When asked at the Nevada debate, only Bernie Sanders said the candidate with a non-majority plurality of support should be made the nominee, period. The other candidates said the process should play out as per DNC rules, requiring that there will be no nominee until there is someone who has the support of an outright majority.
I have an opinion which I’ll share in time, but first I want to hear what others think.
Your option #2 pretty perfectly sums up my opinion.
No changing the rules after the game has started. Bernie wants to claim the nomination despite about 70% give or take of his party preferring
more moderate candidates. That’s probably his best game for the nomination, but that’s not the rules…
If one of the candidates has a large lead, but not a majority, after the first ballot, those hated superdelegates will probably come in and throw their support behind the leader, if only to keep the convention from turning into a bloodbath. That’s how the system is supposed to work.
I’ll preface this by saying I hope Bernie doesn’t win the nominations.
That being said, the Democrats can talk about rules all they want, but I’m not sure it would be smart to deny the strongest candidate in the field the nomination, just because the rules say the party can.
Looking at it another way, the fact that 70% of the party doesn’t consider Bernie their first choice doesn’t mean that they would necessarily consider Buttigieg, Biden, or Bloomberg a favorable alternative.
I think Bernie would be an ineffective president, but as a candidate, there’s no questioning that he’s built a hell of a campaign machine. It’s the envy of every other Democrat in the race. Nobody gives a shit about the DNC’s arcane rules - it’s just common sense that you don’t take that kind of energy and passion out of a race and expect anything good to come from it.
That would be the smart move. IIRC, I don’t think Hillary actually won enough vote-based delegates to win the nomination, but she clearly won enough contests to justify having super delegates push her past the finish line. It’s only fair that Bernie Sanders’ campaign would expect the same courtesy in return.
It would be utter insanity to take what’s arguably the strongest grassroots movement in the country, take tens of millions of cast votes, and say “Sorry, our party bosses think you people are a bunch of nut jobs - but come out and support us in the general.” Yeah, that’ll fly.
Considering that probably nobody can outright beat Sanders at this point, the next best thing I can hope for is that either Bloomberg or Biden competes well enough to earn a virtual “draw” with Sanders. I think that would be at least easier for Sanders supporters to accept, particularly if Sanders somehow had a bad Super Tuesday (not likely, but I’ll game it out for the moment). But Sanders will almost surely walk away having won more votes in a minimum of 3 out of 4 February contests, and possibly even all 4. If he goes on to dominate Super Tuesday, then it’s time for the Dems to start coming to grips with reality and use their remaining leverage not to strategize how to screw Sanders out of a nomination, but how to infuse at least some of their influence into his campaign and possible administration.
I picked the 2nd as closest to how I think things should go. If Bernie has a clear lead, even without a majority, picking someone else will almost certainly doom the party to be split with a big loss in Nov. If it’s very close (say, Bernie has 28%, Bloomberg has 27%, and a few other candidates have 10-20%), then who knows what will happen, and I doubt we’d get out of the convention with a strong candidate.
Recently we’ve seen some polls in which Democrats are asked who they would pick if they had to choose between only two of the candidates. Bernie beats all the others, and all of them except Warren and Biden by double digit margins. In contrast, Bloomberg loses to everyone else by at least 5 points.
Going by the numbers on Wikipedia, she did have a majority of the pledged delegates.
The superdelegates will definitely “come in” after an inconclusive first ballot, but who knows who they will support - especially if there’s a chance that all but one of the moderate candidates decides to withdraw.
Also note that the rules say, “All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” This could be interpreted as saying, “If you were pledged to a moderate, you need to vote for a moderate, and if you were pledged to a progressive, you need to vote for a progessive.” It’s possible that some states may have laws forcing pledged delegates to vote for their candidate up until a certain point; however, for example, California does not have such a law for the Democrats, although it does for the Republicans (a delegate may switch after the second ballot, or when the candidate gets less than 10% of the vote or withdraws).
This is all basically uncharted territory, but wouldn’t you think delegates would likely follow the express wishes of the candidate they were pledged to?
This process could require the nominee to accept an unlikely running mate (Sanders/Klobuchar! Bloomberg/Warren!).
Why? Clinton was a Democrat, Bernie isn’t.
Note that option two may be, and likely usually would be, contained within option three.
“The process” is that delegates should vote how they believe those who voted for them would want them to vote, as their representative in the process. That does NOT mean taking orders from the candidate they were pledge to.
It is very reasonable for a delegate to conclude that a candidate very close to the majority and/or with a very large lead over the next closest is who those who voted them in would want them to next support and some no doubt would. It is also very reasonable for superdelegates to take their lead from the preferences of the pledged delegates as most reflective of the will of the voters in the primaries.
That would be the process playing out per DNC rules as it should.
OTOH a circumstance in which one candidate had maybe 33% of the vote and those who clearly represent a wish to take the party in a different direction had, put together, 60%, with one ahead at maybe 25%, would rationally lead a delegate to think that those who voted for them want something other than the plurality winner to get the nod.
To the specifics of this circumstance - HRC had a solid majority of the pledged delegates (2205 to 1846), had over 3.6 million more votes than him, and Team Sanders was arguing up to the very end that the supers should OVERRULE the will of the voters as so expressed because he was, he claimed, more electable. When they would not his team spun it was the supers that gave HRC her win (because if they all went to him he still would have won with an overrule of both the pledged delegate majority and popular votes). Many of his supporters today still buy that crap line.
The hypocrisy of his current position, that it would be unfair for a plurality with no majority, to not be an automatic win, honestly makes me gag.
Yes, Bernie’s deeply held democratic principles seem to shift awfully conveniently based on what’s the most advantageous for him personally. :rolleyes:
Which to me illustrates that Democratic primary voters are pretty confused and clueless, tbh. Bernie provides such a stark contrast to the rest of the field, as he and his most ardent followers would readily admit, that it makes little sense for him to be everyone’s second choice, as this seems to imply. He is exactly the opposite of the kind of candidate who should be getting that kind of support. If the majority of the party is down for a revolution, he should already be getting a majority. If they aren’t, why would they go for him as the next-best alternative to Biden or Klobuchar or Buttigieg or Bloomberg? It’s incoherent.
Or Biden/Klobuchar, or Buttigieg/Bloomberg. If the moderates really want to combine forces to keep Bernie off the ticket, that’s more likely to be what we’ll get, which of course is rough because it doesn’t even stanch the bleeding by offering a progressive running mate as a consolation prize. But this is what Harry Reid is floating:
Speaking of Reid, did you check out that zoot suit he was rocking, complete with pinstripes and a feather in his hat, at the debate?
Remember, though, that delegates are generally chosen precisely for their loyalty to their candidate. So they certainly shouldn’t feel obligated to "take orders’, but it seems reasonable to assume that a great many of them would do so voluntarily.
I picked 3 but I hope it’s for 2020 only. This is such a weird primary with the Bloomberg money machine not even getting started yet, a compressed primary schedule with stupid TX and CA jumping in on Super Tuesday, and a party definitely divided between the Bernie cult and #NeverBernie.
In the other thread, you seemed to think it was OK for Bernie to not get the nomination with 38% of the vote and a 16 point lead over the runner up, with another 6% going to Warren. I would call that a pretty clear cut case of a candidate being close to a majority, with a very large lead over the next best. Exactly how close to a majority do you think a candidate has to be in order to be nominated?
Actually, I see the OP specified 40-45% as the cutoff for option 2. So probably the currently projected scenario is right in that dreaded gray area; at 33% or 43% there would likely be general agreement.
Yeah, Bernie is happy with superdelegates if they help him, not if not.
BTW, I wish the DNC would make a majority 2,000 delegates instead of 1,991, it would just be a much tidier and simpler number.
I get the impression that for many Bernheads, there would *not *be agreement at 33%, even if he’s leading someone by only one percentage point. “He has the most support, it’s undemocratic not to make him the nominee!”