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College Democrats Super Delegates Want Your Opinion

Lauren Wolfe, the President of the College Democrats, and Awais Khaleel, CDA's Vice President, are two of the youngest Super Delegates who will decide this nomination. They're asking for your advice on how to cast their ballots:

It's unscientific, and I tend to think that the voting preferences shown by young people at the polls will give them a better indication as to how their constituents would prefer they cast their "super ballots," but this is an attempt at bringing transparency to the process that should be commended.

More cynical people might also say that it's not a bad way to list-build for the College Democrats.

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April 29th, 2008 12:15am
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My Thoughts

Submitted by blueflame on Tue, 2008-04-29 01:06.

Mike, the first thing I thought of after seeing this vid on Huffington was the blog post you made a few months ago regarding young superdelegates. If I can remember correctly, you expressed disappointment that they didn't take the views of young people into more consideration. I wonder if that had any impact on their decision to open things up like this?

Anyways, here are the reasons I gave them for why I think they should endorse Obama:

1. It's pretty much mathematically guaranteed that Obama will win the
pledged delegate count. If superdelegates overturn the will of the people,
it would create horrible bad blood within the Democratic party and
alienate many of the millions of new Dems that Obama has brought to the
party.

2. We need a candidate who can stand strong on Iraq against McCain in the
fall and say they've been against the war from the beginning.

3. Obama doesn't take money from lobbyists and PACs, and Hillary does (as
a former Edwards supporter, this one is really important to me).

4. The Democratic party is the party of the people and our candidate
should embody that core value. Obama's campaign has spurred more
grassroots donations and volunteers than any campaign in American history.

5. With Obama at the top of the ballot, his coattails would help Dems win
across the country and give us a better chance of getting a
filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. He has shown that he can put
states like Virginia and Montana into play and help us get past the
"battle ground states" and "50+1%" thinking leaves a lot of people out of
the political process.

6. Young voters overwhelmingly support Obama over Clinton and we hope we
can count on our superdelegates to represent our views in Denver.

Awais emailed me right back and thanked me for my input, so it's great to see that they're taking the time to respond individually.

Hard Metrics

Submitted by Michael Connery on Tue, 2008-04-29 09:42.

Mike, the first thing I thought of after seeing this vid on Huffington was the blog post you made a few months ago regarding young superdelegates. If I can remember correctly, you expressed disappointment that they didn't take the views of young people into more consideration.

Right. Personally I wanted something with harder metrics. Preferably tying it to some sort of internal vote within CDA (conducted openly on the CDA website) or tied directly to the 18 - 24 vote results nationwide.

But this is absolutely a step in the right direction and I'm glad to see that they did it.