BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is just editing the show this week. I’m Bob Garfield. On Monday, history was made - or not, depending.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Hillary Clinton has 2,384 delegates right now, that is, if you include the superdelegates, which we are including!
BOB GARFIELD: Superdelegates, mainly Democratic Party officials, members of Congress and sitting governors, are counted like any other delegate at the convention in Philadelphia. But, unlike the pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses, superdelegates aren't officially in a candidate’s pocket until the actual convention vote. They’re similar to Schrödinger's cat of physics fame, simultaneously existing and not yet existing. It was after canvassing these cats about their intentions that the Associated Press added pro-Hillary superdelegates to the pledged delegates and reported that she had clinched the nomination, an historic headline but problematic for two reasons. First, the timing. The AP declared the race was over on Monday night, the day before contests were held in six states, this to the frustration of many, like Los Angeles City Councilmember and Bernie Sanders supporter, Gil Cedillo.
GIL CEDILLO: It’s voter suppression in the most rank and raw form. What's next, literacy tests or a poll tax? This is not something that a legitimate news agency should be involved with.
BOB GARFIELD: Intentional suppression? Well, let's just say that's not supported by evidence.
The second complaint is maybe harder to ignore, that the media shouldn't be counting superdelegates, in the first place, because, as the Democratic National Committee's Luis Miranda explained to CNN in April -
LUIS MIRANDA: They’re likely to change their minds. If you look at 2008, and what happened then was there was all this assumption about what superdelegates were going to do, and many of them did change their mind.
BOB GARFIELD: Kathleen Carroll is the AP’s executive editor. She says that talking to delegates to suss out their leanings is a routine part of AP’s election coverage, and has been for decades. So when the pledged plus the committed superdelegates passed the nomination threshold, they never considered waiting to report it.
KATHLEEN CARROLL: We deliver news to the public when we have it, and when we got to the count that gave her the number of delegates and superdelegates needed, based on what the superdelegates were telling us – and we only count them as committing to one candidate or another when they tell us, on the record and by name - so when we got to that number, it was news. And what we do with news is distribute it. I think you and I would be having a very different kind of On the Media conversation if we had news and had suppressed it.
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, we certainly would have, [LAUGHS] yessiree.
[CARROLL LAUGHS]
But there's one thing about the superdelegates. It is a vote at the convention but, by the rules of the Democratic Party, it isn't a vote until the convention. So did you have any news?
KATHLEEN CARROLL: Well yes, we did. And if you read our coverage, we go to great pains to explain what we have counted and what that means. And in each and every one of those explanations, we make clear two things, one, that superdelegates are party officials and they can change their minds before the convention. And two, we've been talking to them since 2015, and so far none of the superdelegates who have told us that they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton have changed their mind in all of that time.
BOB GARFIELD: On an election day, even with very reliable exit poll results of what the outcome will be, the press does hold our fire until the polls have closed, lest we influence the vote. So we know what's gonna happen. We have the news, it's in her hands but we want to let the voters have their say. That convention has often been invoked during the course of the week in criticism of the AP: Why not withhold ‘til the polls have closed in California, for fear of influencing the very election you’re covering?
KATHLEEN CARROLL: First, on an election day, exit polls often are really useful for telling you why people voted, but they are only one of several factors that will tell you how the vote will go. So withholding the results of exit polls makes much more sense because an exit poll alone is not precise enough to call a race on, in most cases, unless it’s blowout. Number two, the media outlets, including AP, who follow that line generally are doing so because the vote is taking place that day. That was not happening on Monday. And we were describing two things, votes that already had happened, those of the pledged delegates - they are, in fact, a majority of the count of delegates - and superdelegates, which we precisely told everyone, said they intended to vote for her or intended to vote for Bernie Sanders. And we described that that was something that was going to happen well beyond the Tuesday of Election Day. So I understand why people think that this is analogous, but it isn't, it really isn't.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, it wasn't the day of the election, I grant you that. It was the day before the election, less than 12 hours before polls opened in New Jersey. Isn’t that a distinction without a difference?
KATHLEEN CARROLL: No, I don't think it is a distinction without a difference. You know, we put the news out when we were sure that we’d gotten to the count, and we would have done the same thing had it occurred two days earlier or whenever it occurred. It just happened to be Monday night at 8:20.
Let me put another thought on the table here. California and New Jersey, very populous states, have primaries in June. If you look back in history, nominees often are decided well before June arrives. Now, the officials in those states have made a decision that June is the right date for the primaries for them. But when I lived in California, over the years, many people complained that the largest state in the union didn't have the right influence in the primary process because the primary took place so late. So if it had been decided by something else before the June primary in California, would that have suppressed turnout? The voters have to make their own decisions. I believe giving them information is, is our responsibility, and that's what we did.
BOB GARFIELD: Kathleen, thank you so much.
KATHLEEN CARROLL: All right, Bob, thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Kathleen Carroll is the AP’s executive editor.
