Yeah, Clinton should try those arguments with superdelegates and DNC members from those evil caucus states.  

1. The Clinton campaign was unaware of the fact that caucus states awarded delegates in the Democratic party's nomination process.

2. The Clinton campaign was aware of caucuses and their delegates, but dismissed them and decided to focus on delegates made available from primaries.

The first scenario suggests an incompetence of massive proportions. The second suggests a callousness that backfired. In either case, the error was enough to cost her the nomination.

Which would you rather memorialize the Clinton campaign with, anna? Incompetence or presumptuousness? Neither is pretty, but one or the other will be written into the history books.

Choose wisely.

People who live in states which hold caucuses shouldn't count?

Serious question.

...knew the rules (except the Pennster) going into the contest, Bill went through the process twice and did not say a thing about it during his presidency, and HRC decided herself to ignore these states, by doing so she, and only she, opened herself up to getting beat by large margins.

The only error here belongs to the Clinton campaign for being over confident and having no strategy post Super Tuesday.

Never underestimate your opponent or the American people.

Serious question.

...outrage about how MI and FL voters are being disenfranchised, you sure do not hold the same opinion of the states who held caucuses.  You seem to be more than willing to nullify their contests and disenfranchising Iowa, Maine, Washington, Nevada, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

What gives?  It's not their fault their legislation chose to use caucuses, they just went out and did their duty, right?

   was Mark Penn. That's it. Had Hillary played the game according to these settings (ie..actually competing in caucuses), she probably would have done better.

  Change the rules for the future, sure. But for this round, Obama won. To hand the nomination to Hillary now would be a gross injustice.

As Velvet Elvis writes:

Caucuses are not supposed to reflect the level of support for a candidate in the general population.  It's supposed to measure the level of support among the party activists and volunteers who actually do the majority of the work in a campaign.  Why shouldn't the people who will be doing all the work have more of a say than the people who just vote, put up a sign and donate?

It's long been known that Hillary's grassroots support is weak and that's a HUGE liability.  Part of the purpose of caucuses and indeed the whole multilayered convention system to prevent the scenario where voters choose a candidate who is unable to attract enough volunteers to successfully mount a campaign. Caucuses are precinct level conventions.

1) It is interesting that Obama is winning even if you ignore several of his strongest states.

2) Caucuses do favor Obama, but most of the caucus states are states that he performs well in because of demographics (he outperforms Hillary in both primaries and caucuses in most Western states, for instance, and most of the caucus states are Western states). His wins might not have been as big in terms of percentage and delegates won if those states had primaries, but he still would have won most of them; many by large margins.

3) Primaries have much larger turnout than caucuses -- several times larger. That combined with #2 means that Obama's popular vote advantage would probably be significantly larger if caucus states had held primaries instead, even though his delegate lead would be smaller.

Translation: Hillary is winning (by one delegate) in contests that she won.

The irony of your post is that it highlights something else: Primary's turn out more people than caucuses.  While this may not be the most democratic way to chose candidates (a case that must be argued before an election season begins), using caucus totals, which are representative, but not as massive, renders the popular vote metric utterly meaningless.

Why didn't Bill bring this up when he was POTUS for 8 years and he ran, twice, in the same system as we are using today? Why now?

I'll tell you why, it benefitted him in 1992 and 1996.  It went against the Clinton's this time around, and now, and only now, do the cry foul.

Let me make this simple:

The Democratic National Convention allocates a certain amount of delegates to each state.  That's it.  That's their role.  "Based on your influence in the party, this is how many delegates you get in influencing our nominee".  They lay out some basic rules, and then they're done.

Then states get to decide how to allocate their delegates.  Some states have the money to do straight-up primaries.  Hooray.  Others decide that they want to allocate their delegates based on who shows up to caucuses and participates.  Hooray.  Others decide that they want to allocate their delegates using both.  Hooray.

Democrats Abroad decides to allocate its delegates by giving each of their delegates a half-vote.  Hooray.

The Democrats choose to give their delegates out proportionally in every state.  They don't have to, but they do.  Hooray.

The Republicans choose to give all of the delegates in a state to the winner of that state, at least in most cases.  They don't have to, but they do.  Hooray.

What you're bitching about is that you don't like the way that some people decided to allocate their delegates.  Tough.  You're not that state Democratic Party, and you don't get to tell everyone how to appoint their delegates.  You don't, Hillary doesn't, Obama doesn't.  

Bitching about votes per delegate is ridiculous.  What would have happened if a state would have had low turnout?  They would have had the same number of delegates, regardless.  You could make this same argument for places that simply didn't have many people show up at the polls.

This argument is stupid.  And tired.  And I feel like it's only being brought up for political expediency.

You don't like the rules?  Cool.  Change it in 2012.  But a long time ago, before you ever cared about this, people that DID care about this decided that they were going to allocate their limited amount of delegates through a system other than a primary.

Obama didn't seem to have a problem with it, did he?

All right!

I knew it was just a matter of time.

I've now seen No Quarter, Taylor Marsh, Hillaryis44, and now The Confluence referred to at MyDD.

Awesome.

Are the same people regulars at all of those gems?

tips and rec'd

Trashing the Caucus process is simplistic and naive. The Caucuses, and particularly the Iowa caucus, are uniquely valuable.

There's lots of good scholarship on the topic.

[quote]Q. How do you reply to people who argue that primaries are more open and democratic than caucuses?

A. The critics are correct to say that there are some very serious procedural flaws in the Iowa caucuses. ... But in general, as far as having a caucus as opposed to a primary, you're making a conscious tradeoff. ... I've written a paper that suggests that the increase in primaries over the last 40 years has led directly to the rise of TV and attack politics that we loathe. Before stamping out caucuses any further than we've already stamped them out, we should evaluate the choices that we're making and take a careful look at those tradeoffs. [/quote]

http://chronicle.com/blogs/election/1304 /taking-the-measure-of-the-iowa-caucus

Here's a simpler solution. Let's use the rules that have been in place for a couple hundred years.

Your solution is that states which can't afford a primary have disproportionately less influence than richer states. Does that sound fair to you?

Obama won primary states also; even in the flawed 'popular vote' metric which undervalues caucus states, he's still leading. So your claim that "He doesn't do so well there" is complete and total bullshit.

Isn't it contradictory to protest the role of caucuses, based on their delegates coming from fewer votes, yet to rely on Superdelegates, who are chosen by no votes?  You didn't mention SDs specifically, but fighting it out more likely than not means fighting for the SDs or, worse yet, making a concerted effort to poach PDs.  

Caucuses were fine before Hillary lost them.

I for one still think they are fine. They evaluate support on both a quantitative and qualitative level. Primaries evaluate the shear number of supporters, not how committed they are.

If there were caucuses in the General Election, then y'all might have a point. Because everyone's vote should count equally in deciding who gets to be president.

But its never been one person one vote in the primaries. The primaries are about picking the best candidate. Surely, that must include a lot of popular support. And you can't win if you lose all the contests. But a portion is about testing a campaigns depth of support.

The superdelegates and the allocation of delegates in general (that has to do also with how blue a state has been) are already undemocratic, and have much more of an influence on the process.

But the outrage? Directly toward caucuses. Why? Because Clinton lost them.

Thanks for all the hard work on this. Rec'ed.