Selecting Candidates

The various writers and editors at FiveThirtyEight will occasionally post some of the group chats they do on various topics. I don't always pay that much attention, because they can be unfocused and hard to read, but some of them are quite good.

Such as this one about the Democratic Party changing their rules about how superdelegates are involved in nominating presidential candidates. There's a decent breakdown of both sides' position and reasoning in there: the faction in favor of the rule change wants to make sure that the superdelegates can't just override the voters, whereas the faction against it wants to prevent the party elites from losing too much of the power they would need to prevent the Democrats from running off a cliff.

One of the detailed arguments against the rule change that I found particularly convincing was the point that this doesn't actually prevent the superdelegates from overriding the voters' wishes. If anything, by specifically defining situations in which they don't get a say and situations in which they do, it might cause some superdelegates to believe that when they do get to vote that they don't have to pay attention to anything except their own preferences.

On the other hand, the idea that ultimately any choice other than trusting the voters' judgment and relying on them to pick the winner is kind of missing the point is rather convincing as well. And there were a lot of interesting questions about how much the results of past elections would have changed if the new rules had been in place earlier; it doesn't look like they'd have changed much.

In the end, while I share some concerns from the chat about whether this makes the Democrats more likely to do something incredibly weird or stupid with their nomination, I don't think this is going to result in too many disruptions to their ability to nominate good candidates. I suppose we'll have to wait until 2020 to see how that turns out.