Against Caucuses

I think Hillary Clinton's efforts to make excuses about losing all the caucuses are pretty lame. At the end of the day, if the establishment quasi-incumbent can't manage to pull of wins at these kind of undemocratic events, she has only herself to blame. But if Clinton and her supporters inside the party want to spearhead a nationwide drive to move to primaries, I'd certainly be all in favor of that.

I didn't like caucuses before Iowa, and I still don't like them now. In addition to the participation barriers, caucuses make outcomes overly dependent on "caucus math" rather than actual levels of support. For the purposes of the actual campaign, however, Hillary Clinton could have made her principled objections to the caucus method of delegate selection known back when she was first lady in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 or as an influential U.S. Senator in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007. Instead, though, she seems to have developed some outcome-driven objections after losing a series of caucuses. They're definitely a bad way to select nominees, but her complaints aren't very credible.