Superdelegate: - A party leader or elected official who is given the right to vote at the party's national convention. Superdelegates are not elected at the state level.

The American presidential election is the culmination of two different campaigns linked by the parties' national conventions. The presidential primary campaign lasts officially from January until June of the election year, and the final presidential campaign heats up around Labor Day.

Primary elections were first mandated in 1903 in Wisconsin. The purpose of the primary was to open the nomination process to ordinary party members and to weaken the influence of party bosses in the nomination process. Until 1968, however, there were fewer than twenty primary elections for the presidency. They were generally "beauty contests" in which the contending candidates for the nomination competed for popular votes, but the results had little or no impact on the selection of delegates to the national convention.

National conventions were meetings of the party elite-legislators, mayors, county chairpersons, and loyal party workers-who were mostly appointed to their delegations. National conventions saw numerous trades and bargains among competing candidates, and the leaders of large blocs of delegate votes could direct their delegates to support a favorite candidate.

Reforming the Primaries
In recent decades, the character of the primary process and the make-up of the national convention have changed dramatically. The mass public, rather than party elites, now generally controls the nomination process, owing to extraordinary changes in the party rules.

After the massive riots outside the doors of the1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, many party leaders pushed for serious reforms of the convention process. They saw the general dissatisfaction with the convention, and the riots in particular, as stemming from the inability of average party member to influence the nomination system.

The Democratic National Committee appointed a special commission to study the problems of the primary system. Referred to as the McGovern-Fraser Commission, the group over the next several years formulated new rules for delegate selection that had to be followed by state Democratic parties. The reforms instituted by the Democratic Party, which were imitated in most states by the Republicans, revolutionized the nomination process for the presidency.

The most important changes require that most convention delegates be nominated by the elites in either party; they must be elected by the voters in primary elections, in caucuses held by local parties, or at state conventions.

Delegates are mostly pledged to a particular candidate, although the pledge is not always formally binding at the convention. The delegation from each state must also include a proportion of women, younger party members, and representatives of the minority groups within the party. At first, virtually no special privileges were given to elected party officials, such as senators or governors. In 1984, however, many of the officials returned to the Democratic convention as superdelegates.

Source from: American Government and Politics Today; 2000 Edition; Schmidt, Shelley & Bardes; pg 322

© Feb 2008 by Afro Staff