The Democrats once again are fighting over their presidential nominating procedures — from Florida and Michigan to superdelegates — in an escalating war that some leaders say threatens to divide the party and has prompted calls for rule changes.
Party rules have forced the Democratic National Committee to strip the two November swing states of their delegates to the national convention, triggering a scramble on how to represent them at the August gathering in Denver. The DNC chief and senators from both states seemed on yesterday’s political talk shows to settle on a mail-in primary as the option with the fewest problems.
“The only thing I know to do is to do it over,” Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, who is pushing the mail-in option, told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” On ABC’s “This Week” program Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, said it’s an option under consideration there, too.
DNC Chairman Howard Dean called a mail-in vote “a very good process” that has been used elsewhere, both in similar “do-over” scenarios and in Oregon for its general election.
“It’s one [option] that we discussed early on when we were negotiating with Florida hoping to head all this stuff off,” the former Vermont governor said on CBS.
Apart from the fight over Michigan and Florida, the Democrats’ proportional delegate-selection process has resulted in a race where neither Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama can pull clear of the other, and that may put the almost 800 superdelegates in the position of effectively choosing the party’s nominee at the convention in August, regardless of the primary results.
The scenario that Democratic leaders fear most is a credentials committee fight over seating the Florida and Michigan delegations. If it’s stalemated, the party becomes open to charges of disenfranchising millions of their voters; and if it’s resolved in a way that’s seen as a backroom deal or an unfair apportionment of the states’ 367 combined delegates, the party could face an ugly split.
Mrs. Clinton easily won both January primaries, reflecting her name recognition and national poll standing then. But per DNC request, nobody including the former first lady campaigned in either state and hers was the only major name even on the ballot in Michigan.
If a solution is not found that is agreeable to both sides, the result “would be a disaster for the party which would be a very divisive floor fight and a lot of bitter feelings about whoever gets the nomination that somehow it was stolen by a backroom deal,” said former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.
Mr. Dean agreed, saying yesterday that either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama will lose, and the party’s unity and prospects for success in November depend on that candidate’s supporters thinking the process was fair.
“We will beat John McCain, if we’re united. And in order to be united, the loser in the race has to feel that they’ve been treated fairly within the rules,” he said. “That’s how you keep the party united. So that’s the number-one thing. We will follow the rules.”
Mr. Panetta, who is supporting Mrs. Clinton, thinks “the whole primary system needs to be re-examined. We need to have a regional system rather than have states fighting to be first in line. We ought to move toward a winner-take-all primary process. It’s a cleaner approach to have someone win a primary, and it’s fair. A majority vote usually wins in our system of democracy.”
Democratic state chairmen have also begun to signal that rules changes may be needed in the future.
“I don’t think anyone envisioned that the superdelegates would decide who the nominee would be. I think that’s a big difficulty, but after the election, we can talk about it,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley.
The nominating rules that have given party leaders a headache in a favorable election year were put into place in a reform movement during 1970s and ’80s, after a series of disastrous defeats, to open up the nominating process to broader participation. Later, the party created, in the words of one Democratic official, “a superdelegate firewall between the voters and the end result of the nomination process.”
The result: Two months into the primary cycle, the party is no closer to resolving its delegate ban on Florida and Michigan, two pivotal battleground states in the 2008 presidential election. And not all the word on yesterday’s talk shows was enthusiastic about giving those states a “do-over” mail-in primary.
Mr. Levin said he had concerns about security. And Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Florida Democrat, said she opposes mail-in voting because it would hurt the voting rights of “transient populations” who don’t have a fixed address and also be a major trial for vote-counters. “This is not the time to test that,” she said.
At the same time, with just a dozen primary-caucus contests remaining, party strategists say it is unlikely that either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama will reach the 2,025 pledged delegates needed to clinch the nomination, leaving the decision to superdelegates, many of whom say they should not be bound by how their state voted in the primaries.
“The superdelegates were elected to vote independently. We are not rubber-stamping,” said Bob Mulholland, a DNC member and superdelegate from California.
“My state voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, but it doesn’t mean [the superdelegates] should vote for Hillary Clinton,” said Mr. Mulholland, who is neutral in the race. “There would not be a purpose for having 796 superdelegates if their only purpose was to rubber-stamp what the 50 states did.”
The Clinton campaign argues, as does Mr. Panetta, that superdelegates should “exercise independent judgment about who should be nominated that would be in the best interests of the party and the country if there isn’t a clear winner in the primaries.” The Obama camp argues that superdelegates should support their state primary or caucus results.
But political analysts who have closely studied the Democrats’ delegate-selection rules say they see no need for any rules changes.
“Democrats made a commitment to proportional representation decades ago, and I see no way they will turn back,” said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution.
“Whatever problems the Democrats are experiencing, it is not a consequence of their rules,” he said. “They have two strong candidates engaged in an energizing and highly competitive contest. Before thinking about changing the rules, they ought to see how this one turns out.”
• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.
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