Popular Vote. Big states. Electoral total. Undemocratic. Disenfranchise.
Meaningless.
The Clinton campaign, in a very clever and well-crafted piece of argument, is pushing a lot of those ideas to keep her campaign afloat in the face of great odds against her, with the expectation that the MSM will never call her on the essential fault of the whole series of arguments:
The primary season is not an election.
What is it? It's a process by which the party chooses their nominee. Don't see the difference yet? Maybe we can consider it this way: what would an "election" of the nominee look like?
- It would use a consistent method of voter eligibility.
- It would use a consistent method of polling.
- It would only consist of secret balloting.
- It would use direct voting.
- It would likely take place on the same date.
But those things aren't true... because the primary season is not an election. On this count, we even have the Supreme Court to butress this argument with their holding that the primary process is a private event, not a public election.
So, why don't we have an election? Because the process has evolved to try to determine the best candidate, which isn't necessarily the one who could get the most votes in a primary election. Let's examine each of the deviations from an "election" in turn.
- It would use a consistent method of voter eligibility.
As we all know, eligibility for the primary contests vary from state to state via a multitude of reasons. In some, only registered party members may vote. In some, you may vote in the contest if you are a party member or are unaffiliated with any party. In some, anyone may vote either as a matter of choice, or because the states do not have party registration.
Let's leave aside the last case for a bit, as it has a different driver, and examine the cases where the state parties have an option. Why is ther a variation of closed, open, and semi-open primary eligibility? Biology actually provides us with an excellent method to assess the question, actually. Since the system as a whole has no single designer (something we have verifiable proof of in this case, fortunately) we can look at the effects of why the system is as it is and examine the benefits it provides.
The current system allows the party as a whole to examine a candidate's support within the party itself, within the party and likely independent voters, and among a larger cross-section of voters including cross-overs. Party members have a proportionally stronger voice than independents, who similarly have a stronger voice than cross-overs, but all are accounted for in some way. Given that the primary season is supposed to determine the best candidate for the general election, which includes all voters, but often depends on carrying ones base strongly, this attempts to mirror that in some manor.
- It would use a consistent method of polling.
- It would only consist of secret balloting.
I'll tackle these as one, as they've been assaulted with the same argument, that caucuses are inherently "undemocratic" for various reasons, those of participation ability and secret balloting foremost among them. Setting aside the premise of this diary momentarily, I find the argument that the caucus process is "undemocratic" due to its open voting structure to be dubious at best. Democracy has a long and valued history from Greece through American Colonial Town Hall meetings to the very votes of the legislature of having open discourse and voting as one of its attributes. It can be persuasively argued that in most cases, secret balloting is a superior system due to the privacy protections it affords. However, that is a seperate issue from being a "democratic" method. End digression.
Similar to the first point, an "election" would have a consistent polling method, one assumes a secret ballot, instead of the mix of primaries and caucuses (in Texas' case, both!) we have. The Republicans even use a third method, a party convention, in West Virginia. So again, we can return to an evolutionary model to examine why we have the mixture. Primaries and caucuses measure different levels of commitment, basically. Primary contests measure the breadth of support a candidate has, relative to the others, of people willing to show up and vote for him or her. An incredibly important metric -- but not the only important one. A caucus measures the breadth of support a candidate has similarly of people willing to show up and spend at least a couple of hours to support his or her candidate, and to defend and maintain that support in reaction to arguments to the contrary. Early caucuses like Iowa and Nevada also gauge the candidate's ability to win over voters whose preferred candidates show to be non-viable. This is a gauge of a deeper level of support -- people more willing to donate, to volunteer, and to advocate for their candidate in a general election, and of the campaign's ability to organize and turn out that support.
Both are important measures, and in the mixed system, we see measures of both. In the current campaign, while Clinton's voting support may be nearly the same as that of Obama, is there any doubt that Obama's got an edge in fundraising, donors, and grassroots volunteers and organization? This tangible, real difference is thus expressed in real terms by the caucus system.
- It would use direct voting.
As the presidential election is the only indirect method here, you could amend this point to include the possibility of electoral vote-modeling (as Senator Bayh did in support of Senator Clinton recently.) However, while the system is somewhat akin to EV proportioning, it is neither that, nor a straight popular vote, but something that is, in this case, directly designed to be something else. Why is that?
The first reason is that a popular vote count would be misleading without a homogeneous electoral system. By their vary nature, caucuses have a lower turnout than primaries, and it's impossible to correlate one's votes to the other, as they measure different things, as I covered just above.
The other reason is to examine how the delegates are proportioned -- they are allocated largely depending on how many votes the party has received there in prior elections. The system tries to de-emphasize smaller states that cannot be reasonably contested while giving greater weight to the base and larger states. All those arguments about red states versus blue states, and big versus little are already accounted for in the delegate system.
- It would likely take place on the same date.
What election uses a running count that is released as it goes along over a space of weeks or months? There is none -- in an election, having results reported is seen as poisoning the well for later voters, to the extent that exit polls are even embargoed. But the primary season purposefully goes on for months -- states with late primaries even get bonus delegates to encourage late participation. What's the purpose? The purpose is to build and consolidate a party consensus behind a candidate, to let those earlier result help snowball a candidacy. If anything is inherently undemocratic, this is it, but thats only an argument if we were somehow electing a candidate.
But we are not. We are in the waxing weeks of a process by which the party is selecting its candidate. It is taking into account both big states and little states; red states and blue states; Democrats, independents, and Republicans; those who will just show to vote and those who will contribute more to the campaign; and this process is weighing all these factors, both by design and evolution. It's a work in process, and one that's constantly changing. But one thing it is not is an "election."