And what kind of sense does that make?
No seriously what's the purpose of getting a huge, expensive group of people together, have a wide voter base tell them who they want to vote for,
Really? You really have no idea what a party committee does?
and then have them rubber stamp it just so the same voter base can turn around and vote for the person they already choose?
Are you not American? Or are are you just that ignorant about how politics and political organizations in this country work?
In the majority of states in the US, only voters registered for a specific party can vote in that party's primaries, so yes, the voters who chose the candidate for that party do turn around and vote for the same candidate in the general election. But, and this is the important part,
voters who are not registered members of that party are also given the chance to vote for or against that party's candidate.
That's how the system works. To break it down...
The party organizes a suite of candidates from those who have "thrown their hat into the ring", so to speak, by announcing their desire to run for the office, and garnering the necessary minimum of signatures from registered voters to put their name on the ballot.
The party organizes and holds a primary election where the eligible members of that party decide who should best represent the party, via popular vote, or caucus vote; and in the case of presidential elections, delegates from the party committees of each state represent the result of that vote at the national convention.
The party tallies and certifies the vote at the convention, and submits their chose candidate for the general election.
The entire eligible population votes on which candidate from all available parties they would like to hold the office. Meanwhile, the Electoral College voters also vote on which candidate from all available parties they would like to hold office; some of whom are mandated by law to vote with the popular vote in their state, while those from other states may vote as they please (but still tend to vote with the popular vote as a rule).
That's how it worked when Barak Obama won the Democratic party primary, and then the general presidential election. And that's how Donald Trump won the Republican party primary, and then the general presidential election.
If we're operating from the Voter Base dictates the nominee to the Party Leadership assumption, what exactly is the party even doing?
Certifying candidates, fundraising, coordinating campaigns, purchasing advertising, developing policy platforms, informing and organizing voters, maintaining voter rolls, managing primary elections, and so on, and so on. The nuts and bolts of getting candidates elected that most people don't bother to think about. Not just for presidential elections, but for all elections where the party has a presence.
It's this particular aspect of the party activity that can greatly influence who wins or loses the primary by granting or withholding funding, access to voter rolls, organizational resources, and so on. And this is what the DNC did in the most recent election. Thanks to Hillary bailing them out of a poor financial position, they put all their resources into getting her chosen in the primary, while simultaneously withholding similar support from Bernie, and Martin O'Malley, who also ran in the 2016 presidential primary. This is not a conspiracy theory, this was stated flat out by the DNC leadership after the election, and after Wasserman-Shultz stepped down.
Even with that uneven allocation of party support, Sanders still kept the race very close, and had a better-than-even shot at winning the primary despite the efforts of the DNC, had they not made a critical error early on by not campaigning hard in the Southern states in the early days of the primary race, something they admitted afterwards was a huge tactical blunder. They assumed those states would go to Clinton anyway, and did not put the effort into them that they should have. Even a minority of convention votes from those states could have given Sanders the election despite the DNC's manipulations, and despite the Superdelegates.
However, gaining those votes would not have been necessary, and would not have made a difference, had the DNC not already decided that Clinton would be their candidate, the will of their party members be damned.
The argument seems to be "The voting populace has to tell the party to tell them to vote for the person they've already said they want to vote for..."
That was complete gibberish. Do you not understand the difference between a primary and general election?
And again this isn't some secret cabal government conspiracy theory.
Be careful, straw men are flammable. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, or even secrecy, for a process to be rigged.
The rules very from state to state and party to party (and for brevity sake I'm just going so say "Primaries" to mean both Primaries and Caucuses which technically different but serve the same function) but in a lot of cases nothing in the official process (and we get into a lot of "Rules of Order" nuance here) says a delegate has to cast their vote in accordance with their voter base and if they don't it's not like they've broken a law because primaries are not elections in the proper sense.
Which doesn't invalidate at all the principle that a primary election is ostensibly for the purpose of choosing the candidate that will be sent to the general election for that party. But, in fact, there are rules, at both the state and national level, regarding how delegates are expected to vote based on their particular state's version of the primary. Failure to follow those rules can result in votes being invalidated.
I don't even know how you incorporate Super-delegates into the "Voter Base instructs the Party" narrative.
It's not my narrative, it's the narrative of every party who engages in a primary election. Your entire post was just one big evasion of my question:
If primaries don't select candidates, they why bother with the trouble and expense of having one?
And as for superdelegates, that was already addressed in an earlier post, go back and read.
