Doesn’t it take a 2/3 vote to change rules on the floor of the convention?
Meanwhile, I saw things in 2016 that helped Sanders, as well as things as helped Clinton, and I am not sure just how much the DNC played in either one.
In Sanders’s case, at least one state changed its primary rules to allow 17-year-olds to vote if they would be 18 by general election day in November.
In Clinton’s case, a number of states that announced primary/caucus results announced both the vote percentage and the delegate counts, but included the Superdelegates in the counts so that, while Sanders won the vote, it looked as if Clinton won the primary. Whether this was by the DNC, the state Democratic Party, or the media, I do not know.
I do know that, this year, CNN has already made it clear that it will declare as “the winner of the Iowa Caucus” the candidate with the most State Delegate Equivalents, regardless of the raw vote (which will also be released by Iowa’s Democratic Party) or delegate counts (and if the SDEs are close, the delegate counts may have a different leader depending on how they break down in the Congressional districts).
Since it seems you’re putting forth the argument that the DNC actively changed votes at the state level, you’re going to need to provide some pretty extraordinary proof.
Basically anyone that wants to call themselves a Democrat can be one. States do have standards to get on the ballot, however. It’s usually from gathering enough signatures from registered voters. Sometimes the signatures have to be from people who are registered with that political party if that states tracks it. Sometimes you need signatures from all parts of a state. And some states just want you to pay a fee.
I know, clear as mud! But, since we don’t have candidate selection committees for local parties, it’s the best we’ve got.
The intent of states to limit ballot access is a way to keep the ballot a reasonable size and not look like a 1970s NYC phone book with hundreds of people ‘running’ for President.
And if not for those things would Sanders have magically broken through the ceiling of 15-20% support among African American voters in the South? Due to how the Democrats delegate allocation works, margin of victory is all important. While Sanders came close to Hillary in several large states like California, and eked out a win over her in Michigan, a small win is almost a draw in delegates. Meanwhile throughout the entire Southeast Hillary sometimes beat Bernie by margins as high as 60%.
That’s basic math and is why Bernie lost. Is it your theory that anything the DNC did would have changed the way black voters in the Southeast viewed Bernie in 2016?
Why are you making excuses for cheating? If you watched a Superbowl game and it became obvious (and later proved) that the refs were paid off to favor one team would you argue it is fine because the opposing team didn’t really have a chance anyway?
If Clinton’s game was so overwhelming anyway that Sanders never had a chance then why cheat at all?
Thing is, none of us can say how things might have played out differently if the DNC had acted as a neutral party towards all candidates. I recall how early on it was being widely touted how far behind Sanders was from Clinton, giving the impression he was nearly mathematically out of it so a wasted vote, when it was mostly the superdelegates that were being counted. Such appearances matter and this was not done by accident.
Clinton was definitely the front runner from the get-go but she got beat by a dark horse candidate eight years earlier when she was also the front-runner. Sanders was looking to do something similar and she was not going to have any of that again.
The 2020 Endorsement Primary (Biden has 252 pledged superdelegates, Warren 87, Bloomberg 62…they all got more after Iowa where they lost badly to Sanders, Sanders 55…remind you of 2016?)
She has since said she will support whoever the nominee is but probably because she got a crapload of pushback on it. So, if Sanders in the nominee she may “support” him but I would not count on zealous support from her.
Please, Hillary, stop saying mean things about Bernie! You’re really hurting his campaign by doing that! And whatever you do, please DON’T THROW HIM IN THAT THERE BRIAR PATCH!
Also, Clinton went after Sanders again today as well as James Carville throwing in some digs (at dems as a whole but with special emphasis on Sanders):
I’m sorry, what exactly are you on about? The Democratic Party is a political party, its leaders are politicians, they are allowed to have bias, and political preference. They are allowed to use what powers they have in service of those preferences. Particularly for intraparty business. This actually, believe it or not, is normal. So I need you to identify very specifically what you believe is cheating in the realm of intraparty politics.
The party owes no one neutrality. The party does have some fairness obligations in certain contexts. For example if they tried to manipulate the vote in a primary (which are actually legal, state run elections) that would be a serious crime. Do you have evidence that occurred?
In 2000 Al Gore ran for his party’s nomination for President. He received the formal endorsement in his race against Bill Bradley of the sitting U.S. President (who is nominally the head of the party while in office, even though he does nothing formally in that role), and every Democrat congressional leader in Congress. The party massively and immensely backed Gore quite early in the primary process and snuffed Bradley’s primary chances out (he wasn’t going to win anyway.)
In fact, in 2016 Obama’s endorsement of the party favored candidate came much later than is typical for sitting President endorsements: cite, in fact Obama held off on endorsing Hillary until after she had essentially already won the primary.
He specifically did it out of fear progressive snowflakes would claim the process was “rigged”, even though by definition–politics is not a fair fight, it is not intended to be, and conflicts within a party are not about fairness.
For example in the U.S. House, anytime an “insurgent” challenges their party’s leader for House office and loses, the insurgent usually finds themselves stripped of committee assignments and blocked out of power. This isn’t cheating, it’s called politics.
The government has a strong obligation to be neutral in how it runs elections (one at which it regularly fails), but the political parties have no such obligation, morally, ethically, conventionally, or legally. It’s a fiction Sanders supporters invented in 2016. And that is widely out of step with how American politics is generally conducted.
I’ll have to wait more to hear what vague, and ephemeral definition of “cheating” you decide to invent before I can fully address this–but it is my contention they didn’t cheat at all because they didn’t owe Sanders neutrality. Sanders doesn’t get to take away other politicians right to endorse and choose the candidate they like just because…he wants to?
That’s not true though, he was also mathematically out of it in terms of pledged delegates very early on. Because none of the Democratic primaries are winner take all, once any kind of real lead is built it’s very difficult to turn them around. Because you can’t turn it around by just edging out 51/49 wins, you have to engineer big drubbings. FiveThirtyEight and all kinds of other sites that built pledged delegate predictors had modeled Sanders as having no significant chance of victory as early as late March.
Obama wasn’t really a dark horse candidate, in fact a dark horse candidate as a term really has little meaning in modern politics. A dark horse was someone in the old convention system who would emerge as the nominee after dozens of rounds of voting, when all the leading men had basically been rejected for some reason or another and the party bosses found a compromise candidate from the somewhat lower political echelons. (Abraham Lincoln was a dark horse candidate of the GOP in 1860, having not been seriously thought of as the likely nominee going into the convention.) Obama ran a well built and supported campaign from very early on, albeit a smaller one at first than Hillary until he built up his small donor funding base and started getting more big donors.
There’s really not any way to get the nomination in the “primary” system as a traditional “dark horse”, because to get the nomination in the primary system you have to put your name out there and openly advocate for yourself very early on. The closest modern candidate to being a dark horse is potentially Bill Clinton, since at the start of the 1992 campaign season he wasn’t considered much of a favorite to win the nomination, being a relatively little known (nationally) Arkansas Governor.
Barack Obama was actually running to be President, and while he started off lean he had smart political strategists who were building his organization to expand into one that would be needed to compete with Hillary for the nomination. A ton of people connected to Sanders, albeit not Bernie himself, have admitted that the 2016 run was simply started as a protest run to try to get some more leftist positions into the party platform. After Bernie did well in a few of the early states he realized he might have a chance to win and then he actually wanted to be President. But at that point he was basically trying to build a genuinely competitive campaign with like a 3.5 year deficit versus Hillary, with far less organization, less professional political staffers positioned in offices around the country etc.
Bernie never had a real chance of winning the 2016 nomination because he didn’t decide to enter until relatively late, he was doing so as a protest candidate, and quixotically tried to become a real candidate far too late in the process to ever hope to catch up.