Seducing superdelegates

Wednesday, March 5

Senator Hillary Clinton yesterday scored a pair of crucial victories in the Democratic party's Ohio and Texas presidential primaries last night.

The character of the rest of the primary timetable is intriguing. With the exception of upcoming caucuses in Wyoming and a primary in Mississippi, which favour Barack Obama, there are no further primaries until Pennsylvania votes on April 22. If Clinton survives that test, the candidates will face the last series of significant contests in May and early June. The largest state votes are in North Carolina and Indiana on May 6 (Obama should win the former, but Clinton has the edge in the latter), followed by Kentucky and Oregon on May 20, and Puerto Rico on June 7.

These state contests now are a proxy for a different, and more significant, competition. The Democratic party's nominating rules allow the states to choose just over 80% of the national convention delegates via primaries or caucuses ('pledged delegates') -- but reserve 20% of delegate slots for elected or appointed party officials ('superdelegates'):

With the partial exception of the Democrats' 1984 nomination struggle, these superdelegates have been inconsequential -- one candidate has always won such a large proportion of the pledged delegates that it did not matter if the superdelegates were unenthusiastic about them. However, it has now become statistically impossible for either Clinton or Obama to secure the nomination through pledged delegates alone. Therefore, to a major extent, the remainder of the Democratic battle will be as much about exploiting primary results to impress the superdelegates (who are free to alter whom they support until the convention) as it is about accumulating pledged delegates. Therefore, the remainder of the campaign is likely to involve a series of competing 'moral claims' to the nomination, pitched at the superdelegates.