The 2012 presidential election cycle featured incumbent President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee...
I kind of doubt most people were thinking about super delegates in the polling booth. That’s pretty a wonky and most people don’t pay attention to that.
IMHO, it was the super simple stuff that we see in elections all over the world. A candidate gets a leg up if they are well known or is a continuation of a recent administration that people liked.
People pay attention to who is leading in the polls and more likely to win. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but there’s a huge portion of the population that wants to be “on the winning side”. So whichever candidate is getting reported as the strong leader in the news, gets their vote. The news includes the super delegates in their reporting, despite the fact that the super delegates have only voted against the popular vote one time in all of history. So, the whole situation is misleading for the masses because they don’t understand how the system works and they want to vote for the “winning” candidate. The DNC understood how this would play out when they created the super delegates, and it has served them well in installing a pro-institutional candidate in all of the elections. After 2016 there were reforms made for the 2020 election about when super delegates can vote and the way they’re reported due to strong backlash from Democrat voters over the shenanigans they pulled against Bernie.
I kind of doubt most people were thinking about super delegates in the polling booth. That’s pretty a wonky and most people don’t pay attention to that.
IMHO, it was the super simple stuff that we see in elections all over the world. A candidate gets a leg up if they are well known or is a continuation of a recent administration that people liked.
People pay attention to who is leading in the polls and more likely to win. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but there’s a huge portion of the population that wants to be “on the winning side”. So whichever candidate is getting reported as the strong leader in the news, gets their vote. The news includes the super delegates in their reporting, despite the fact that the super delegates have only voted against the popular vote one time in all of history. So, the whole situation is misleading for the masses because they don’t understand how the system works and they want to vote for the “winning” candidate. The DNC understood how this would play out when they created the super delegates, and it has served them well in installing a pro-institutional candidate in all of the elections. After 2016 there were reforms made for the 2020 election about when super delegates can vote and the way they’re reported due to strong backlash from Democrat voters over the shenanigans they pulled against Bernie.