Where's the Vote?

In the primary system we may find ourselves asking does my vote matter? Because the primary system for the Republican and Democratic parties are managed on a state by state basis, with different voting dates, there is a natural progressiveness to the system. If a candidate wins an early state's election or caucus, then there is a presumption that the candidate will win the following state and every state thereafter. Some primary elections have been decided very early in this way as with Lyndon Johnson who dropped out after not doing well in the New Hampshire primary in 1968. As a result the media and political insiders consider the early going as being the biggest edge a Presidential candidate may have and as a result a disproportionate amount of emphasis is given to a few small states that are the early primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The progressive nature of the primary season inflates the value of small states that vote early and often deflate the value of larger states that may be later in the campaign. Rarely does California have any influence on the chosen candidate of either the Republican or Democratic party since it's primary is usually held towards the end of the primary political cycle. California has the largest number of delegates than any state, but it's like having a losing lottery ticket the day after the lottery, the residents of California don't even get to hope for a chance of having a winning ticket. It's just a procedure that they go through to finalize the outcome of the other states.

Each party struggles with the problems of holding primaries with different rules to elect delegates that will get to travel to the "Party" convention later in the summer in order to help choose the winner of their primary through a roll-call type of atmosphere that mocks voting and imitates a carnival. The real purpose of the primary is to get representative delegates for candidates and real people who can afford to travel and represent the chosen candidates at the coronation. There is not a lot of consistency between the states for how this process is accomplished, but some lip service is allowed in terms of  "voting" by the public as each state chooses their delegation in a controlled way.

Usually the public tires of the primary game once a presumptive nominee is apparent, but this year there have been challenges in the two dominant party's primaries that have forced the process into the open and what we have seen so far isn't pretty. In the Democratic Party delegates are distributed by Super Delegates, or individuals who have be chosen to be Super-Voters, thereby having the power of entire regions at the whim to allocate in a god-like way, as they wish, much like feudal lords issuing decrees. The Republican Party has other techniques for controlling the outcome of it's selected delegates, which I am not well-versed on, but in the case of Colorado all of the delegates were awarded to one candidate without an election of any sort, even though there are multiple candidates in the election.

If this is the underbelly of our Democracy then we must take a closer look at what Democracy is supposed to represent or achieve. The conundrum here is that votes do not exactly equal delegates but delegates equal success, therefore making voting in the primary has become an incidental symbolic public game for the masses while the Party elites select their nominee. These ordained nominees can then be official Presidential candidates to represent their Party in a direct popular election in the fall.