I’m sure there are people who would want to pull out every possible stop to deny Bernie the nomination if he were at 49.9%, too. What’s your point?
Yeah, try telling that to voters.
If someone - Bernie or not - had a significant lead over all opponents, and yet the nomination did not wind up going to that person because their opponents conspired to prevent them from getting it, it would cause many voters - including me - to seriously question whether it’s worth bothering. Yes, Trump and the Republicans are terrible, but is there a point where the better option is still so bad that it’s unacceptable to agree with it? Really hard to say. Probably not because Trump really is that bad, and worse it’s almost certain the Supreme Court would be completely lost in another four years, but damn if that wouldn’t come really, really close to making me shake my head and give up on the whole situation and just not vote.
Now, a situation where someone’s within a tight margin of the leader? Sure, it’s reasonable for it to go to either one of them based on who the delegates think should be the nominee, and I don’t have a problem with letting their judgement decide in a close situation. Any lead bigger than about 5-6%, though (and that’s already a big enough lead that I’d be raising my eyebrow at a decision to shift to another candidate), and that’s unacceptable to me. It would be better to simply scrap the primary and simply have party leaders meet and agree to a candidate, or set the rules so they have a veto on candidates even being part of the process, if they’re going to want to exclude someone so strongly.
Not much over a third with solidly more than half voting for a completely different approach is not near close to me.
Absent other information that would be available at the time (current polling in head to heads and performance in key states), I’d say both nearly 50% (at least 45%).
The way this would and should work out is how parliamentary systems work out - if you do not win an outright majority you need to form a consensus that is the majority to be the leader. Plurality is not enough.
That’s really my complaint about Sanders’ idea; if the agreed upon rules for the contest were plurality wins, then fine. But the rules are and have been a majority, so you don’t switch it mid-game.
If Sanders wants a plurality to win, he needs to work on changing the DNC policies for 2024, not bitch about it in 2020.
How much “bitching” has he done? I don’t pay a super lot of attention day to day.
Agreed. JUst like if people don’t want a Democratic socialist to run for the Democratic nomination, they need to work on changing DNC policies for 2024, not bitch about it in 2020.
However, the question isn’t about what the rules should be. I don’t think Sanders is advocating in this case for a change to the rules. AIUI, he’s suggesting what the most strategic decision would be. If Bloomberg has 40% of delegates and Sanders has 16%, and superdelegates all throw their support behind Sanders because they’re terrified of running a sexist racist billionaire against Trump, they’re pretty clearly ignoring what voters want–and since the general is decided by voters, that’s strategically foolish.
It seemed to me that he was suggesting it the unqualified duty of the Superdelegates to vote for the nominee with the plurality.
He was specifically asked about it during a debate and gave the answer that best served his political self-interest. Amazingly enough, so did all the other politicians on the stage! Who would imagine?!:rolleyes:
I voted for option three, with the understanding that except in the most unusual circumstances, three would imply two. The Democratic party isn’t suicidal. If Bernie comes in with 40-45% of the delegates, and all the other candidates are sitting at around 20%, they know that giving the nomination to someone else is going to fracture the party and the resulting hurt feelings will doom whomever comes out on top, leading to 4 more years of Trump. So they may as well roll the dice and hope that the Bernie bros are right.
I wouldn’t go that far. Like if it’s Sanders 38, Biden and Buttigieg both with 30, then I wouldn’t expect Sanders to get the nomination.The concept of lanes makes sense up to a point. I think a 16 point lead is an awful lot to override. Both of the runners up are closer to the single digits than they are to the leader. At that point, delegates really have to ask themselves “If the voters in my State were that committed to not nominating Sanders, wouldn’t they have figured out a way to avoid dividing the non-Sanders vote five ways?”
It makes sense to me to play by the rules as they were originally laid out at the beginning of the race. Change things next election if you don’t like how the current rules made this election turn out.
But the DNC is a private organization. They can draw straws to pick a nominee. They can draw straws until it looks like the guy they don’t like will win, then change the rules to rock, paper, scissors instead. Whatever. It’s their show, and I’m not part of their club.
Do they know that, though? I doubt they’ll overturn a clear overwhelming Bernie win if it happens, but I also doubt they’d spit on the man if he were on fire. Helping him out in any way, even if it ultimately helps the party, is not guaranteed, in my opinion.
They really do NOT know that. It really depends on what the 55 to 60% of those who did NOT vote for Bernie think, as deduced by the delegates they elected to represent them.
In the recent Irish election Sinn Féin received the most votes, the plurality, and the most first preference votes. Before the election however both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had sworn to not form a coalition with Sinn Féin … and the leader of Fianna Fáil had sworn no coalition with Fine Gael either.
Should it work that the other parties and their members automatically fall behind the plurality winner?
As it stands they’ve all been negotiating with each other. But odds are it won’t be Sinn Féin in the leadership position.
Similar deadlock in Israel.
The nomination and parliamentary leadership both require either an outright majority or relying on the ability to form a coalition that is a majority. Which requires compromises … something that is anathema to the Sanders revolutionary brand but is on brand for the Gang of Four (as RTF has called them) of Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Biden, and Klobuchar. Hell, even Warren is good at that.
Now if you have 40 to 45% of the vote it shouldn’t take much negotiating and compromise to get enough over to your side to have a coalition with an outright majority (which the supers should endorse). An inability to do it would speak to someone massively disliked by the remaining 55 to 60%, which would be of its own significance. I don’t think such a circumstance is likely in this cycle. But someone with a solid plurality but not a majority being unable to be the nominee because they could not negotiate into a majority coalition position to me would be a feature not a bug.
Which, as I understand it, is completely and absolutely counter to the point of having superdelegates in the first place.
#1. If a candidate has a majority of the delegates, they should get the nomination.
#2. If a candidate has the most delegates and would have a majority if all the super-delegates went to them, then they should get the nomination.
#3. If no candidate can get a majority even with all the supers, then the delegates need to start horse trading. Super delegates need to force a winner as soon as they can.
In 2016, Hillary satisfied #2 and Bernie did not. It was the obvious choice. If Bernie has #2 coming into the 2020 convention, then he should get the nomination without complaints.
A contested convention (#3) will be contentious no matter what, but the candidates should be building bridges right now to the others. Part of being the party leader is building coalitions.
I’m not a Democrat, but I’ll be voting for their nominee this fall. I really don’t think it matters as much as many people think who the nominee is.
Not an entirely valid comparison. Parties in a parliamentary election are competing against each other. Here there is obviously an element of that, but also a level on which they are supposed to be working toward a common goal. The Conservatives care a great deal about beating Labour, and very little for how Labour may feel about it. But convention delegates need to be looking for a solution that won’t leave any faction feeling screwed over.
Hypothetically, let’s say that with this delegate count, polls showed that a small majority of Democrats, like 52%, believed that Sanders should be the nominee. Would you think the delegates should feel obligated to nominate him at that point? If not, how large would the majority have to be to change your mind?
Barring other counterfactual information extant at the time I would think that the delegates pledged elsehow would in “good conscience” conclude that voting for Sanders would best “reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” But I could see with that slim majority others feeling otherwise. Honestly if it was a 40 to 45% plurality with a big gap I would think something was very wrong with a candidate who could not get a solid majority saying that. You do realize that would mean that something like 4 out of 5 of Democrats who voted for someone else still thought he should not be the nominee? The incontestable slam dunk would be if a majority of those who voted otherwise stated he should be the nominee at that point.
Devil’s advocacy:
The delegate allocation process, at least as I understand it, already builds in a heavy advantage for candidates who win pluralities in large fields. So in a world where nobody drops out and Sanders keeps winning around 25% of the vote in most States, with everyone else finishing just a few points above or below the 15% cutoff, he would end up getting a large plurality or conceivably even an absolute majority while still getting only 25% of the vote. If it’s a majority, of course, everyone would unhesitatingly agree that we have to play by the rules agreed to at the start. 
But if it’s only a large plurality, that would definitely undercut Sanders’ claim to be morally entitled to the nomination.
That isn’t a very accurate take on the rules.
The rules build an advantage for every candidate that breaks threshold. 30.1% percent of votes in NH went to candidates that got shut out of the delegate count. All three other candidates an advantage and split the delegate total. Sanders and Buttigieg tied for delegates won based on 25.7% and 24.4% of the statewide vote. The 9 delegates they both won was 37.5% of the delegate haul. Klobuchar pulled 25% of delegates on 19.8% of the vote. Buttigieg actually got a bigger advantage from the delegate allocation rules than the vote plurality winner.
It is even possible for the plurality candidate in the statewide vote totals to lose when we look at delegate counts. The majority of delegates are awarded at the congressional district level. In states with a lot of districts a plurality candidate could win big in some districts but just barely miss threshold in most. The total number of votes statewide would still look good. The delegate counts could still suffer.
Also, the Congressional districts are not equally weighted for delegate allocations. The state level delegate counts are not even weighted strictly by state population. The DNC uses proxies based on recent election results. They try to roughly balance districts and states along “one Democrat, one vote” levels not “one person.” It is very rough. Where someone is winning votes matters. It is not just about getting more votes.
In fields that shrink early the underlying complexity disappears before we really have to take notice. This time we have to notice.
I’m surprised to see we actually agree on this! My impression is that many Sandernistas do not. They would definitely expect Sanders to get the nomination if it’s 38/30/30, and will throw a fit if he does not.