CNN)You might think, from their title, that superdelegates are better than regular delegates.
Actually, they're worse.
It wasn't until the mid-1900s that parties embraced primary elections as part of the process for deciding on presidential candidates. But to ensure that the voters themselves didn't have all the power, in 1982 the Democratic Party adopted what are called superdelegates, who today control 15% of the final nomination process.
It's in the Democratic Party that the outsized power and lack of accountability of superdelegates is supremely, well, undemocratic.
Specifically, after the Democratic caucuses in Nevada,CNN estimatedthat Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were almost tied for pledged delegates, with 52 and 51 of them, respectively. And yet Clinton was leading by a much wider margin in the total delegate count because a whopping 445 superdelegates -- out of a total of 712 -- pledged to support her. By comparison, just 18 superdelegates pledged to support Sanders.
In other words, while Clinton and Sanders were almost perfectly split in the tally of voter-determined delegates, superdelegates threw their weight behind Clinton by an almost 25-to-1 ratio.
So here's where it gets really interesting: In the 2008 Democratic primary,
by at least some measures, more people actually voted for Clinton than for Barack Obama. But because of the way pledged delegates are counted and because Obama's team led an effort early on to lock down superdelegates, the math ultimately favored Obama, and Clinton dropped out. Clinton, in turn, learned not to dismantle the superdelegate system but to better play it,
hiring the architectof Obama's superdelegate strategy to marshal hers this time around.
