Superdelegates Aren’t the Real Democratic Primary Problem—Big Government Is

I have no brief for the Democratic Party. Its economic policies, its instinct to centralize power, and its vision of the family and the Constitution are wrong on the merits. But the recurring outrage over superdelegates is aimed at the wrong target. The real problem is not that a private political party uses an anti-majoritarian check on its own nomination. The real problem is that we have built a federal government so sprawling that the internal rules of a private association now feel like a matter of national survival.

That is the story almost nobody tells.

What the superdelegate fight actually shows

The modern Democratic Party has never resolved a simple question. Does it believe in pure majority rule, or doesn't it?

Superdelegates are the party's answer to a specific political trauma. After George McGovern captured the 1972 nomination on a wave of activist energy and then lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, the party spent the next decade trying to rebuild a role for experienced elected officials in the nomination process. The Hunt Commission's reforms in 1982 did exactly that. They created a category of automatic delegates, including governors, senators, members of Congress, and senior party officers, who could vote however they judged best regardless of what primary voters had said. The intent was not subtle. It was a check on an insurgent candidate who might be beloved by the party's most committed activists and unelectable everywhere else.

In 2016, that system blew up in the party's face. Hillary Clinton began the primary with a lead of hundreds of superdelegates before a single ballot had been cast. The Sanders campaign and its supporters treated that early lead as proof that the game was rigged. It did not matter that Clinton eventually won the pledged delegate race and the popular vote. The optics were fatal.

So in 2018 the DNC changed the rules. Superdelegates were largely sidelined from the first presidential ballot. They remain as a backstop for a contested convention, but they no longer determine the nominee on the first vote. The reform settled the optics. It did not settle the tension.

The Democratic Party still wants two contradictory things. It wants a plebiscitary primary that feels democratic. And it wants a private institution's right to protect itself from a nominee it considers disastrous. That is not a scandal. It is a confession.

A private club's right to be undemocratic

Here is the part most commentators miss. The Democratic National Committee is not a government body. It is a private association. The Constitution says nothing about political parties, and the First Amendment protects freedom of association. A political party may choose its nominee by primary, caucus, convention, smoke-filled room, or a coin toss if it likes.

The courts have repeatedly recognized this. A party has a constitutional right to set its own rules for selecting nominees, and a state cannot simply impose a one-size-fits-all primary system on it. That is not a loophole. It is the difference between a republic of free associations and a state that manages politics from above.

The modern primary system confuses this point. Most primaries are run by state governments at taxpayer expense, which makes voters feel as though they own the process. They don't. The parties decide whether to accept the results, and historically they have not always. The government-run primary was a progressive reform in the early twentieth century, sold as a way to break the party bosses. It did not make politics more virtuous. It simply moved the gatekeeping from party regulars to whoever could turn out in a low-turnout primary electorate.

If the Democratic Party wants superdelegates, it has every right to keep them. If it wants a pure one-person, one-vote nomination, it has every right to adopt that. If the Green Party wants to choose its nominee by a council of elders, that is nobody's business but the Greens'. What a party cannot do, if it respects freedom of association, is use the state to impose its preferred rules on everyone else.

The Founders built a republic, not a pure democracy

The Democratic Party's superdelegate fight is a small-scale version of the argument the Founders had in 1787.

The Constitution is full of anti-majoritarian checks. The Senate, the Electoral College, judicial review, and the amendment process are the obvious ones. These were not accidents. The Founders feared what Madison called the violence of faction. They understood that 51 percent of the people, inflamed by a moment, can trample the rights of the other 49. So they built a republic, a government of law, filtered representation, and separated powers, not a pure democracy.

George Washington warned that parties would become potent engines by which ambitious men would subvert the people. He was right. But the answer was never to eliminate every check on the majority. The answer was to keep government limited enough that no faction could do too much damage when it won.

The Democratic Party's superdelegates are, in effect, a constrained-vision device. Thomas Sowell spent a career explaining the difference between the constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature. The unconstrained vision assumes that if we just remove the bad rules, people will choose wisely. The constrained vision says institutions need checks because human nature is fallible and power corrupts.

Superdelegates are a constrained-vision mechanism. The Democrats are unconstrained in their rhetoric and constrained in their rules. That is why they cannot settle the argument.

The real problem is the size of the state

So why does anyone outside the Democratic Party care about its internal rules?

Because the presidency has become a four-year grant of centralized power over health care, education, energy, speech, corporate governance, and a thousand other things never enumerated in Article I, Section 8. When the federal government controls that much of life, the fight over who controls the government becomes existential. The nomination of a private club starts to feel like a constitutional crisis.

That is the Hayekian point. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek warned that as government planning expands, the stakes of political control expand with it. The superdelegate fight is a small symptom of that disease. The cure is not better rules for the DNC. The cure is a government small enough that no party's internal machinery can threaten your liberty.

Suppose the federal government did only what the Constitution authorizes. Suppose Washington had no say over your health care, your child's classroom, or your workplace policies. Then it would matter a great deal less which faction won the nomination. The superdelegate question would shrink to its proper size: an uninteresting internal dispute inside a private club.

But we have done the opposite. We have expanded the state so dramatically that every nomination fight feels like a battle for the soul of the country. That is not the DNC's fault alone. Both major parties have presided over the growth of the administrative state. Superdelegates are simply the visible symptom.

The objection, stated fairly

Now, the obvious objection. So you're defending DNC elites against the will of the voters?

No. I'm saying the will of the voters is a fiction when applied to a private organization that millions of people join for different reasons. If Democratic voters don't like superdelegates, they can change the rules through the party's internal process or leave. Those are the only legitimate options. What they should not do is demand that government force a private association to be more democratic.

The Sanders movement in 2016 wanted to use the Democratic Party's machinery while demanding that the party be a pure plebiscite. But a political party has the right to protect itself from being captured by an outsider who does not share its long-term commitments. That is not tyranny. It is association.

The deeper answer, though, is that the proper remedy is not government-enforced intra-party democracy. It is reducing government's scope so that the nomination does not carry so much power. If the state is small, you don't have to worry about whether a private club uses superdelegates.

The human stakes

The ordinary American doesn't need the Democratic Party to be more democratic. He needs the federal government to be far less powerful.

If the state did only what the Constitution authorizes, it would matter a great deal less which faction wins the nomination. Superdelegates would return to being what they should be: a private club's internal rule, worthy of a shrug, not a national panic.

The Founders gave us a republic, not a pure democracy. The Democratic Party's superdelegate fight is a reminder that even those who talk constantly about our democracy don't actually believe in unlimited majority rule when their own power is at stake. Good. Neither should you.

But don't waste energy reforming the DNC. Limit the state. Then the internal rules of a political party will stop feeling like a constitutional crisis.