I am writing in response to a recent guest opinion by Sarah Baik regarding the Bucks County Democratic Party’s endorsement process.
Ms. Baik begins by claiming that the Democratic Party has “rigged the nomination procedures to short-circuit the democratic process.” This is simply untrue.
The rules of the Democratic Party allow for the endorsement of candidates in primaries. They do so to give the people who are most involved in the Party – i.e., committee people and elected officials – the ability to voice their preference to Democratic voters in the primary. Those who do not like such endorsements, such as Ms. Baik, assail them as undemocratic. In fact they are an exercise in democracy at the most basic level among the people who year in and year out do the most to help get fellow Democrats elected to office. They should be able to voice their opinions and then let voters know where they stand.
Her comment that these committee people – and the elected officials in the party – “were not elected by the people” is, again, flatly false. Committee people run for election in their voting precincts every four years, and elected officials are, by definition, elected by the people.
To be clear, an endorsement by the Bucks County Democratic Party does not prevent a candidate from running for office. It does not prevent committee people who do not support the endorsed candidate from campaigning for another candidate in the primary (more about that later).
Nor does it guarantee that the endorsed candidate will win the primary, contrary to Ms. Baik’s sweeping, and once more false, statement that “[i]t is a widely accepted fact that no candidate has ever won a primary whose name did not appear on [the official Democratic ballot].” Just ask former Governor Ed Rendell, who was not endorsed by the Party but who nonetheless beat former Senator Bob Casey in the gubernatorial primary of 2002 with the help of committee people, like me, who bucked the Party. The idea that primary voters simply follow the Party’s recommendation without any further thought lays bare a dismissive and elitist view of the average voter.
Ms. Baik goes on to disparage committee people as behaving like “lemmings,” as if they are somehow incapable of independent thought in deciding who would be the strongest candidate for the fall election. Again, these are hard-working people, who, by the time of the endorsement each year have heard from the candidates, usually on multiple occasions, giving them a chance to form their own judgment on who would be best suited to win in November. The fact that the rules of the Democratic Party require that the endorsement vote not be taken by secret ballot has never prevented people from voting how they wish, sometimes resulting in multiple rounds of ballots to achieve the supermajority needed for endorsement.
Ms. Baik also makes a number of false claims about the endorsement process to support her baseless claim that it has been rigged.
For instance, she is wrong when she alleges that local committees have “reportedly prevented” candidates for congress other than County Commissioner Bob Harvie from speaking at their events. To the contrary, all candidates have been welcomed to speak. Moreover, if a candidate were to inform me as County Chair that a particular committee had prohibited them from addressing its members, I would correct the situation immediately.
She is wrong when she intimates that petition signing events held prior to any endorsement are being closed to candidates other than Commissioner Harvie. Indeed, at the endorsement meeting itself, all candidates will be free to circulate their petitions for signature.
And as the Beacon noted, her claim that committee people who support a non-endorsed candidate are punished with removal from office and a two-year ban, is untrue. Those sanctions apply only to committee people who do not support a Democrat running against a Republican in the general election.
Finally, Ms. Baik also assailed the straw poll that was undertaken to help committee people evaluate the candidates running in the 16th State Senate District. There was nothing “back room” about the process. In fact, it was part of a virtual candidate forum open to all committee people and voting on the straw poll was kept open for several days.
As it turns out, someone participating in the virtual forum surreptitiously recorded it and then sent that recording – along with internal emails about the process – to the press. Doing so breached the confidence of not only the committee people who participated in what was a good discussion of the issues, but of the candidates as well, whose candidacies were thus made public before they had had a chance to make a formal announcement on their own terms. It remains unclear who did this. What is clear is that their actions say more about their own integrity than anything about the integrity of the process.
The truth is that the people who most often assail the Democratic Party’s endorsement process are usually those who support candidates who do not have the votes to win it. That is not the fault of the Party or of the candidate who ultimately may win. That is on them.
