Set for Convention Floor Fight, Push to End Superdelegates 'Catching Fire'

The push to abolish the “antidemocratic superdelegate system” within the Democratic National Committee is at its apex ahead of a DNC Rules Committee meeting on Saturday, at which an amendment to minimize the influence of those party insiders will be considered.

Superdelegates, which only exist within the Democratic Party, are unpledged elected officials or party elites who may back the candidate of their choosing at the convention, regardless of how their state voted in a presidential primary or caucus. The vast majority lined up behind Hillary Clinton before the 2016 primary race even began. 

Between 11am and 2pm EDT on Friday, a plane calling for an end to superdelegates will fly over the Philadelphia Convention Center. According to a press statement from organizers, the plane will be flown “on behalf of a coalition of both [Bernie] Sanders and Clinton supporters who agree about the superdelegates cause.”

“The time has come to end the archaic and undemocratic superdelegate system once and for all—and that starts Saturday in Philadelphia.”
Click Here: cheap INTERNATIONAL jersey—Aaron Regunberg, DNC Rules Committee

Meanwhile, more than 130,000 people have signed a petition in support of the effort, and more than 50 Rules Committee members have joined in by cosponsoring and filing an amendment to sweep away superdelegates. While this is “far from a majority of the 187-member committee,” as Alex Seitz-Wald notes for MSNBC, it does put the amendment past the 25 percent threshold of support within the committee that will be needed to issue a “minority report” and force a vote on the floor of next week’s Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.

“The campaign to end superdelegates is catching fire,” said Aaron Regunberg, Rhode Island state representative and a DNC Rules Committee member leading the fight. “Superdelegates disempower voters, they are less diverse than our overall delegates, and they are wildly unpopular. The time has come to end the archaic and undemocratic superdelegate system once and for all—and that starts Saturday in Philadelphia.”

In an open letter to the DNC last week, a coalition of 14 national organizations outlined why the system should be scrapped, saying it is “unrepresentative, contradicts the purported values of the party and its members, and reduces the party’s moral authority.”

The groups demanded that “moving forward, the DNC retain at least the current total number of delegates, inclusive of superdelegates—4,770—for future national conventions, but allot all of them to states, territories, and Democrats abroad through the rubric that governs pledged delegate allotments, and require that all of them be selected through popular primary and/or caucus processes.”