Democrats are less democratic
>Florida and the DNC, Aug 26 2007
Roger Simon of the Politico reports:
Florida will lose all its delegates to the Democratic National Convention unless the state moves its primary from Jan. 29 to Feb. 5, the Democratic Party decided Saturday.
While the one-week change may seem trivial to outsiders, the decision by the party's powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee was seen as a crucial test of party power and discipline.
As several states continue to elbow each other to go earlier and earlier in the 2008 presidential calendar, the Democratic National Committee decided to draw a line in the sand and say "enough."
Why is the DNC taking such a hard line? Obviously, it has an interest in the delegate selection process proceeding according to its bylaws. This punishment helps in that regard in two ways.
First, this punishment signals to other states that the DNC is serious - i.e. its threat is credible. By coming down so hard upon Florida, it cues to other states that their violations of the bylaws will be dealt with just as severely. If, on the other hand, the DNC decided to be "merciful" to Florida, other states would intuit that the DNC is not serious about enforcing its bylaws, and therefore they would start breaking them. A harsh punishment for Florida sends a clear message that the party is serious.
Second, and relatedly, this punishment may be necessary to sanction a large state like Florida. If the DNC were to do what the RNC did - and simply cut Florida's number of delegates in half - the Sunshine State would be left with a large enough number of delegates to induce candidates to campaign actively in Florida. And, as the intuition of most state leaders seems to be that early victories imply momentum and therefore later victories, this is not much of a punishment. Florida Republicans, for instance, still will have great influence on the Republican primary process. Even though their number of delegates is half of what they would be, there are still enough delegates up for grabs that candidates will come to Florida and compete about as intensely as they would had the RNC taken no action. Accordingly, the winner will get a boost going into February 5th - and therefore a victory in Florida implies later victories on the Republican side. The DNC is hoping that, by reducing the Florida primary to a beauty contest, it diminishes the importance of Florida enough to eliminate its capacity to generate any momentum. If no delegates mean that the candidates ignore Florida - the DNC will succeed in this regard. But leaving Florida with, say, half of its delegates gives candidates an incentive to come to Florida and compete, win, and gain momentum - and thus Florida goes effectively unpunished.
Personally, I think this is a dangerous strategy the DNC is pursuing. Too many pundits wrongly assume that both nominations will be decided by the results of February 5th. I think that is underdetermined. I think there is a fair chance that February 5th will produce a "split decision" - with major candidates from both parties surviving the day with strong bases of support. This could yield contested nominations at one or both conventions. Simply because this has not happened in the last few cycles does not mean that it couldn't happen this cycle.
I think that such an occurrence - a contested convention - is more likely to occur this cycle than in any cycle in recent memory. First, there are so many states that are voting on February 5th that momentum may not be as influential this year as it has been in the past. If those February 5th primaries were to be spread out over the course of two weeks, the later states could use the earlier states as a cue to who is "electable," and therefore converge around a single frontrunner. This will not happen to the same extent this cycle. The states of February 5th can only use Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina as their cues. If these five states split their support between several candidates, then there will be no real momentum for anybody - and those February 5th states will vote their first choices. This, in turn, might yield more than one candidate per party with enough delegates to keep on fighting after the fifth. Second, both parties are offering candidates with real policy differences between them. So, not only might candidates have earned enough delegates to keep on fighting after February 5th, they will also have issue-related reasons to do so. And, since half of the states will have voted by February 5th, a fight that goes past February 5th might be the type of fight that is only settled at the convention.
This is where the decisions of both parties regarding Florida could be trouble. What happens, for instance, if Obama wins the Florida beauty contest, finishes second at the convention, and the difference between first and second place is roughly the number of Florida delegates that Obama would have netted? What if Obama's second place finish is not as strong, but Edwards is willing to toss his delegates to Obama to avoid giving Hillary the nomination, and that Obama's Delegates + Edwards' Delegates + Obama and Edwards' Excluded Florida Delegates = Clinton's Delegates + 1 Delegate?
There are many different scenarios in which the exclusion of Florida's delegates would be of great consequence - and essentially all of them are negative. I am not saying that any of them are likely. But I am saying that if one of them did happen it would probably be terrible for the Democrats. It could yield a floor battle not fought simply over who is the better person to represent the party in the general election, but also over who has been treated fairly. This kind of fight over policy and process could be really, really messy. And, of course, the Republicans would quickly and gladly chortle that the Democratic nominee is "illegitimate," etc.
Like I said, I do not consider this to be likely - but remember that your expected utility from a given event is calculated by the probability that an event will occur multiplied by the payoff you will yield from the event if it occurs. This kind of "two-dimension" convention battle might be a low-probability event, but if it did occur, the payoff would be highly negative. This is why I think this was a dangerous strategy for the DNC to adopt.
And then, of course, there is the unseemliness of "disenfranchising" a set of voters who genuinely believe that they were disenfranchised in the last open presidential election. Without commenting upon the validity of anybody's impressions about the 2000 election - one cannot help but ask whether this is smart politics. Is Florida the kind of state that a party can afford to alienate? How many times are Florida Democrats willing to be pushed around?
Ultimately, I think that the DNC's answer to the problem that has gripped this cycle is an unnecessarily risky short-term solution to a long-term problem. These fights over delegates and primaries are happening, I think, because the convention system itself is antiquated and out-dated. The conventions were originally designed as the places where those empowered to decide the parties' presidential nominees came together to make a decision. This power has been transferred almost exclusively to the voters back in the states. The convention is now little more than a three-day political advertisement. And yet, the convention has been retained - in large measure because it is an event that the party still actually controls. Unfortunately, control over the convention is an inefficient and unwieldy way to exercise authority over the nomination process. But it is the only power the party really has left. And so, the DNC has been reduced to taking incommensurately punitive measures against a state as important as Florida. There is no other punishment it can actually deliver to Florida to get it to follow the rules.
Personally, I find this troubling. My intuition is that the events of the 2008 primary process could very well yield major reforms in the way presidential nominees are chosen. And, as I think the reforms of our democratic process in the last fifty years have generally done more harm than good, I fear that the reforms of 2009 will be just as bad. Reforms of our democratic process always seem to emanate from those who either hate the parties, hate political competition, or both (usually both). So, my guess is that sooner or later you'll see support for some piece of federal legislation that "solves" this particular problem of democratic process by reducing the role of the parties in that process. And, because the parties are this country's best chance for genuine democratic control over government, the reforms will end up making our system less democratic. That seems to be the way things have gone in the last fifty or so years - so, I don't see much reason to expect anything else.< |
