Delegates/Super Delegates vs the Electoral College?

[mjr]

What I'm curious about is this:

If you're in favor of abolishing the EC, are you also in favor of doing away with the Delegate/Super Delegate system as well?

I've seen a number of people make arguments for doing away with the EC, but few to none advocating doing away with the Delegate/Super Delegate system within the primaries.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

I'm probably in the minority but no to both.

I think the EC needs some reforms and possibly a revamp for how demographics work in the 21st century. But the EC is there to resolve tie scenarios, non-majority, or statistical tie scenarios. Having electors that can negotiate that rather than non-stop recount litigation has an expediency aspect to it. It's main problem right now is that the high population/low population states thing isn't real. it's more about Urban/rural split in every state so it is defacto buoying only one constituency. It needs to essentially work to unstick the process, not cheese the process. When you start consistently seeing population/EC splits, that's more a symptom of dysfunction as when it was less populous state vs. more populous state the electors served more of a bargaining function. What we're seeing right now has only happened 5 times in 300 years and twice in the last 20 or 2 of the last 5 election cycles.

Super delegates prevent Trump and that's not a dig, but a demonstration of why they exist.. And in retrospect, the last 4 years have been a good test case as to why that is a good thing. I won't go into minutae, but essentially Republican party has largely flipped outside of social issues. Globalization skeptical - this was a Republican platform. Alliance averse - We don't even have to go back 2 presidents to see that change. Budget-indifferent. Pro-Tariff - again not a republican position. Really the only thing that's the same now is protestant bent (which is fine) and support of racist institutions (less fine). So people like Ryan or Flake essentially don't have a party anymore - with opportunists like McConnell whose only concern is elections remain.

Even at the beginning of the Constitution, the founders were skeptical of a momentary lapse in popular judgement. It happens - things piss us off. But what they didn't want is rapid and wild changes in policy that would damage the democracy. So for example if Trump makes it impossible for the next president to fix the relationships with allies, ultimately that's a process failure.

So SuperDelegates have their place as they put a breaker on a momentary passion so that it either cools or eventually takes larger form. They're frustrating when "your guy" loses because of them, but they serve a purpose of logical consistency within the party and assure an over-time migration rather than a momentary about face.