In any sufficiently close election, any sufficiently large bloc could decide the vote if they voted together. To say that they did or will decide the vote, however, is to say that they will or did vote together.
The obvious example, today, is the superdelegates. Another I've hated for years regards minority groups of stockholders.
concretions after the jump.
It's become a trope of this primary that the elected delegates can't decide the Democratic nominee, and so the superdelegates will decide it. That's a thoughtless misunderstanding of the real situation.
Since the elected delegates will not have a great enough majority for Obama, the superdelegates will participate in the diecision.
Newswwek even published a comparison with the last time that the electoral college failed to decide. The election was decided by the House of Representatives. That situuation, however, gives the electoral college no function but naming the candidates among whom the House selects. In Denver, the elcted delegates will have more votes than the superdelegates (as a group; each of them will have the same vote as a superdelegate has).
There is absolutely no reason to believe (or hope if your last name is Clinton) that the superdelegates will vote overwhelmingly to oppose the votes of the elected delegates.
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The deal with stockholders is even sillier. It starts with an oft-quoted observation: In a widely-held public corporation, a bloc of insiders who all vote their shares together can usually maintain control with only 10% of the shares.
The people who provide exceptions to that rule are called "corporate raiders." But it's usually true.
The reasons are:
- Most small shareholders don't vote.
- Many shares are held in trust by money managers who either don't ever vote or always vote for management.
- People who dislike how the firm is managed usually sell rather than stay around to vote the board out.
People without the mental capacity to understand the words in bold rewrote the statement to say that 10% of the stocjk gives you control. The possibility of several blocs with opposing interests and more than 10% of the stock each doesn't seem to bother them.
This has led to several silly statements about "XXXX control American industry." With "The Jews" probably standing for XXXX more often than any other group.
My favorite, however, was a guy who actually got a book published a few years back claiming that workers controlled industry. (Book poublishers are supposed to filter out crackpots. It didn't work in this case.) The argument was that retirement funds own more than 10% of most companies. Since 10% is enough to control, as everybody knows but those who can think, the workers who are the beneficiaries of teh retirement funds are in control.
This presupposes that Morgan Stanley is going to vote the stock in favor of the opinions of the beneficiaries of the retirement fund that morgan Stanley has invested in the corporation. It also presupposes that such votes have occured for years without any public notice.