Category Archives: Democratic Party

Superdelegates and Pendulums

By DocJess | Published August 29, 2018

Reprinted with Permission

50 years ago, Democratic candidates were chosen by “The Party”.

50 years ago this week, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, that began to change. There had been some primaries and caucuses in 1968,  of which Vice President Hubert Humphrey won a tiny amount, but “The Party” wanted Humphrey to be the party’s presidential nominee. They got that, and a whole lot of protests, and a disaster in November. Nixon won the Electoral College 301 – 191, with the remainder going to George Wallace. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Selection Rules for 2020

By tmess2 | Published August 26, 2018

This weekend, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) held its “Summer” Meeting.  One of the items on the agenda was the RBC’s draft of the various documents that together comprise the rules for the 2020 nomination process.  For first time readers of this site, the Democrats have a multi-step process for drawing up the rules for delegate selection.   Typically, step one is a Festivus-type Commission in which the party head appoints a Commission drawing from all parts of the party for an airing of the grievances from the last cycle.  (Sometimes, this step is skipped when a Democrat wins the White House, particularly when a Democratic incumbent is re-elected.)  That Commission then drafts suggestions.  Step Two is the Rules and By-laws Committee (RBC) of the DNC actually takes those suggestions (and other suggestions by RBC members) and amends the rules from the last cycle to incorporate those suggestions that have the support of the RBC.  Step Three is that the full DNC then reviews and approves the new set of rules and issues them to the state parties.  Step Four is that the state parties then (taking into account both legislative changes in their state and the new national rules) draft the state rules.  Typically, the state rules need to be completed by the late spring/early summer of the year after the mid-term.  Step Five is that the state rules are then submitted to the RBC for review for compliance with the national rules and approval (or directions to make changes to comply with the national rules).

The reports out of the Summer Meeting suggests that the RBC drafts were adopted essentially intact; so what follows is based on the draft plans that were approved by the RBC:  the Call for the 2020 Convention and the Delegate Selection Rules for the 2020 Convention.   (Both linked documents show the changes to the old rules.)   There are several important details/changes in the draft documents from the RBC.  (If you want to skip the technicalities of the rules, what these may mean in practical terms is at the end of this post.)

First, the 2020 Convention will take place in mid-July.  (Call, Preamble).  The DNC will select the site later this year or early next year.  The delegate selection process will end by June 20, 2020.  (Call, Part III). Continue Reading...

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The 2020 Convention — Rules Changes (June 2018)

By tmess2 | Published June 17, 2018

For both parties, the rules governing the national convention is the product of gradual change over time.  It is a natural desire — shared by both parties — to look back and what went wrong and to try to fix it.  The more intelligent members of both parties understand that every cycle will be somewhat different,; so “fixing” something to stack the deck against a candidate is likely to backfire.  A perfect example is the Republican rule changes after 2012.  In 2012, the Ron Paul campaign was perceived as manipulating the rules to get Ron Paul supporters elected to fill delegate slots won by other candidates.  In response, the rules were changed to bind delegates to vote for the candidate that won the delegates.  Regardless of how one feels about the merits of that change, the result was that the Republican Party establishment (which had pushed for the rule change) was helpless to stop the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump.

After the last convention (following past practice), the Democratic Party appointed a commission (the Unity Reform Commission) to study the rules and suggest changes in certain areas.  In early 2018, The commission’s report then went to the Rules & By-laws Committee (RBC) of the Democratic National Committee.  Among the tasks of the RBC is drafting the actual rules governing the 2020 delegate selection process and the convention process.  Since receiving the report of the commission, the RBC has been considering that report along with looking at other issues related to delegate selection process and has been composing a draft of the rules for 2020.  Later this year, that draft will go to the full Democratic National Committee for a final vote.

While the RBC has discussed a large number of changes, the one change that has gotten some media attention is the rules governing who can run.  Most of the media coverage has, at the very least, ignored the history behind this rule, and suggested that the rules change is targeted at Senator Bernie Sanders. Continue Reading...

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Time to Run

By tmess2 | Published March 18, 2018

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the central characters have created a finite improbability machine — a device for doing things that could occur naturally but only on rare occasions.  By definition, the finitely improbable do sometimes occur — e.g., a number 16 seed winning in the first round of the NCAA basketball — because, however the deck may be stacked against the event happening, there is series of events that can come together to make the improbable happen.

In politics, the first of the events needed for a party to win an election is for it to have a candidate file to run.  This past week, the Democratic Party narrowly won (subject to a canvass that should not change the results and the Republicans in the House simply opting to ignore the results) a special election in Pennsylvania’s Eighteenth District.  While, given the change in conditions since 2014 and 2016, it is unlikely that a Democratic candidate would have won in those two elections, the Democrats did not have any chance because no Democrat filed.

In most states, the filing period for offices occurs in the spring of an election year.   (Green Papers has a good list of the filing deadline and the primary dates for most states.)  At this point, the filing deadline (at least for the established parties) has passed in about half of the states.  So far, the Democrats are doing a good job at finding candidates to run for Congress.  In the states in which the filing deadline has passed, Democrats have filed for every seat other than North Carolina’s Third District.  While it is harder to tell for sure in states in which filing has opened (as candidates can still withdraw), it appears that Democrats have candidates for most if not all congressional seats in those states — the only district that does not have an announced Democratic candidate is Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth District.  (Some of the upcoming states require nominating petitions.  While it looks like there are Democrats circulating petitions, it is impossible to tell if we will have a candidate until the petition is filed which may occur just before the deadline.  There is also the complicating issue in Pennsylvania of the new Congressional district lines.  The Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the new lines.  However, the U.S. Supreme Court has had the stay application for over two weeks — and pleadings closed on March 6.  It becomes less likely — and it was already unlikely — that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant the stay once filing closes on Tuesday as such a change would disrupt the primary schedule.) Continue Reading...

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2020 Democratic Convention — Unity and Reform Commission — Part 2

By tmess2 | Published February 12, 2018

One of the issues in the last several primary cycles — for both parties — have been the role of unpledged delegates.  There are several reasons why both parties designate certain party officials (and on the Democratic side, elected officials) as automatic delegates.  First, it removes these individuals from the competition for the “regular” delegate slots making it easier for grassroots activists to compete for a delegate slot.   Second, these individuals have a slightly different perspective than the voters.  While everyone wants the party to win the White House, state party officials are also responsible for winning as many down ballot races as possible.  Elected officials want to win their own races.  As such, in theory, if the leading candidate seems too extreme or flawed, the unpledged delegates could swing the nomination to the second-placed candidate.   Before 2016, the Republicans decided to bind their automatic delegates based on primary results in their state.  After 2016, some Republicans might regret that their automatic delegates no longer had that power given the continuing fiasco that is Donald Trump.  However, in neither party, the automatic delegates have ultimately supported the candidate that won the most delegates; so this theoretical power has never been used.

Even though this power has never been used to change the result, many Democrats have wanted to reduce the power of the automatic delegates.  The resolution that created the Unity and Reform Commission mandated that, while elected officials (Senators, Representatives, Governors) and distinguished party leaders (e.g., former presidents, former DNC chairs, former speakers/caucus leaders) would remain unpledged, DNC members would be pledged in accordance with the primary results.  The task for the Unity and Reform Commission was to make recommendations as to how to handle this process.  First, the recommendations distinguish between DNC members who represent the states (state party chairs and the DNC members elected by the state parties) and other DNC members (at-large members and those who represent groups of elected officials).  The “state” members will be bound based on the state results; and the “national” DNC members will be bound based on the national results.

On the issue of exactly how to bind these automatic delegates, the Commission did not reach a final recommendation but, instead, suggested two alternatives.   The first would just pool the delegate votes with no individual votes on the first ballot.  The second would create a mechanism for assigning the automatic delegates to specific candidates based on the delegates personal wishes with some random mechanism if the personal preferences do not line up with the required allocation.   Unlike regular delegates, however, the automatic delegates would be absolutely bound to these allocations. Continue Reading...

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2020 Democratic Convention — Unity and Reform Commission — Part 1

By tmess2 | Published January 7, 2018

While, in one sense, it is very early to talk about who will be President of the United States on January 21, 2021, there are many people who think that process has a lot to do with results.  And the drafting of the rules for 2020 have already started.

On the Republican side, there is no public effort to re-write the rules.  Unlike the Democratic Party, the Republican party has the basic rules (which are less detailed than the Democratic Party rules) for allocating delegates to the national convention within the actual Rules of the Republican Party and require a supermajority of the Republican National Committee to change those Rules.

The Democrats, however, keep the rules for delegate selection separate from the party by-laws.  So every cycle, the rules and by-laws committee drafts those rules and submits them to the full Democratic National Committee for approval.  The starting point for these rules is the rules from the previous cycle.  However, because no rules are perfect, most contested campaigns lead to complaints about the rules.  These complaints in turn have, in most of these cycles, caused the party to appoint a commission to study whatever rules were seen as being a problem in the last cycle and make recommendations. Continue Reading...

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A Long December

By tmess2 | Published December 17, 2017

The year comes to a close with its usual mix of good news and bad news.

On the 2020 presidential election, the Unity Reform Commission has completed its work.  Josh Putnam over at Frontloading Headquarters has posting summaries of the Commission’s decisions.   From the first two summaries, the recommendations seem to be moving toward more open primaries (a reversal of the party’s traditional support for closed primaries) and to make caucuses more like primaries with a preference toward using the primary if there is a state-run primary.  These recommendations will go to the Rules & By-laws Committee (which folks may remember from 2008).  The Rules & By-laws Committee will take these recommendations into account in drafting the 2020 Call and Delegate Selection Plan.  When the draft is concluded, the RBC’s draft goes to the full Democratic National Committee for approval.  If the Unity Reform Commission believes that the RBC is not fully implementing their recommendations in the draft, they can ask for the full DNC to intervene.  Presumably, the party will also begin its site selection process early in 2018.

As the site selection and the rule drafting process continues, there will probably be a lot of discussion here.  For now, it is important to be cautious about changes driven by the problems of the last cycle.  There is always a temptation to “fight the last war.”  But the problems in one cycle do not necessarily recur in the next cycle, and it is important not to do things that will probably make more problems than they fix. Continue Reading...

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The Democratic Party: Where do we go from here?

By DocJess | Published April 17, 2017

In the past week, I had three conversations that all intersect on the issue of the future of the Democratic Party. Three quite different people, and varying subject matters. I have not yet reached a conclusion, but the questions raised fascinate me.

Conversation 1

I belong to a political action group and we had a meeting. While the topic doesn’t matter, this comment still rings in my ears: “I work in a factory, and we make decisions immediately. I hope the rest of you won’t take this wrong, but you are pencil pushers.” Continue Reading...

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And so it’s Tom Perez

By DocJess | Published February 25, 2017

The vote on the second ballot was 235-200 indicating that the rift between the old guard and the new left continues. So what does this mean for our party?

First, Tom Perez is a good guy. He’s smart, he’s well educated, he has held political positions (both elected and appointed) of increasing responsibility, most recently as Secretary of Labour.  While his tenure at Labour was not a rousing success, he is in favour of the Fight for $15.

However, he was in favour of TPP. In addition, he feels that the Democratic Party does not answer enough to rural Americans, and that the DNC did nothing to help Hillary Clinton directly. And therein lies the problem with his election. Continue Reading...

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Early Post-Mortem

By tmess2 | Published November 20, 2016

This election is a bitter pill to swallow because everybody got it wrong.  Apparently even the internal polls of the RNC in the last week of the campaign showed Secretary Clinton ahead.  At the end of the day, President-elect Trump managed to avoid shooting himself in the foot just long enough during the last two weeks for Republicans who were telling pollsters that they were voting for Governor Johnson or were undecided to hold their noses and come back home.  Certainly, the polls with two weeks to go encouraged the Clinton campaign to dream about states that they could go into and help Democrats in down ballot races.  The perception that Clinton would win in some ways gave permission for Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Trump to keep the margin down and for Democrats to cast protest votes for third party candidates.

It’s also a bitter pill because the race got very personal.  Since the election, I have gotten e-mails from local activists about the issues that the party needs to address.  On most of the issues, there was a plan on that issue from the Clinton campaign.  The issues, however, never got aired as the campaign focused on the flaws of the two candidates.    I don’t think that the choice of the Democratic candidate mattered on this aspect of the campaign.  In the primary, Trump also ran a very personality based campaign, slandering his opponents and coming up with labels to characterize the rest of the Republican candidates.   Certain issues that were mentioned in the DNC WikiLeaks memos were not good issues for a Democratic primary but would have proven useful tools for the Trump campaign in the general election.  Trump was such a big personality and so uniquely “not ready” to be President, it is hard to see how any Democratic campaign could have avoided the temptation to focus on Trump’s flaws and gotten the media to focus on the issues rather than the personalities.

Given the closeness of this election what needs to change between now and 2020. Continue Reading...

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