Democrats Must Dump The Caucuses Which Are An Especially Bad Way For A Democratic Candidate To Be Nominated

First a disclaimer.   I have a very low opinion of opinion polls.  No, that's too mild.  I hate them, I don't trust them, I don't trust the people who conduct polling and I don't think there's a way to do it to produce a consistently reliable result.  I think most opinion polling is, in fact, done to push an agenda, usually that of the people or groups who pay for the polling.  Polling outfits certainly know that they're unlikely to get lots of business if they consistently tell their customers what they don't want to hear.

Knowing that you won't be surprised that I'm not very impressed with the predictive activities of Five Thirty Eight, the entity that analyzes polls to make predictions about the future.   I won't go into that for this post other than to say that's not all that they do.  Like the weatherman on the radio, their record of analysis of things that have already happened is generally far better than their predictions about the future.

Disclaimer over.

In pointing out some of the downsides of choosing nominees through a caucus instead of a primary, I left out the biggest one, we don't hold caucuses to decide who becomes president, we hold elections. Despite the huge roar of the Bernie or Bust folks over his winning three caucuses this past weekend, their candidate does as well as he's ever going to do in those largely artificial contests which have rules which are nothing like the election the nominee will face in the fall.  Here's part of what the people at Five Thirty Eight say about that.

So why is Sanders doing better in caucuses than primaries? The most obvious answer is that caucuses reward candidates with diehard supporters. There are often speeches, and sometimes multiple rounds of voting at caucuses. Typically, you have to stick around for a while to vote. That takes devotion, and if you’ve ever met a Sanders fan, you’ll know that many would climb over hot coals to vote for him.

Sanders’s strength in caucuses may also be, in part, coincidental. Every state that has held or will hold a Democratic caucus this year has a black population at or below 10 percent of the state’s total population, and black voters have been among Clinton’s strongest demographic groups. Without those black voters, Clinton just can’t match the enthusiasm of Sanders’s backers. (In Southern states, where Clinton romped, her voters were far more enthusiastic than Sanders’s supporters were.)

While enthusiasm isn't a negligible thing, its temporary, interim  results can be deceiving, telling you nothing reliable about what the all important outcome in November will be.   I can well imagine that if Bernie Sanders doesn't get the nomination but does do what I believe he would, endorse Hillary Clinton, that many of those Bernie folk who would "climb over hot coals" for him will turn on a dime and decide he has betrayed them.  A good many of the Bernie Sanders supporters don't, in fact, have the maturity to understand political reality, a lot of them don't seem to understand that the success of Sanders' campaign relies on exactly the artificiality of caucuses or that their results are not a reliable predictor of what will happen in an election in November.  Frankly, a lot of them are immature brats for whom it's all about them.  Bernie or Bust really means "if I don't get my way I'm going to throw a tantrum".  Indeed, you can see Bernie Sanders supporters having such tantrums now, every hour online.

In the fact that all of the states holding a Democratic caucus have a small percentage of Black voters lies an especially telling reason as to why they are an especially bad way for a Democratic candidate to be chosen.   No Democrat can win the presidency without a strong turnout by Black voters, the same is true for other groups but that is most true for that vital part of the Democratic coalition.

I would argue that the caucus system as it is this year, in this election season, minimizes the strength of Black voters.  If the results of election rules in any state led to the weakening of the effectiveness of Black voters in that way, Democrats would, rightly, be using it as an example of voter suppression on grounds of race.  I would bet you anything that Bernie Sanders would vote to overturn such a system on the basis of its results.  

More on why the Sanders victories in caucuses are not necessarily a sign of strength for him in a fall election is shown in this paragraph.  It also contains information on what Hillary Clinton has to do to win.

Sanders has outperformed his targets in 11 states. Just three of those states held primaries (Illinois, Oklahoma and Vermont), and one of those three (Vermont) is Sanders’s home state. The other eight were caucuses. Six of Sanders’s best states by this measure were in the West (all the caucuses this week and Colorado). In fact, Iowa and Nevada are the only caucuses so far in which Clinton beat our delegate targets by more than one delegate, which may have something to do with all the organizing effort the Clinton campaign put into those states.

The Five Thirty Eight article points out that Sanders is running out of caucus states which are likely to break in his favor and the result will be that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination, despite having to use up resources better saved to fight against the Republican war machine in the general election.

I would imagine that someone reading that might bring up the New Hampshire primary but given the habit of New Hampshire voters to support candidates from neighboring states who don't go on to win the election,  Dukakis, Kerry, Romney, that should figure into any analysis of its own peculiarities.  I am sure that the fact that New Hampshire voters have been watching Bernie Sanders on TV (New Hampshire news regularly covers surrounding states) might have had a bit to do with his strength there.  He's a regional hero, of sorts, to Democrats.  I think it had to do with why his strength in the Maine caucus was so big, as well.  It wasn't until I heard a lot of his supporters at my local caucus who said that if he didn't win the nomination that they would do the monumentally stupid thing of voting for Jill Stein that the alarms went off for me.

The election in November is the important one and the winner won't be selected by the absurd and antiquated caucus system.  Democrats should dump caucuses in favor of something which will produce a candidate more likely to win in a totally different kind of process, a democratic election.  Caucuses should be left in the past.