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Michael Blissenbach's avatar

Your mother is a hero for doing that at the 1992 DNC, James, and I hope for the sake of the souls of the people who mugged her and threatened her that they repent of the evil they did that day and seek to make amends for that evil.

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Daniel Pareja's avatar

What happened with superdelegates, as best as I can recall:

In 2016, a constant complaint from Sanders' supporters was that the media was reporting superdelegate support as if they were actually committed, showing Clinton with a much larger lead than her actual pledged delegate count gave her. This, so said the Sanders camp, gave a lot of unearned momentum to Clinton, which proceeded to bias primary voters in her favour. (As Clinton supporters retorted, the media also did this in 2008, with Clinton being heavily favoured by superdelegates at the start of that election's process, and Obama ended up winning, though the eventual pledged delegate count between himself and Clinton was far, far closer than between Clinton and Sanders.)

Despite this, by the time all the nominating contests had wrapped up, Clinton had a majority of pledged delegates, but those pledged delegates did not represent a majority of all delegates. Sanders, likely thinking he had a better shot in the general election than Clinton, continued for a time to petition superdelegates to support him instead of Clinton, but eventually conceded and endorsed Clinton. (Hypocrisy knows no bounds, though I suppose a Sanders supporter would argue that at that point, he was just playing by the rules that were set, rather than the rules as he might have wished them to be.)

All praise to The Green Papers: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/D (showing Hillary Clinton with 2,205 pledged delegates of around 4,050, but there being 4,763 total delegates).

After the 2016 election, the DNC considered alterations to the superdelegate rules. Sanders' supporters wanted to be rid of them entirely, but the rule ultimately adopted was one that merely reduced their role, though not in the way you described above, to my knowledge. The current rule, I think, is that superdelegates can only vote on the first ballot if their support won't make a difference assuming all pledged delegates actually vote for the candidate to whom they're pledged. In particular, what superdelegates cannot do is override the choice of a candidate who'd received a majority of pledged delegates but not enough of those to have a majority of all delegates. If this rule had been in place for the 2016 convention, then, ceteris paribus, Hillary Clinton would have won the nomination.

All praise to The Green Papers again: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P20/D (showing that in 2020, Joe Biden had a majority of all delegates from his pledged delegates and so superdelegates voted on the first ballot, mostly for Biden).

Of course, what Sanders supporters thought might have happened in 2016 if superdelegates couldn't have been reported as first-ballot convention floor voters in advance of knowing primary results is that since that would have meant that there was a 0-0 "likely floor vote" tie going into the nominating process between Clinton and Sanders, rather than there being a few hundred in Clinton's column already from superdelegate support, there wouldn't have been people thinking Clinton was the inevitable nominee and thus voting for her (or not bothering to vote for someone else, namely Sanders). Thus all else would not have been equal and Clinton might not have come out of the primaries with a pledged delegate lead. (Whether this would have led to a Sanders majority of pledged delegates or, perhaps because other candidates--Martin O'Malley, anyone?--stayed in, a contested convention, is something on which I will not speculate.)

In the event of a possible contested convention, the first ballot (on which superdelegates can't vote) is essentially just for show to establish that no candidate has received a majority among the pledged delegates. After that, the superdelegates can vote.

So under the current rules, all else being equal, Clinton in 2016 would still have happened. (Whether Obama in 2008 would have happened is another matter. All praise to The Green Papers once more: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/D.phtml Because of a few delegates won by John Edwards in early contests, Barack Obama did not have a majority among the pledged delegates, and his nomination that year ultimately happened when Clinton moved, and the convention voted, to suspend the rules and nominate Obama by acclamation "in the spirit of unity", though many, perhaps most, pledged Clinton delegates at that point were voting for Obama anyway. Kerry in 2004 had a healthy majority of pledged delegates, yet again all praise to The Green Papers: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P04/D.phtml There would have been no question of his nomination.) Sanders supporters just thought that if the current rules had been in place at the start of 2016's process, Clinton might not have ended up with that majority because all else would not have been equal, and perhaps it would have been different enough for things to have broken Sanders' way.

Then come 2020, when it was very early (before Super Tuesday, maybe even before Iowa) it was a very real possibility that if nothing changed, Sanders could well have had a plurality, but not a majority, of pledged delegates, and Sanders supporters that year were adamant that if he ended up with a plurality, he had better darned well be the nominee, even if the field were so close that that plurality was only 30% or so and so the rules to which his camp had agreed specified a contested convention with all the superdelegates voting. (Once again, hypocrisy truly knows no bounds. There was a moment in one debate where the candidates were asked if the candidate receiving a plurality, but not a majority, should become the nominee automatically or if that should lead to a contested convention, and everyone but Sanders said "contested convention", even though back in 2016 he had tried to create a contested convention! What I suspect his camp really wanted, I know some suggested this, was to, essentially, supercharge the McGovern reforms and create a single, national day of primaries on which every contest takes place simultaneously, with whoever wins the aggregate popular vote becoming the nominee, and abolish antiquated things like nominating conventions.)

tl;dr Since 2020, Democratic convention superdelegates only vote on the first ballot if their votes cannot override the pledged delegate votes, and thus the superdelegates' votes are purely performative, and this happened in 2020 since Biden's pledged delegates represented a majority of all delegates, including superdelegates. Otherwise superdelegates cannot vote on the first ballot, leading either to the nomination of the candidate who received a majority of pledged delegates (if there is one), which would have happened in 2016, or to a contested convention after the indecisive first ballot, with superdelegates being eligible to vote on all subsequent ballots, which, going strictly by these rules, would have happened in 2008. (However Obama had a majority of superdelegates in his favour so he would presumably then have won on the second ballot.)

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