Without getting into the weeds of how all the mechanisms work, I think that things like Super delegates and caucuses to a decent job of giving the party leaders, elders, establishment... whatever you want to call them, influence in picking the party's candidate. I think it showed itself to work well when they originally backed Clinton, but were persuaded by the more general population to move to Obama. And I think it showed itself to work well this time around when Bernie's platform was just too far off of moderate to really stand a chance of winning a general election. Although I'm sure it's full of corruption and all sorts of nastiness, I think the system worked ok for picking the Democratic candidate most likely to win.
On the other hand, party leaders do not seem to have nearly the say in the Republican candidates, and they end up with a terrible, grass roots/social media/reality tv generated candidate. If the party leaders had more say, they would have surely come up with someone with a better chance to win, and hopefully someone more qualified to be president.
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