Subject: CNN transcipt superdelegates
From: "Brinster, Jeremy" <[email-masked]>
To: "Dillon, Lauren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:43:44 -0700

this is just the part about superdelegates, let me know if you'd like anything else:

TAPPER: So you've heard these complaints about superdelegates. I know that they've been there since the '80s?

MIRANDA: '84.

TAPPER: '84. And one of the complaints from Sanders supporters is that superdelegates subvert the will of actual voters, that the establishment candidate effectively starts the race with 20% of the delegates in his or her pocket. How do you respond?

MIRANDA: The reality is, is that 85% of the delegates at the convention are selected by the results of primaries and caucuses, so the voters themselves are the single biggest factor in who becomes the nominee. Superdelegates-I think one of the problems is the way the media reports it. Any night that you have a primary or caucus, the media lumps in superdelegates that they have basically polled because they just called them up and say, who are you supporting? They don't actually vote until the convention, and so they shouldn't be included in any count on primary or caucus night because the only thing you're picking on primary and caucus nights are the pledged delegates based on the vote.

TAPPER: But what about when we do our totals. When we do our totals, do you think the total is okay to include?

MIRANDA: Not yet, because they're not actually voting, and they're likely to change their minds. 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 before the convention and it shifted the results in the end. But to be clear, the superdelegates have never actually determined who the nominee is since 1984, when they were created, and after 2008, they were actually reduced from 20% to just 15%. And so I think we're in a situation where the voters continue to be the single most important factor and the purpose of the superdelegates is to make sure that our elected officials and party leaders who are the backbone of the party get to participate at the convention, but it's also good to have them in a separate category because regular folks can run to be delegates at the convention. So you'll see in 2008, we had a 17-year-old who got elected as a pledged delegate who would have never had that chance if he was running against his member of Congress. So it's a way that we do it to make sure that we also have diversity at our convention because we want the convention floor to look like the rest of the country.

TAPPER: Very interesting. The DNC itself saying don't include superdelegates in the totals to cable networks like our own.