legislature. The bribery was so open that the Senate refused to seat Clark.) So, as a check on the passions of, say, a Trumpian mob, the Democrats have a good system. Expect the GOP to change its rules for the next election, if the GOP is still around.

This a petition to try and make the DNC see how dissatisfied people our with the whole Super delegate system. Please sign in it if you feel Super Delegates have to go!
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/super-delegates-the-peoples?source=c.em...

Of course Ms Brazile's vote should count more than mine. What was I thinking? The canaille should know their place.
Democratic superdelegate -- there's an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Would that our Constitution allowed election of a president by simple majority vote. We would have avoided George W. Bush in that way.

Democrats' proportional approach is more just, and I suspect that the superdelegates will be moved most by the popular vote. Sanders would need to compile very large majorities in the remaining states to overtake Clinton's lead, and that looks unlikely at this point.

Neither system. A parliamentary system where each party (as in more than two) win seats based upon the number of votes cast for each is far superior in that all factions are represented based upon the number of votes received. The nations leader, theoretically aka "President" must be acceptable to a majority of the varied parties delegates.
Regardless of how each individual party, Republican or Democrat in the USA, chooses its presidential candidate we are left, in most all cases, with the choice between Tweedledee or Tweedledum -- which is no true choice and the majority of us end up being poorly, at best, represented.

Which system do you believe results in the best-qualified nominee? As a Democrat, I would have to say the Democratic Party system, because they have in the super delegates the people who are best qualified to judge the winning qualifications of the nominee.

It is problematic whether the states in the South (traditional Republican states), in which Hillary Clinton has built up her delegate lead over Bernie Sanders with largely black voter support, would be winnable in the presidential election for either Sanders or Clinton. Bernie Sanders is winning Democratic primaries and caucuses in states that the Democratic nominee for President must win in the November election for President.

And, the large majority of establishment super-delegates, who now back Hillary Clinton, might well consider this very point and switch their allegiance to Bernie Sanders before the Democratic convention if winning both the Presidency and the open seats in Congress are considered by them to be imperative. There are no Democratic presidential candidate coattails in the South.

At long last someone explained the rules, how they reflect party values and skew predictions for match-ups in November. As a Democrat, I think the Democrat system of proportional majority with check produces the more qualified and tried candidate. When will the Times compare current primary results with electoral college delegates state by state?

Not a new argument here. The Greeks and Romans couldn't solve this question in antiquity; and our Founders created a House and a Senate. The 'Great Compromise' creating the Senate (the analog of superdelegates) is instructive... does the Senate 'cool the passions' or is it 'where good ideas go to die'? LBJ said 'it depends on whose ox is being gored'
The important lesson from history is that when the people feel ignored or abused by a system, they turn to dictators to overthrow it.
There is plenty to blame in the parties for segmenting the people instead of uniting them. But the Democrats had their catharsis in 72 when they were torn and crushed and became 'the big tent'. The question has to be why didn't the Republicans learn from '08? The 'establishment' has now learned, to their horror, that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

68 percent of politically engaged Republicans said “ordinary Americans would do a better job than elected officials solving the country’s problems.” strikes me as anti democratic. What alternative candidates have the 68% proposed? They just keep nominating and reelecting the same politicians.