The endorsement process

I am not against changing the endorsement process. I have been around DFL activists for a long time, and to be quite honest, a good number of them really put me off. They certainly are not representative of the DFL party as a whole, to say nothing about the electorate itself. Allowing the most extreme elements of the party (and not just extreme in terms of political ideology, but in terms of everything) probably isn't the best way to choose the best, most representative, most electable candidates. Sometimes the party does all right, like I think they did with Klobuchar. Sometimes they don't, like they did with Roger Moe, John Marty, Ember Reichgott-Junge, Buck Humphrey, and countless other endorsed candidates that have lost in the past, sometimes not even getting past the primary.

One possible solution would be to allow multiple endorsements. However, if this were to be the case, I don't think lowering the threshold from 60% would be a good idea. Democrats tend to believe "everybody's a winner!" and "every idea is a good one!" which is why conventions typically have over a hundred platform resolutions to vote on, most of which are utterly pointless and serve no other purpose than mental masturbation. Since there seem to be very few people like myself who actually enjoy voting "no" on resolutions and candidates, I think that if you could vote to endorse any number of candidates for an office and the threshold were low, like 25%, then everybody who showed up would get endorsed, making it completely worthless. On the other hand, if convention attendees could vote for any number of candidates, and the threshold were 70 or 75%, then whoever was endorsed would show that they were acceptable to a large majority of attendees, and that would mean something.

This has been talked about in the past, and nothing serious has come about. It is true that the "old guard" of the party would lose a lot from a proposal like this, and they don't want to give up the power. It's too bad, really.