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Originally Posted by ALIEN ANAL

no idea what this delegate and superman delegates and party wisemen shit is

the delegates represent a portion of the electorate.

so when people vote in the primary, they are not electing a candidate directly. they are picking a delegate pledged to that candidate. the delegates then vote at the convention. in recent times the results have been decided in advance, but in previous times there was a lot of horse trading between the different delegates. fun stuff!

the superdelegates are these higher ups in the party (governors, congress people, etc) who vote directly at the convention. so their vote is worth the vote of thousands of people. while some argue they should go with the popular vote, the superdelegates can throw their support for whoever they prefer, for whatever reason they think.

there are 796 or so superdelegates out of the 4000 or so total delegates at the democratic convention--so about 20%

the republicans have different rules, and no superdelegates

oh you can read about superdelegates here