jducoeur: (0)
jducoeur ([personal profile] jducoeur) wrote 2008-02-06 06:47 pm (UTC)

The Democrats have a relatively consistent system. All states are allocated proportionally (on a congressional district-by-district basis, AFAIK). You have to get a minimum 15% to get anything, and the granularity is still kind of coarse (which causes some interesting effects WRT where the candidates choose to campaign), but it's largely proportional everywhere.

That's part of the issue. As a number of people have been pointing out lately, Obama and Clinton are close enough that it's really fairly unlikely that a winner will be selected before the convention: the proportional system means that the margin between them will probably be smaller than the number of superdelegates. (The question of who "won" a state is mostly irrelevant in the Democratic primary, despite all the media attention to it.) And if the superdelegates swing in the same direction overall that the pledged ones did, I think the whole thing will be a non-issue. But if they change the tally -- if the superdelegates throw the totals toward a different candidate than the popular vote did -- then I think you'll see a lot of thunder and lightning...

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