I missed several Sabato’s Crystal Ball emails due to accidental unsubscribing. Here is one of many make-up posts.
05/29/2008
Rhodes Cook’s THE “CONTROVERSIAL” CAUCUSES: An Outsized Influence in 2008
Maybe one of the most intriguing – and nefarious – aspects of this long-running Democratic presidential campaign is that the legitimacy of the system itself has come into question. Doubts, to be sure, have been raised about the role of the unelected “superdelegates”.
But the campaign of Hillary Clinton has fingered a different villain for its greatest contempt – namely, the caucuses, which it claims are undemocratic as well as unrepresentative. They argue that her hard-working, blue-collar base was largely disfranchised by the sometimes awkward caucus meeting times.
The ire of the Clinton forces is a bit understandable. While the New York senator has run close to even with Barack Obama in the primary states, she has lost decisively to him in virtually all of the caucuses. The latter constitute a large share of her deficit in both delegates and popular vote which could in the end be her margin of defeat.
It is ironic that such a small slice of the nominating process could prove to be so decisive. For in size, the caucuses are much like the tip of an iceberg. In recent elections, about 35 to 40 states have held primaries. The rest have scheduled caucuses (with Texas Democrats famously holding both). Turnout has always been much, much larger in the primaries. So far this year, more than 33 million ballots have been cast in the sanctioned Democratic primaries, compared to less than 2.5 million votes in the Democratic caucuses.
Yet until this year, the credibility of the caucuses was rarely, if ever questioned.