The problems with superdelegate indecision

Matthew Yglesias comments on the need for Democratic superdelegates to make up their mind:

Ambinder says "given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they'll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there's no real reason for those superdelegates to choose in June. They'll have MORE information about electability in July or August... so why choose in an environment with less info?"

Well, I'd say the reason is that we're not really gaining more information as time goes on (Clinton backers, for example, were making the Wright/Ayers anti-Obama argument to pundits and no doubt superdelegates as well quietly for months before it "hit" the mainstream). What's happening, instead, is that both candidates' negatives are going up while resources aren't being applied against John McCain. Insofar as superdelagates genuinely want to pick a winner, they'll recognize that picking someone gives them a better chance of winning than does a summer of indecision.

This is actually a well-known decision-making anomaly that is described in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, an entertaining pop economics book with many of the same virtues and flaws as Freakonomics. Ariely tells the story of "Buridian's ass" to illustrate how we often fail to account for the costs of indecision:

[C]hoosing between two things that are similarly attractive is one of the most difficult decisions we can make. This is a situation not just of keeping options open for too long, but of being indecisive to the point of paying for our decision in the end. Let me use the following story to explain.

A hungry donkey approaches a barn one day looking for hay and discovers two haystacks of identical size at the two opposite ends of the barn. The donkey stands in the middle of the barn between the two haystacks, not knowing which to select. Hours go by, but he still can't make up his mind. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of starvation.

You can see any superdelegate stalling after early June in the same way. Despite the questions I've raised about Hillary's electability, the fact is that the political fundamentals (the state of the economy and the war in Iraq) matter far more than candidate quality. But the process of voters converging to the decisions implied by those fundamentals may not begin until the Democrats pick a candidate. As such, there's a reasonable argument to be made that picking either candidate in June is preferable to waiting longer in the hopes of making the "right" decision.

Comments

[Jinchi]

I think we're oversimplifying the issue here. Nearly 70% of the superdelegates have made their decision, already. They don't vote as a block, and if they were to get in a back room and decide among themselves who the winner was, the loser would undoubtedly cry foul.

The superdelegate system is a dangerously flawed and undemocratic one. The long drawn out election calendar is another problem. Many of those delegates remaining have likely made the decision that they'll support the winner of the pledged delegates once the primaries are over. That's a perfectly sensible and legitimate choice and probably the one with the fewest long-term consequences.

[Jinchi]

From the WSJ :

Many superdelegates increasingly seem to share the view that ultimately they should support the candidate with the most pledged delegates. Almost certainly that will be Sen. Obama. "They argue that if the party insiders took this away from the winner of the voters' process, that could be disastrous for the party. And I agree with that," says Mr. Achepohl, the Nebraska Democratic chairman.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120942916625251325.html

[Myriam Koepcke]

It will take 70% of the delegates from each remaining state for Hillary to win. She has lost this race, barring party hanky-panky. Ann Coulter did NOT endorse Hillary because she believed Hillary could beat McCain. Think about it.