Democrats inch closer to overhauling how they would pick a presidential nominee

The Democratic Party drew closer Friday to revamping how it nominates presidential candidates, with proposals of sweeping changes to how a nominee is selected and how voters participate in caucuses and primaries.

At a day-long meeting in a drab Washington conference room, 21 partly leaders sought to bring to a close roughly two years of disputes between supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Recommendations approved by the DNC’s Unity Commission will be referred to the full DNC for consideration at meetings next year.

There is no guarantee that party leaders will adopt the proposals. But DNC Chairman Tom Perez, who addressed the group Friday morning, vowed that he would work with the group to ensure their work “doesn’t collect dust” and is promptly considered.

The unity group first agreed to significantly reduce the size and power of party superdelegates — more than 400 party leaders and elected officials who can cast a ballot for whomever they want for the party’s presidential nomination.

Under the change approved Friday, only presidents, former presidents, elected officials, and current and former DNC chairmen would be considered “unbound” superdelegates. The other superdelegates — DNC officers or state party leaders — would be required to vote for the candidate who won their state’s primary or caucus on the first ballot at the nominating convention.

The commission also voted to recommend imposing penalties on states that don’t allow for same-day party affiliation changes or at a minimum, allow voters to switch parties the same day as a voter registration deadline. For example, an offending state’s delegate count at the national convention could be reduced, but there are no current proposals on potential penalties.

Only state governments can change election rules or laws, so any changes in party rules would merely be seen as a lobbying tool to compel the change across the country. The changes could especially penalize New York, a state with some of the most arcane, difficult election laws in the country. The Empire State had 291 delegates at the 2016 Democratic convention.

The commission grew out of the tense conclusion of the 2016 primary, which ended with a strong majority of delegates for Clinton and a large number of unhappy Sanders supporters.

At a party meeting before the 2016 nominating convention, with tensions heightened by the release of hacked emails from inside the DNC, Clinton supporter Charlie Baker and Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver proposed a commission that would limit the number of unpledged superdelegates and have free rein to recommend more party reforms.

Many Democrats, who expected Clinton to win the presidency, saw it at first as a way to calm nerves before the convention. “We need to make sure that nobody does anything when Bernie speaks, and we need to make sure that nobody does anything when Hillary speaks,” former Denver mayor Wellington Webb, a Clinton-backed commission member, told The Washington Post at the time.

Clinton’s defeat in the general election heightened the profile of the commission: In the drawn-out race to lead the DNC, Perez deferred questions about superdelegates and “fair” primaries by saying the 21-member commission would handle them.

From the outset, Sanders’s supporters were outnumbered. But the senator put some of his closest allies on the commission, including Weaver and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner — both leaders of Sanders’s post-election group Our Revolution.

At four public meetings, held across the country this summer and fall, the commission took testimony on the possibility of superdelegate reform, of opening primaries to independent voters and of making it possible for voters to participate in caucuses if they could not appear at them physically.

By the final public meeting, in Las Vegas, the commission generally agreed on a proposal to cut the number of superdelegates by more than half.

Sanders delegates suggested that states like New York, which have tight party-registration deadlines, could be compelled by the DNC to loosen them.

Weeks later, the DNC was rocked by the release of former chair Donna Brazile’s book “Hacks,” in which she said Clinton had saddled the organization with a fundraising agreement that favored the campaign and its consultants — and that teed this up before Clinton won the primary.

In November, in the wake of Brazile’s book, Sanders and Our Revolution laid out four specific goals for the commission and the DNC:

• “Dramatically reducing the number of superdelegates,” if not eliminating them.
• Open primaries.
• More access to caucuses.
• Budget transparency that could prevent another 2016-like outrage.

All were needed, said Sanders, to make the party credible to non-Democrats.

“Independents are a majority of voters,” he said. “If you don’t include them, your party is obsolete.”

Weaver made the same argument at Friday’s meeting, while other commission members warned that requiring primary or caucus participants to register for the Democratic Party to cast a vote might deter independents, whom the party needs in a general election.

The meeting is set to continue on Saturday with proposed changes to the caucus system, used by Iowa and a handful of other states to pick presidential candidates.