Russell's Blog

A friendly reminder to those who are following the nomination process: Party primaries are not national elections. Political parties are essentially private clubs. Subject to a few basic limitations (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), they can make up whatever rules they like. If the Democratic Party wants to select the presidential nominee via a dance-off, or a hip-hop battle, or an egg toss, that is perfectly legal.

I keep reading about how the party isn't allowed to take away Florida and Michigan's delegates. Of course they can; it's a private club. In fact, their rules stipulate that they must strip the delegates in this circumstance.

It's obvious to everyone that the nomination process isn't perfectly equitable, but the system we have now is a huge improvement over the smoke-filled-room method of the very recent past. Hillary Clinton has raised some important objections to how the system works. That's good. It needs improvement. However, winning the nomination and fixing the nominating system should not be conflated. This is her party, after all. She's been extremely influential in the party for almost sixteen years. If she wants to advocate for reforming the process, then she was welcome to spend some of those sixteen years of influence, you know, influencing. After the election is over, if she uses her influence to push for reform, that would be a great service to the party and to the nation. But pushing for reform in order to win isn't good for anyone.

I should point out that the general election system isn't exactly perfect either. Any competent candidate must demonstrate the technical abilities needed to campaign and win, fair and square, even in a system that is unfair and warped. I should also add that the Democratic nomination process and the general election process closely approximate a fair and equitable system, to a precision of a percent or thereabouts.

Elections are political instrumentation. They measure the prefrences of large groups of people. Say, for example, that you take a measurement with a volt meter. It reads 5.13V, plus or minus 0.5%. It's not acceptable to write down 5.17V because you think the probe contacts are a little dirty, and that's throwing off the measurement. However good your intuition and experience, that's called fudging your numbers. If doesn't change the results, then a little fudging won't do much harm, even if it is bad methodology. If it does change the results, then it's fraud. Bad scientist. No tenure.