The ground rules seem pretty clear at this point — Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns are going after superdelegates with everything they’ve got. Pledged delegates were chosen through primaries and caucuses, voters have reasonable expectations that they will do what they’re supposed to do, and wooing them is perceived as a real no-no.
Now, the notion that the Clinton campaign might try to peel off Obama’s pledged delegates first came up as a rumor a few weeks ago. Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer responded to the talk with a rather unambiguous denial: “We have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama. It’s now time for the Obama campaign to be clear about their intentions.” (It wasn’t entirely clear why the Obama campaign’s intentions needed to be clarified, but officials said they, too, would not pursue Clinton’s pledged delegates.)
And yet, this just won’t go away. Here’s Clinton yesterday, talking to the Philadelphia Daily News:
“I just don’t think this is over yet, and I don’t think that it is smart for us to take a position that might disadvantage us in November. And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They’re just like superdelegates.”
Actually, they’re really not. Sure, they each get a vote at the convention, just like pledged delegates, but pledged delegates are chosen by voters and superdelegates are rewarded for being insiders.
More importantly, though, if the Clinton campaign believes pledged delegates are “just like” superdelegates, it once again raises the specter of some uncomfortable campaign developments.
This would be easier to overlook if it wasn’t happening with such frequency. A couple of weeks ago, Ben Smith reported that during a conference call with reporters, top Clinton aide Harold Ickes noted that pledged delegates aren’t formally bound to vote for the candidate they’re elected to support. “That binding rule was knocked out in 1980,” he said. Ickes didn’t actually say the Clinton campaign would start pursuing pledged delegates, but the fact that he would highlight the rule raised eyebrows.
A few days later, Hillary Clinton personally sparked speculation about this in an interview with Newsweek. Asked how she could still win the nomination given Obama’s delegate lead, Clinton said:
“[The math] doesn’t look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they’re all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to.”
And yesterday marked the third time in three weeks, suggesting this is very much on the campaign’s mind.
To reiterate a point from a couple of weeks ago, this would certainly be a hardball move from the Clinton campaign, but it’s not literally cheating. Ickes and Clinton are right — pledged delegates are not, in fact, required to stick with their candidate at the convention.
The point, though, is that it feeds the perception of “stealing” votes — voters participated in primaries and caucuses, chose delegates to represent their preference, and now one campaign might try to undo the primary and caucus results by targeting pledged delegates. If this is the strategy, Clinton is, in effect, saying she wants the delegates from the states she won and the delegates from the states she lost. If you’re a Clinton backer, you might like this fighting spirit. If not, it seems like an underhanded way of sowing division and undermining the party.
As Isaac Chotiner recently noted:
The strategy here seems completely mystifying. It’s simply impossible to imagine that Clinton will get elected delegates to switch to her (the outcry would be enormous, obviously), and yet her campaign is intent on pushing the idea (Harold Ickes said something similar last week). All this ensures is that the media will run a lot stories about a dirty campaign intent on stealing the election. Given that the Clintonites are going to need some good will in July (if in fact they want to garner a delegate majority through superdelegates), the logic of this ploy eludes me.
For all I know, this is just a coincidence. Clinton and Ickes weren’t hinting, and the fact that this keeps coming up is not indicative of an actual strategy at all. For that matter, it’s equally possible that the Clinton campaign is simply trying to create more uncertainty about the process (in other words, “Note to superdelegates: don’t commit now; anything can still happen”) and won’t follow through.
But the talk is unhelpful, and in all likelihood, pointless — candidates chose delegates based in part on their commitments to the candidates. If the Clinton campaign began targeting pledged delegates, it would not only become highly divisive, it would also likely fail.