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A reform effort to take away party bigwigs’ presidential-nominating power suffers a setback.Before 2008, your average American might not have known what a Democratic Party superdelegate was. But that year these mysterious party insiders became a feature of the daily news cycle as the fierce presidential-primary battle swept across the country. In a neck-and-neck race, the party confronted the very real possibility that these unelected delegates to its national convention might support Hillary Clinton in sufficient numbers to give her the nomination, despite Barack Obama’s slim but indisputable lead among pledged delegates, who are assigned by the results of state primaries and caucuses. The prospect of Democratic insiders taking the nomination away from the first African-American to qualify for it threatened to seriously damage party unity, and prompted a move to reform the Democrats’ nomination process.But recently a party committee quietly tossed out a plan to take nominating power away from the superdelegates—former presidents, current senators and Congress members, members of the Democratic National Committee, and other party luminaries such as labor leaders. The superdelegates currently have automatic seats at the convention and are free to vote for whichever presidential candidate they please.After Obama secured the party’s nomination, he urged the DNC to create a commission to examine superdelegates’ influence and other shortcomings in the nomination process. The Democratic Change Commission (whose members included Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, and House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina) took a tough stance. Superdelegates, it recommended, should be required to vote for a candidate assigned to them, based on the results of their state’s caucus or primary.
