John Oliver takes a harsh view of the primary process for his most recent Last Week Tonight, but, as he explains his reasoning, it’s not hard to see why.
For both parties, there have been questions about the winning candidate earning fewer delegates than competitors. That includes Louisiana, where Trump won. “The thing is, I get why he’s annoyed,” Oliver said. “And there is no clearer piece of evidence that our system is broken, no more thoroughly dead-canary-in-the-coal-mine, than when Donald Trump is actually making sense.”
Oliver mentioned the “counter-intuitive process,” which both parties reformed following the 1968 Democratic Convention. That the system details are still left up to state leaders might explain “why we have such an erratic cluster fuck every four years. Almost every part of this process is difficult to defend.”
Voters could be “frozen out” in caucuses. In 2012, Republicans saw participation rates of just 3 percent. Washington State has both a primary and a caucus, but delegates are decided by the caucus months prior to the primary.
Politifact noted that there was no clear evidence that the complex state party process for choosing delegates in Nevada was “hijacked,” but wrote that “the arcane party structures don’t reflect how most people assume presidential selection works.”
Then there are the superdelegates, who “are super in the way that kids on My Super Sweet 16 are super; they are party obsessed, widely resented, and untethered from all responsibility,” Oliver said.
The theory was “that the party leaders could step in if they didn’t like the way things were headed, which makes it so weird that whenever Debbie Wasserman Schultz… is asked about them, she insists that superdelegates would never do that.” Oliver asked “if they’re not going to make a difference, why take the risk of having them at all?”
Republicans delegates are only required to reflect state voters in the first round of voting, then become unbound delegates. Pennsylvanians might not even know who they are voting for, as the ballot doesn’t list which candidate a delegate support. Oliver suggested “there would be riots in the streets” if Dancing with the Stars had that voting system.
States such as North Dakota didn’t even have a primary or a caucus — the party chooses its delegates.
Oliver said the parties are “basically private clubs” in that:
Oliver said the system “clearly needs wholesale reform.”
Trump admitted he doesn’t care it’s a rigged system now that he is the presumptive nominee. “Nobody wants to change the weird rules if they win,” Oliver noted.
“It would clearly behoove both parties to take a long hard look at this, because they actually got lucky this time,” he said. “It does seem that the party nominees will coincidentally be the people with the most votes,” but “there is no guarantee that the candidate with the most votes will win next time.”
Oliver closed with a dose of reality.
“Unfortunately we only get angry about the primary process during the primary process when it’s impacting the candidate that we care about,” he said.
He suggested everyone send an email to the party chairs on Groundhog Day. It “does seem appropriate because unless this primary process is fixed, we are all destined to live through the same nightmare scenario, over and over again, until the end of fucking time.”
