In another blow to Hillary Clinton, an influential Democrat is calling for superdelegates to vote for the candidate with the most regular delegates, which is likely to be Barack Obama.
Former Democratic Party Chairman Roy Romer said Thursday that he and other superdelegates should not overturn the will of delegates when choosing a nominee.
“The ultimate issue is who has the most delegates,” Romer told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor newspaper. “My judgment here is also that the superdelegates are going to follow the results of those delegate counts.”
He added: “Any decision that goes against the delegate count is a very difficult decision.”
Neither Obama nor Clinton is expected to amass enough regular delegates to clinch the nomination by the time voting ends in June, so the victor will likely be decided by hundreds of superdelegates. It would be difficult for Clinton to overtake Obama’s lead in regular delegates, although she might be able to catch him in the popular vote.
But Romer said superdelegates should not feel conflicted if they end up with “the unlikely scenario that one candidate has the delegate count, the other candidate has the popular vote count. This is a delegate convention; it’s like the Electoral College. That’s the rules, and you’ve got to stay faithful to what it is that you agreed to.”
Romer’s comments echoed those of another influential Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what’s happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party,” she told ABC last weekend.
Romer, the former governor of Colorado, has not endorsed either Democratic candidate, although he praised Obama for giving a speech this week aimed at squelching the controversy over incendiary remarks made by Obama’s spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright.
“When you get a hot one coming in, you don’t duck it,” Romer said. “You look at it right in the eye.”
