Many moments in Wednesday’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate have already deserved­ly made head­lines: Eliz­a­beth Warren’s evis­cer­a­tion of Mike Bloomberg, the ongo­ing feud between Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders’ defense of social­ism, to name a few. Per­haps the most impor­tant came at the very end.

Those involved had deep doubts about the wisdom of opening up the nominating process to control by voters.

Asked whether the can­di­date who ends the pri­ma­ry sea­son hav­ing won the most del­e­gates should also win the nom­i­na­tion, all the can­di­dates bar Sanders — who now looks poised to win Neva­da and the states beyond—demurred, insist­ing that the par­ty fol­low the ​“rules” and ​“the process” set up.

Sanders was the sole out­lier. ​“Well, the process includes 500 superdel­e­gates on the sec­ond bal­lot,” he respond­ed. ​“So I think that the will of the peo­ple should pre­vail, yes.” Sanders was refer­ring to the cur­rent nom­i­nat­ing rules, which stip­u­late that if no sin­gle can­di­date wins a major­i­ty of pledged del­e­gates on the first bal­lot, the choice goes to a sec­ond bal­lot where all del­e­gates are free to vote how­ev­er they like — includ­ing those hun­dreds of par­ty big­wigs known as the superdelegates.

What that means is that four years after inflam­ing pro­gres­sive rage in 2016, and only two years after hav­ing their pow­er weak­ened, superdel­e­gates may well help decide anoth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion. And if so, they will work exact­ly as designed: to allow the par­ty estab­lish­ment to kneecap an out­sider can­di­date if the demo­c­ra­t­ic process goes in a direc­tion unfa­vor­able to par­ty elites.

“Peer review”

As out­lined in my 2016 In These Times inves­ti­ga­tion, superdel­e­gates were cre­at­ed in 1982 by the Hunt Com­mis­sion over frus­tra­tion with the nom­i­nat­ing reforms of 1970, which par­ty lead­ers blamed for allow­ing the nom­i­na­tion of an unruly out­sider like Jim­my Carter, and thus his 1980 drub­bing at the hands of Ronald Rea­gan. As Elaine Kamar­ck, a Hunt Com­mis­sion mem­ber and superdel­e­gate, explained to In These Times in 2016, the par­ty came off that loss look­ing to pro­tect itself from future ​“out­lier candidates.”

The tran­scripts of the commission’s sev­en-month-long dis­cus­sions from July 1981 to Feb­ru­ary 1982, obtained from the Nation­al Archives, make painful­ly clear how sharply the cre­ation of the superdel­e­gates was tied to anx­i­ety over the loss of influ­ence for par­ty elites. As Xan­dra Kay­den, a mem­ber of the Cen­ter for Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pol­i­cy (now Cen­ter for Nation­al Pol­i­cy), explained in August 1981, the advent of the pri­ma­ry sys­tem was ​“the prin­ci­pal rea­son we lost con­trol of the nom­i­na­tion at the pres­i­den­tial lev­el,” and Demo­c­ra­t­ic offi­cials and top-ranked par­ty mem­bers had to ​“regain con­trol of the nomination.”

“There are those who feel on the one hand that the fate of the Par­ty has been what it has been because of the reforms” of those years, said Wal­ter Faun­troy, a civ­il rights activist and the Dis­trict of Columbia’s non-vot­ing del­e­gate to Con­gress. He added dur­ing the dis­cus­sions that ​“had the par­ty reg­u­lars and the par­ty struc­ture remained in con­trol of nom­i­na­tions and in con­trol of resources and the like, that our fate would have been much better.”

Those involved had deep doubts about the wis­dom of open­ing up the nom­i­nat­ing process to con­trol by voters.

“Whether you have 100,000 or 10,000 or 10 mil­lion peo­ple par­tic­i­pate has no bear­ing what­so­ev­er on the qual­i­ty of the out­come,” Min­neapo­lis May­or Don Fras­er said at the time. This was after Fras­er had opened the pro­ceed­ings by jok­ing that the par­ty could sim­ply decide to ignore the results of the pri­maries entire­ly, receiv­ing ​“gen­er­al laugh­ter” from the room.

“We are the only demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try in the world in which polit­i­cal par­ties pick their can­di­dates in this man­ner,” Austin Ran­ney, an elec­tion expert and alum of the 1968 Hubert Humphrey cam­paign, com­plained at the time. ​“In every oth­er demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try in the world, you name it, this is the case, the can­di­date is picked by a rel­a­tive­ly small group of par­ty peo­ple in which the party’s elect­ed pub­lic rep­re­sen­ta­tives, peo­ple who have faced the test of get­ting them­selves elect­ed to pub­lic office, play a promi­nent role.”

Cen­tral to this was the idea of par­ty elites’ supe­ri­or wis­dom — the ​“cer­tain polit­i­cal acu­men, a cer­tain polit­i­cal anten­na” they brought to pro­ceed­ings, as Con­necti­cut State Sen. Dick Schneller put it at the time.

Ran­ney com­plained that the old sys­tem, one where par­ty elites alone decid­ed, meant there was a process of ​“peer review.” Pick­ing a win­ning can­di­date through such means wasn’t guar­an­teed, he said, but the odds were much higher.

“There is nobody who can bet­ter tell a can­di­date how to win the state of Cal­i­for­nia than a sen­a­tor or a gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia who has in fact won that state sev­er­al times,” said Kamar­ck. It echoed the view of future vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Geral­dine Fer­raro, who told par­tic­i­pants that par­ty elites ​“can pos­i­tive­ly bring to the con­ven­tion the views of the grass­roots who are their constituents.”

Com­bat­ing ​“spe­cial interests”

At the heart of all this was the party’s trau­ma from the 1980 land­slide loss, which offi­cials viewed as a prod­uct of choos­ing unrep­re­sen­ta­tive can­di­dates who catered only to the party’s base.

“We have fair reflec­tion of those vot­ers and cau­cus par­tic­i­pants who vote or par­tic­i­pate in the cau­cus­es, but what about the major­i­ty of Democ­rats who vote in Novem­ber but not in the pri­maries?” polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Thomas Mann asked at the time.

​“Some­times I think that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in its present ver­sion comes across to a great many peo­ple as not so much a sin­gle par­ty work­ing for a com­mon goal as a bunch of its sin­gle inter­est groups, spe­cial inter­ests groups itself,” griped Ran­ney. ​“There is the Women’s Lob­by and there is the — I mean Cau­cus, and there is the Black Cau­cus, and there is the Right to Life Cau­cus, and there is this cau­cus and there is that caucus.”

This kind of rhetoric was com­mon for the era, per­haps best embod­ied by none oth­er than for­mer vice pres­i­dent and cur­rent Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­tender Joe Biden. As out­lined in my forth­com­ing polit­i­cal biog­ra­phy of Biden, the then-Delaware sen­a­tor spent the 1980s tour­ing with the cor­po­rate-backed Demo­c­ra­t­ic Lead­er­ship Coun­cil (DLC) lec­tur­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty to change.

Biden would lat­er com­plain in 1993 about the ​“idi­ot­ic groups out there” like the ​“XYZ Group for Amer­i­can Val­ues” and the ​“QSY Group to Save All the Women in the World.” He made repeat­ed­ly clear through­out the decade that these ​“inter­est groups” or ​“spe­cial inter­ests” he and oth­er Democ­rats were com­plain­ing about weren’t, as they used to be, big busi­ness and its lob­by­ists; they were the var­i­ous minor­i­ty and activist groups that formed the party’s base.

In 1978, as he piv­ot­ed sharply right­ward for a re-elec­tion cam­paign held in the shad­ow of that year’s tax­pay­ers rebel­lion, he blamed the growth of the fed­er­al bud­get on con­stituent inter­est groups’ reluc­tance to cut pro­grams that specif­i­cal­ly ben­e­fit­ed them. Or as he told the NAACP con­ven­tion more blunt­ly in 1986 when tak­ing aim at Jesse Jackson’s cam­paign, ​“You can’t try to pit the Rain­bow Coali­tion, blacks, His­pan­ics, poor whites, gays, against the mid­dle class.”

This mind­set was reflect­ed in the Hunt Com­mis­sion, whose name­sake, North Car­oli­na Gov. James Hunt—name-checked by Alvin From, then-head of the DLC, as a leader with an admirable record — sug­gest­ed some­thing sim­i­lar in the commission’s open­ing. ​“There are some peo­ple in this par­ty that maybe still feel a lit­tle left out, and maybe some of them are the sort of mid­dle-income Amer­i­cans,” he said. ​“I hope we can fig­ure out some ways to get them more involved. I think we can do that.”

In oth­er words, at the same time that Biden and oth­er neolib­er­al Democ­rats were cas­ti­gat­ing the par­ty for lis­ten­ing to ​“spe­cial inter­ests” — mean­ing its diverse vot­ing base — over what they viewed as main­stream Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers, this mind­set found its way into the Hunt Com­mis­sion delib­er­a­tions. Par­tic­i­pants wor­ried about the par­ty becom­ing viewed as mere­ly a col­lec­tion of ​“inter­est groups,” and hoped that giv­ing a big­ger voice to par­ty elites would ensure ​“mid­dle income Amer­i­cans” and oth­er groups they viewed as alien­at­ed from the par­ty thanks to its ear­li­er rule changes were represented.

These ratio­nales were put to the test in 1984. Con­trary to the pop­u­lar adage that superdel­e­gates have nev­er decid­ed an elec­tion, by par­ty mem­bers’ own admis­sion at the time, superdel­e­gates were inte­gral in giv­ing estab­lish­ment-favorite can­di­date Wal­ter Mon­dale an ear­ly and sus­tained edge over his clos­est rivals that year: the young, charis­mat­ic and neolib­er­al Gary Hart, and the pro­gres­sive pop­ulist Jesse Jack­son. The superdel­e­gates then helped defeat or weak­en sev­er­al plat­form planks put for­ward by both, includ­ing rein­ing in the use of nuclear weapons and mil­i­tary force in gen­er­al and water­ing down an affir­ma­tive action program.

The elec­tion result didn’t bode well for the sup­pos­ed­ly supe­ri­or acu­men of par­ty elites: Mon­dale, who made cut­ting the deficit the cen­ter of his cam­paign, suf­fered an even worse defeat than Carter, win­ning only his home state of Min­neso­ta and Wash­ing­ton, D.C. In some ways, it pre­saged the out­come of 2016, when superdel­e­gates put their thumb on the scale for anoth­er estab­lish­ment can­di­date who suf­fered anoth­er (albeit vast­ly nar­row­er) elec­toral dis­as­ter at the hands of a rad­i­cal right-wing Republican.

The Democ­rats might be hop­ing the superdel­e­gates can still save them from Bernie Sanders. But there are grave rea­sons to ques­tion whether they’ll save them from Don­ald Trump.