For better use of superdelegate power, give them a negative vote

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) recently threw his hat into the ring in the race for the White House and joined a field of long shots, fellow governors and, of course, a former president, all scrambling to take their chance at Joe Biden in 2024. They will compete in caucuses and primaries and for the financial backing of major donors. 

The ostensible purpose of this extended process is to select someone who will succeed in the White House. How well is this process working? The evidence suggests — not well. 

Just since 1998, American presidents have been impeached three times. Since 2001, they have overseen two catastrophically mismanaged wars, the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the mismanagement of the worst global public health emergency since 1918, and an attempt to violently overturn an election. 

No matter your party, you can agree that this is a far cry from the standard set by Washington, Lincoln and both Roosevelts. This is not a partisan position. 

No president today could imagine the sky-high numbers boasted by Eisenhower, for example, whose average approval rating among Democrats — his opposition party — was 49 percent. Joe Biden, in comparison, has averaged 7 percent among Republicans. In that light, it’s unsurprising that Eisenhower was able to coast to reelection on the supremely insipid — and effective — slogan, “I like Ike.” Nearly everyone did. 

Why have presidents fallen so far? Because our system for choosing them has little or nothing to do with performance in office. There is, however, a surprisingly simple change to the parties’ rules for nominating presidents that could substantially improve the quality of nominees, while actually making the process more democratic than it is now. 

Today, presidential candidates are chosen by the vote of delegates to the party conventions. Most are elected by winning primaries and caucuses, but some have their vote by virtue of their roles in the party as elected officials or party leaders. These are the so-called “superdelegates.” They have never actually swayed a nomination contest, but in 2016 they might have done so.  

In the wake of the Trump takeover of the Republican Party — over the quiet opposition of its elites — the Democratic Party, instead of learning from the experience of its rival, chose to decrease the power of its superdelegates by changing their voting process. 

This was a mistake. Instead, the parties should have changed the way superdelegates exercise their power. 

Currently, a superdelegate gets a vote at the convention just like the regular delegates who are on the candidates’ slates, except they are no longer allowed to vote on the first ballot “unless a presidential candidate has been certified by the DNC Secretary to have obtained a number of pledged delegates equal to a majority of all pledged and automatic delegates to the Convention.”

That doesn’t make sense. Instead, we should give them a negative vote. They shouldn’t have the power to vote for anyone. That’s the people’s job. They should, however, have the power to vote against someone. 

A superdelegate, if he or she chooses, could cancel out the vote of a normal delegate. A united party elite would not have the power to pick a candidate: They could, however, block one. They could say, in essence, “You can have anyone else. But we know him or her, and we know that he or she just shouldn’t be president. That’s just too big a risk.” This would preserve the voice of the people, but add to it the informed judgment of political leaders. It would give us the best of both worlds. 

The Founding Fathers were supremely concerned with ensuring the presidency was filled only by the ablest people and gave that job to the Electoral College. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that it would ensure that no person would ever become president who was not “endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The Electoral College was supposed to be made up of people who knew both the candidates and the presidency. Today we call such people political elites.

The Electoral College never worked as intended. Instead, we got political parties, which select their nominees in proverbial “smoke-filled rooms” during conventions. This usually results in presidents who are capable, if rarely brilliant. Why? 

In my books “Indispensable” and “Picking Presidents” I show that leaders who are “filtered” – that is, thoroughly evaluated – tend to be solid performers. They are often good, but rarely great. Filtered leaders might not be Lincoln — but they’re rarely disastrous. That’s important. A great president would be wonderful, but the most important goal is avoiding disaster. 

The old system certainly wasn’t perfect. It didn’t represent the interests of women or Blacks at all, for example. No one wants to return to it. But the current system doesn’t represent the people well either. Primaries — and even worse, caucuses — are made up largely of party activists, the most politically active, and often the most politically extreme, Americans. Even worse, it largely removes from the process the judgment of people who actually know the candidates — not just who they pretend to be on television. 

We don’t want a society run by elites. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still need them. By diminishing the power of political elites from our process for selecting presidential candidates, we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds — a nonrepresentative process that gives us little or no guarantee that the person who ends up with the most important job in the world will be up to the task. 

It’s time to remember the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and bring political elites — elected officials and senior party members — back into the process. When we’re selecting the most powerful person in the world, we can’t risk anything less.

Gautam Mukunda is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and a PD Soros Fellow and Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.