What the Heck is a Superdelegate?

January 28th, 2008 at 03:53pm Andrea Zimmermann

With all of the attention being paid to the presidential primaries this year, some of the election jargon floating around can be confusing.

Delegates and superdelegates to the nominating conventions are becoming increasingly important as the primary season wears on. Both political parties treat delegates differently with multiple layers of rules.

One way to look at the delegates is to consider them as cash on hand.

When Democrats show up in Denver in August, the roughly 4,049 delegates will come assigned to the presidential candidates for the party. For the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. in September, the estimated 2,380 delegates

Traditionally, delegates assigned to a specific candidate vote for that person at the convention. Therefore, just as in life, those who have the most “money” going into the convention are likely to win the nomination.

But of course, national politics is never that clean-cut.

The convention, particularly for the Democrats, always includes a number of delegates that are not bound to a candidate. For Democrats these are called superdelegates, and Republicans call them unpledged.

Many media outlets are predicting that these unattached delegates will be the key to settling a potentially open nomination process.

Here is some additional reading because this isn’t likely to go away until this fall:

• Superdelegates who haven’t endorsed a Democrat yet
• A good overview from my Gatehouse colleague
• CNN and the New York Times break it down, here and here
  Even Bill Clinton gets a vote
• Dems have been wooing superdelegates since summer
• 1982 rule creating superdelegates could be boon to Dems

Entry Filed under: national politics