Far less than he got from caucuses and open primaries.
If it wasnt for caucuses there’d have really been no race.
Maybe 500.
I agree with other responders that the answer is “not very many.” My sense from having worked in many political campaigns is that very few people base their voting decisions on who is the front-runner.
In fact, I think there’s an argument to be made that the enthusiastic support given Clinton by the superdelegates actually *increased *Sanders’s votes. Much of Sanders’s campaign rhetoric revolved around suspicion of the establishment. The SDs were probably his best example of that. Sanders could point to how few SDs he had, and complain about media outlets including them in delegate totals, and emphasize the unfairness of it all, and I think that the SD imbalance brought that home to a lot of onlookers: Damn, he’s right, look at how he’s getting screwed; we’d better get to one of those rallies and start getting active on Facebook and send him $27.
And early on he was hitting all the right notes with that, too, talking about democracy and how antithetical to that the SD system was and how the SDs should be required to vote for the candidate with the most pledged delegates–making it difficult to Clinton supporters to defend the system without sounding undemocratic. (His argument lost its moral force later on, of course, when he decided that the superdelegates should support him, despite the fact that he didn’t have close to a majority of pledged delegates (democracy? *screw *democracy); but that was later and the argument had already been successfully made for a lot of people.)
Anyway, the superdelegates were “an outward and visible sign” of Sanders’s argument that the system was rigged, and helped a) bring people into his camp and b) get them energized to spread the gospel of the campaign. From that perspective, the senator might actually have done worse in the popular vote without the influence of the SDs.
Why would SDs pledge early if it wasn’t to push favor to one candidate?
Let’s see…they’d made up their minds already?
Examining it, SD’s are overwhelmingly establishment. Given the choice between a Democrat of long standing (and much fundraising) and an independent who declared D just to run for the primary, which would you think would be a more appealing option to them?
Of course they were trying to push favor to one candidate. That’s why you endorse someone! And they still would have done it even if they weren’t superdelegates, because that’s how elections always work. Republican senators and governors and representatives weren’t superdelegates, but they still endorsed candidates.
Look I’m a diehard Bernie supporter, but I accept he lost, HE accepts he lost. If Clinton has a stroke or is lead away in handcuffs then maybe Bernie will be the nominee. Apart from that, give it up and concentrate on defeating Trump.
Realistically, it would very probably be Kaine.
In SOME ways? In what ways? How an “unfair” advantage? Because her name and face are well-known due to a prominent career in politics? Please explain.
This is actually a good question, and something worth exploring is what does “level field” mean. You see, no campaign is conducted on level field. No campaign is conducted as a “fair fight.”
A fair fight, we have things like very specific rules about where you can hit/be hit, rules about how much “weight differential” there can be between your opponent and yourself. Rules that require the other opponent to go to their corner when they knock you down, and give you ten uninterrupted seconds to try and resume your footing to continue the fight.
Politics, to keep at the fight metaphor, isn’t a Marquess of Queensbury Rules boxing match, it’s a street fight. 500 pound fighters can and do get squared off against 125 lb weaklings, and the results are predictable. Hillary had immense advantages over Bernie–vast support from Governors, House members, Senators, a former President as her husband. She had a much higher national profile. She had more access to big donors. She had more access to professional political staff who had ran many large campaigns before. She had more experience in the primary system–and in fact, she made strategic mistakes in 2008 (like focusing too much on winning primaries in big states–Bernie actually repeated some of Hillary’s 2008 strategic mistakes in the running of his own campaign) that she learned from.
What exactly does a “fair fight” look like? One in which Bernie and Hillary are prohibited from any “outside” support? So they cannot mention their resumes, since one has a more impressive one than the other. No politicians can endorse either candidate, have to wait for the voters to have their say. They have to spend equal amounts of money. They have to be given equally qualified campaign staff. The more you think about it, the more that it becomes patently obvious elections are not, cannot be, and never will be “fair fights.” Each candidate will always come in with a set of advantages and disadvantages, and more often than not, one candidate will have a much stronger hand than the opponent. Sometimes this effect is remarkable. Like in 2012, was it “fair” that Barack Obama got to spend the primary season just raising money, no need to fight any opponents, while Romney spent tens of millions winning a contested primary? Is it fair that while the GOP coalesced around a candidate, Obama was able to run anti-Romney ads before Romney had access to general election funds? Was it fair that Obama started the general in a much stronger financial and organizational position because of these? Of course it wasn’t “fair”.
But that’s because elections are not fair fights.
The reality is many Bernie diehards are simply too young and too ignorant of our political process to understand this, they see evil conspiracies where a wizened eye sees simple, unavoidable reality in a democratic system.
But back to how many more votes Bernie could get, defining “fair fight” differently–say there were no superdelegates, the answer is “probably not many.” Bernie ran a pretty bad campaign if you were wanting to win. I think there’s good evidence he wasn’t running to win until after the first few primaries when he started to realize he maybe could’ve won, but it’s too late by then. He took weeks to meaningfully modify his stump speech (which focused almost exclusively on economic inequalities) to include any talk of systemic racism. Not because he was anti-black or didn’t care, but because Bernie genuinely believes that the disadvantages facing blacks are just a “subset” of broader economic inequality. Hillary was saying from the beginning of the campaign there is more to it than that. Sanders had already lost South Carolina by the time he started to change his messaging–and he had long lost any chance of appealing to the black community. Sanders is stubborn, and didn’t want to change his stump speech.
Sanders also doesn’t like retail politics. This means visiting the “Mothers of the Movement”, doing smaller events at churches and other groups, in addition to doing larger campaign events. Sanders likes the role of college professor–a big room, he’s the lecturer, telling America what it’s doing wrong and how he has the answers, non-interactive. I think he viewed his large rallies as being far more effective than these small meetings where you make small talk with voters–there’s also good evidence Bernie’s interpersonal skills are poor, and he has little time for or little appreciation of small talk. What Bernie failed to realize is meeting with small groups of people who are very important in their local minority community, creates a vast network of surrogates who turn around and become permanent advocates in that neighborhood–for the duration of the campaign they are turning out new voters for you. This is why Bernie made almost no inroads with black or Latino communities.
There’s also evidence Bernie’s campaign was ran in a way that didn’t spend money well. It appears that a few top advisers of Sanders were professional political media consultants who got 15% of any ad spending Sanders spent money on. These same people apparently advised Sanders spend much of his money on traditional television and radio advertising. Unsurprisingly, these are where the largest commissions are for the same people making this advice. But if you look at the demographics of the typical Sanders voter versus the typical Hillary voter, it looks like the $200m or so odd dollars he spent on TV ads had very little impact. TV advertising has little effect on young voters, who largely don’t watch them. And yet, that was the demographic in which Sanders dominated. TV ads are more likely to be seen by older people, and Hillary handily won every age group above age 40. This suggests that Sanders probably could’ve spent more money on other types of organizing and other types of political activity. Like for example instead of running so many ads in “flashy states” where he had a “chance” of winning, maybe he could’ve ran actual campaigns in the Deep South where he lost sometimes 80-20. In a delegate fight changing that to 60/40 is actually quite meaningful, but pushing a “close” state like Michigan from 51/49 HRC to 51/49 Bernie has little meaningful impact at all. The only way it matters is if you buy into the failed strategy of Hillary 2008–that winning states creates “momentum” that will cause your opponent’s campaign to collapse. What Hillary found out is fighting out close wins over Obama in a series of large states did little, he stayed in the race just fine, and while he was losing close fights in large state primaries he was winning monstrous margins in caucus states right to the very end.
At the end of the day, the campaign Sanders ran was basically able to get historic margins among under-40 whites, but the demographic reality is you don’t win Democratic primaries with that being not only your base, but like 85% of your support.
It’s also worth noting that the media and even the Democratic establishment has done a good job of soothing Sanders ego by perpetuating the myth he lost a close fought primary. Losing by 12% of the popular vote and 359 pledged delegates is a pretty strong loss. Much stronger than Obama’s win in 2008. Additionally, it was arguably “stronger in reality” than some past primaries–because in past primaries more mainstream candidates, once they knew they lost (and everyone who understood the Democratic nominating process and professional politics knew Bernie couldn’t win the nomination after Super Tuesday) they conceded and left the primary. If they had stayed in until the last primary like Bernie did, many past primaries look a lot closer in delegate count than this one did.
If you map that 12% popular vote loss to other forms of elections it can be pretty insane. Like in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson by about 12% in the popular vote–and he won 442-89 in the electoral vote. This was called a “landslide.” Even in countries that do proportional representation like Germany for example, a 12% win over the next closest party is considered huge–several of Merkel’s strongish election wins her party only won by a % over the SDP, and in the most recent election when her CDU beat the SDP by over 15% it was considered a historic landslide and one of the strongest electoral showings in German history. By any real measure Sanders not only lost, he lost tremendously.
Politifact settles it. Bias perhaps, no rigging.
I love stumbling up on old articles, posts and such which were taking it so much for granted that Hillary was it!
It’s almost as good as the Youtube videos where the inevitable and unavoidable truth is dawning on the News Reporters who were always much presumed to be unbiased. Priceless!
That’s earning you a warning for trolling.
Know, deep in your heart, that if you post to delight in hurting other posters your time here will be short.