Letters to the Editor
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If only the rules were different, Hillary would be winning.
Of course this presupposes that the Obama campaign would have run their campaign as if the delegates weren't proportional.
Here's a tip for all of you amateur political operatives out there; campaigns win by exploiting the differences in each election.
Hillary Clinton ran her campaign as if it were winner take all.
Despite what she says today about all of these votes from PA to PR being counted, she started this campaign with the assumption that PA to PR would only have one candidate to vote for; her.
These are the same rules Bill Clinton with which Bill Clinton won the nomination. I can't remember but was the comback kid's "win" in New Hampshire in 1992 dampened by a winner take all loss?
The truth is, by not leaving the decision up to the very large and very blue states and giving voice to voters in other less blue states, are we not more likely to nominate a candidate who has broader appeal in the general election?
Doesn't a proportional system expand Democratic exposure in Congressional districts that are neglected by the party for three years, giving Democrats a chance to widen our Congressional majorities?
Democrats need to expand, and preaching to the choir in large blue states doesn't expand the party.
Proportional primaries enlarges the electoral map for us, forces Republicans to spend money in formally safe districts, and generates new enthusiasm at the grass roots.
A winner take all system fosters stagnation. And considering the state of the Republican party today, why in God's earth would Democrats even consider emulating them?
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How many times
Do we need to elect a president by a minority of voters before we decide to fix the system?
Winner take all systems merely disenfranchise 49.5% of the voters in a bi-polar contest and many more in a multi-polar contest. Your arguments about caucuses vs primaries are unimpressive. In many primaries, Republicans can vote for their preferred opponent. For that matter, given the multivariate nature of the American electorate, why do we essentially only have two parties?
The results of the current system (the whole system: nomination through general election) has been such a smashing success that less than 50% of the electorate bothers to vote. Which, in turn, means that our elected officials got there on typically less than 25% of the populace's vote. Wonderful. And this is the system you claim makes sense?
I don't think so. You may be able to legitimately claim that, if the Democrats used the Republican WTA system, Three Names would have the nomination sewn up but you can't claim that that system makes sense if you also want to claim that politician X was selected by the majority of the voters.
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ancient history
I'm old enough to remember the struggle to get rid of winner-take-all delegate allocation back around 1968. I seem to recall that abolishing winner-take-all was the liberal position.
But that isn't the only anachronism here. It wasn't just Howard Dean who came down on FL and MI. You'll recall that Hillary Clinton's representative agreed with sanctions against the rogue primaries, back when she didn't think she would need them. And, as the estimable Kos observes, even if the Iowa-NH supremacy is iniquitous, to get rid of it, first we have to establish the authority of the DNC to control the process.
Wilentz's article, like the Clinton campaign, is reduced to arguing that Hillary, despite her astronomical negatives, is the Democrat better poised to pick up Ohio and the presidency. Maybe, although I seem to recall hearing the same argument for the pathetic Kerry candidacy. The conclusion that isn't iffy, though, is that the Obama campaign has run rings around the Clinton campaign. Why are they so convinced they can put away McSame, when they can't put away Obama???????
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Clinton would be ahead in the primary and would lose in the GE
If Sean Wilentz weren't trying to crown a particular candidate as the party's nominee and applied some objective analysis, he might actually make a worthwhile point. I am not going to defend the Democratic Primary process as perfection, but a winner take all system effectively causes the nominee to be heavily weighted to the selection choices of California and New York and will give us a quick nomination contest and a losing candidate. That's certainly what it did in 2000 and 2004.
Wilentz does not address the problems inherent in a winner take all election process: that it would reward name recognition notwithstanding organizational capacity to move beyond Mark Penn's foolish 17+1 state strategy that might, rarely, produce a winner but will never produce an effective supporting governance structure (like a majority of senators with some gratitude for your presence on the ticket).
I do not understand this vested interest in Clinton's candidacy. Every time I read an article like this I realize how far from democratic ideals the movers and shakers in Clinton's camp would really like to take us. It's an election not a coronation. And the coup de grace: If Clinton had used a modicum of advance planning she would be the nominee notwithstanding her weakness in the GE. She didn't; it's her own and not the system's fault. Get over it.
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If the General Election system made sense, it would look more like the Dem Primaries
I am shocked that such an intelligent observer of American politics would advance such a numbskulled analysis. If the American electoral system made sense, it would be based on the national popular vote. If the system made sense, then Al Gore would be our President. The Democratic Primary system makes sense because it is, on the whole, more democratic. It is more democratic than the Republican winner-take-all system.
Clearly, the main reason that Wilentz thinks the system doesn't make sense is that it hasn't favored his candidate. The unstated assumption is that if the system "made sense", Clinton would have won. Now, the first thing to say about this, is that everyone knew perfectly well what the rules were from the very start, and that whining that the rules aren't fair with 5 minutes left to go in the last quarter is just that: whining. The second thing to say about this is that Clinton and her allies had a great deal of say over the system, and they did everything they could to stack the deck in her favor (e.g., by setting up Super Tuesday as a knock-out blow). The third thing to say about this is that we have no way of knowing how things would have turned out had the rules been different. Both candidates knew what the rules were and designed their strategies accordingly. Clinton's strategy was to close the deal on Super Tuesday. When that strategy failed, she had, well, no strategy, leaving Obama to roll up more than a dozen victories in a row. What we learn from this, and from the campaign as a whole, is that Obama has better advisers and a better organization. Had the rules been different, their campaign would have been different, too. Would Hillary have won then? Maybe. Maybe not. There is no way to know, and no sense in asking such questions. The rules were the rules. And it's pretty clear who won. It is time for Wilentz and other Hillary supporters to accept reality and close ranks to defeat John McCain.