Poll: Americans want change in presidential nominating process

Americans have little faith in the presidential nominating system and support major changes, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

About 38 percent of respondents said they have hardly any confidence that the Democratic Party’s way of choosing a presidential nominee is fair, according to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. For the Republican Party, 44 percent said the same.

{mosads}Only 17 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats said they had a great deal of confidence in each party’s nomination process.

Respondents overwhelmingly favored open primaries, with 70 percent supporting them to just 29 percent who preferred closed primaries.

And 81 percent said they liked primaries, with just 17 percent supporting caucuses.

Superdelegates are an unpopular concept on both sides of the aisle, the poll found. Forty-six percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans called them a bad idea. Only 25 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of Republicans supported superdelegates.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders often decries the use of superdelegates in the Democratic Party and has urged superdelegates in states where he won to respect the will of the voters and support him.

The poll of 1,060 people was conducted May 12–15. The margin of error is 4.1 percentage points.