Good post, Mark, and I agree.

I would go farther and say the whole presidential election system needs to be thrown out and redesigned.

I haven't thought it all the way through, but I'm thinking the primaries should all be on the same day, just like the election. Maybe in April, but whenever. And no caucuses, just primaries. Further, the whole delegate system should be thrown out. Whoever gets the most popular votes gets the nomination. The conventions can then be speechifying and strategerizing and platform setting.

In the general, we should do away with the electoral college and elect the president by popular vote so every vote counts.

I don't see the point of delegating in either the primary or the general. It's not 1790 and it's not like the candidates have to travel around on horseback or by wagon train.

They can get out to the states. We have mass media and debates and campaign ads and the internets and all kinds of ways for them to get their message out to voters.

They can start in October the year before the primary just like they do now. Then they'll have six months to make their case in the primary and then six months to duke it out with the other party before November.

What's the problem with this?

Will this be fixed/changed in our life times? We're still working on getting accurate voting machines 8 years later.

It seems super delegates ("unpledged party leader and elected official delegates") are only a problem when there is a close primary and then it does appear the Democrats do like to fine tune along the way.

What's the deal with caususes? We need to get rid or caucuses. Many voters don't get the chance to participate.

Right now anyway, I say we should just have a single primary in April or May, just like the General election where everyone in every state votes on the same day.

And to make it more fair and to avoid the possibility of a nominee who did not win a majority of the popular vote, maybe it should be instant runoff voting in the primary.

The delegate system does seem too complicated. It shouldn't take a day (or days?) to figure out how many each candidate won. Then again, in 2008, why does it take so long to get some of raw vote total results from some areas?

Regarding (4), Florida and Michigan may now be a problem. But it's not a fault of the Democratic party system, per se. The problem arose because the two states opted to go outside the calendar the party had set up.

Brian A.
I'd rather be cycling.

It's been an educational year seeing the process exposed, but the Democratic Party nomination process is working just fine. The fact that it requires a little more attention and effort than taking five minutes to vote plus a half hour eating popcorn watching the election tally on TV later that night is a good thing.

A national primary day would be a disaster for candidates like Edwards, Kucinich, etc., who bring the actual ideas to the table during the more drawn-out process. And, as flawed as it may be, the Democrat's delegate system is better (in the sense that it more closely reflects the popular vote) than the Republican's winner-takes-all the states' delegates version.

I'm looking forward to seeing the nominee decided at the convention. It should be interesting. In the meantime, it'd be helpful if Clinton and Obama would start showing us what kind of punches they're capable of landing on McCain.

A national primary day would be a disaster for candidates like Edwards, Kucinich, etc., who bring the actual ideas to the table during the more drawn-out process.

I'm not so sure about that. It might actually help them. There would still be a drawn out process. There just wouldn't be any votes until the end. And all the candidates would still be in it when there's a vote. (Which is why it would probably need to be an instant runoff vote.)

And we wouldn't have candidates dropping out along the way, negating the votes of people who voted for them early, and all these ebbs and flows of bad press and low blows would not have as much impact.

One downside is that the debates would all have to be like those ridiculous debates we had early on with eight people getting to speak on complicated issues for 30 seconds.

Texas had a Democratic primary yesterday. About 2.8 million people voted in it.

Texas also had Democratic caucuses yesterday. It looks like about 120,000 may have voted in the caucuses.

The results of both the primary and the caucuses are to be used to select Texas's delegates.

Do the math.

How would you think it would work, based on the numbers of participants?

You think maybe about 95% of the delegates would be allocated from the primary; and, generously, maybe 5% from the caucuses?

1/3 OF THE DELEGATES ARE ALLOCATED FROM THE FAR LESS THAN 1 PERCENT OF PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAUCUSES.

Only 2/3 of the delegates are allocated from the primary.

How's that for reflecting the popular vote?

Let me be just a little contrarian. I was an election judge and Precinct chair in Texas for several years. I am somewhat familiar with the system although I moved away several years ago and some changes may have occurred.
The good thing about the election/caucus system is that a person is allowed the level of participation they want and are rewarded for that level of participation. If all you want to do is go vote, and go watch Idol or something, you can do that and go home. You get 2/3s of a say in what happens. If you really want to take part, you vote, then go to the caucus and really take part. You get a full say in who gets delegates, you can be elected a delegate to county or state conventions where the national delegates are selected, you can vote on planks to be submitted for the state platform; in short you can actually take part in the Democratic process. It was some of the most fun I ever had outside the...well,lets go on. The other point is not knowing for, sometimes, days who gets how many delegates. OOOk, does it really matter? We think this process should be instant but if more people have more say and more involvement, isn't that important too? After all, the convention isn't until August; a few days won't hurt too much.

The states should vote in five alphabetic groups of ten. During the first presidential cycle, Alabama through Georgia will vote on the last Tuesday in January. On the first Tuesday of February, Hawaii through Maryland will vote. And so on.

During the next cycle, North Dakota through Wyoming will vote first, then the states at the beginning, with the fourth group voting last. Every cycle, the states will have a different position.

This will allow for the "primary period", but also prevent certain states from getting a disproportionate share of attention. Iowa and New Hampshire would hate it, but, if we do it at the federal level then we can just tell them to get over themselves.

The worst idea would be to do ALL the primaries at once. Think about the states that are represented early: Iowa (the Midwest heartland), New Hampshire (the northeast), Nevada (the west), and South Carolina (the south). By putting these states first, and then spreading out the primary schedule as a whole, parties force their candidates to pay attention to many different constituencies. If all of the primaries were held at the same time, the interests of smaller states and demographics would take a back seat. Candidates would flock to the major media centers to pursue the most densely populated and delegate rich states. Spreading out the schedule gives an exponentially larger number of voters the chance to judge candidates on a local level.

Also, superdelegates in their current form were established in the early 1980’s after the close primary fight b/w Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, which created much of the same division in that party as exists now. I don’t necessarily agree with the logic but the point was to have people in place that could make a decision for the party should there be a close race or no clear nominee – that is EXACTLY the way this race is shaping up so if you’re a Democrat and you buy into your parties logic, you should have no problem with superdelegates.

We need to stop having open primaries. It is silly to let the Repub. be decision makers in our party.

It's hard to imagine a Democrat living in East Tennessee being opposed to open primaries. How many times have you shown up at the polls where all the races had either a lone Democratic candidate or none at all? If you wanted to have a voice in "whittling down" the candidate list, the only meaningful way to do it was to vote in the GOP primary.

I admit I'm old fashioned - as in George Washington old fashioned. I'm not happy with idea of political parties in general, and I'm especially displeased with having only two viable parties distilling all the issues, ideas, and attitudes in the country down into two different mulligan stews. The two party system functions like an inverse prism and creates a much less dynamic democratic debate in our legislatures. Historically, it seems to be a bit of an Anglo-Saxon oddity going back to the Tories and Whigs of Old England. On those grounds, I'm opposed to anything that serves to tighten the stranglehold the two party system has on the voting public. Maybe if I found the mulligan stews being offered up more pleasing to my palate, I be less energized about it. But I'm unhappy with both flavors, so there you have it. Party Platforms. Party Whips. Party Loyalty Scorecards. Blech.

I've been curious to know if someone somewhere has worked out who would be ahead in the Democratic nomination process if they had the winner take all system for primaries and caucuses that the Republicans have?