Superdelegates are the automatic convention delegates of the U.S. Democratic Party — members of the House and Senate, governors, lieutenant governors, state party directors and state committee chairs, seated by virtue of office rather than by primary vote. John Kiriakou, a former Democrat, treats the system as the mechanism by which the party’s nominating contests are decided against their own voters.[1]
Origin
Kiriakou dates the system to the aftermath of 1972. Nobody at the DNC had wanted George McGovern as that year’s nominee: he was the most popular candidate at the time, especially among young people, but the weakest nationwide, and he went on to lose 49 states. The party let him have the nomination and then, immediately after the defeat, instituted superdelegates.[2][1]
Kiriakou’s objection is one of first principles — “it’s a party of the people, right? If the people want George McGovern as the nominee, then George McGovern should be the nominee” — and his reading of the intent is that the party wanted to go back to “the days with the smoke-filled back rooms with the party bosses choosing who’s going to be the nominee.” The efficiency of the design, as he and his interviewer work out between them, is that concentrating the decision in roughly 1,500 automatic delegates leaves far fewer people who need to be controlled.[1][3][4]
West Virginia and Wyoming
The case Kiriakou puts forward as decisive is the 2016 primary, in which Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in both West Virginia and Wyoming and Clinton took “literally every delegate” from those states.[5]
He places this alongside the debate-question episode: DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, he says, gave the Clinton campaign the debate questions in advance, and Sanders did not receive them. His summary is unqualified — “it’s fixed.”[6][7]
The pattern before and after
Kiriakou describes the same treatment applied to other insurgents. Of Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential run: every time she inched up in the polls, the DNC changed the rules for participating in the next debate, setting the threshold one or two percentage points out of her reach each time, because her message threatened them and she would not get with the program.[8]
Of Jesse Jackson, who won eleven contests in 1988 and had real momentum: Kiriakou says the party let him self-destruct, because he was never a Democratic Party insider and “the insiders were not going to let him have that nomination.” Asked who the deciding “we” actually is, his answer is the state committee chairs who make up the Democratic National Committee.[9][10][6]
The Republican asymmetry
The Republican Party, Kiriakou notes, has no equivalent system — which is precisely why an insurgent candidate such as Donald Trump could take its nomination, an outcome he considers “much less likely to happen” on the Democratic side.[9][10]