You’ve done an excellent job selecting February 16, 2016 as the date for this graph. Why did you do this?
One reason could be that the graph shows delegate counts two weeks before Super Tuesday (March 1, 2016), when 12 states or territories had primaries and 865 pledged delegates (21% of the total number of pledged delegates needed to win the nomination) were up for grabs.
After Super Tuesday, the graph absolutely did not look like the graph you’ve posted and it did not look like that “month and months” before the election. Here is what Hillary’s pledged delegate lead looked like after Super Tuesday:
You’re objectively incorrect when you say that your graph indicated the state of the gap between Hillary and Bernie for “months and months” before the election. It’s also misleading to the point of being factually wrong to imply that superdelegates decided the nomination. They did not. After Super Tuesday, Hillary developed a sizable lead in pledged delegates and never looked back. By the time California rolled around, her lead of pledged delegates was practically insurmountable and Bernie would have not only had to win in the remaining states, but he would have had to do so by overwhelming, comical majorities.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
EDIT: Rereading your post, I see that you didn’t claim the graph looked like the for “months and months” before the election. I inferred that in my indignation. The fact remains that superdelegates didn’t decide the election.
Nobody’s OK with this. The Democratic Party has been trying out a pretty wide variety of presidential candidate selection process reforms for just under 50 years, some have been better than others, but all were based on the assumption that party leadership was ready to implement party policy. The 2015-2016 DNC leadership decided that their personal preferences trumped correct party process, and did real damage. I’m a pretty loyal Democrat, and I hate DWS with a passion for what she and her cronies did to my party. However, DNC=/=HRC; the Clinton campaign certainly took advantage of the fact that the party leadership was willing to swan dive into her pocket, but you can’t blame her for having a pocket.
The DNC leadership was corrupt. The HRC campaign was merely opportunist. The latter is not only not a crime, it isn’t even a fault in a political campaign.
In the Democratic race, Clinton won seven states, building up a delegate cushion over her insurgent rival Bernie Sanders. She rode her support among African-American voters on a Southern sweep through Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, and added Massachusetts, a state Sanders had hoped to win.
So “Clinton = liar and a cheater” is an assumed fact? When you start with that as axiomatic, I can see how you reached your conclusion.
Another of your “facts” is that someone who’s flogging a new book has very little to gain by making a controversial statement.
Here’s the facts as I see them. Brazille made a controversial claim. Almost a day ago someone pointed out that her claim doesn’t match available documents and asked her for evidence. She has yet to respond.
Perhaps that’s because there are legal entanglements, and over the weekend we’ll learn that her claims are 100% accurate. Or perhaps she doesn’t have evidence to back her claims. If not, how will you respond?
The problem I have with saying 'the primaries were rigged" is that it implies the DNC did something a lot more tangible than what we know so far. Intra-DNC emails showing they disliked Bernie is not much more than griping unless there’s evidence of them actually stealing votes (which is what the word “rigged” implies.) Remember Hillary had been involved with the DNC forever, she was “the establishment Democrat” whereas Bernie had been basically an independent for most of his time in the Senate. Of course people within the DNC would prefer Hillary. Even this thing about Clinton fundraising is not news-- Bernie’s campaign complained to the DNC about it in April of 2016, before Brazile claims she told Bernie.
Show me actual evidence of the DNC tipping the scales so Hillary tallied more votes than Bernie, actual favoritism, not things that give the appearance of favoritism.
I love Bernie, I wish he’d won, but Hillary had been on the national stage for decades, she had the name recognition, and she got more votes in the primaries for various reasons far beyond how the DNC was running it’s fundraising. A lot of Democrats are still pretty middle-of-the-road, they weren’t about to vote for a “socialist”, and a lot of them wanted Hillary because they genuinely thought she had a better chance against any of the GOP nominees. The only lesson here is that the DNC needs to get it’s act together instead of squabbling amongst themselves.
Turns out running as the “white knight”, then getting caught red-handed rolling in the muck, isn’t the best “optics”. Der Orangenführer started in the muck; he had nowhere to fall.
In hearings post election the DNC has admitted that they coordinated efforts with Clinton’s campaign in order to box out Sanders. During the Campaign both the DNC and Clinton campaign denied this. So yes - liar and cheater - not assumed, confirmed fact.
And why do Dems like to pretend nothing ever happened? You all are going to sink us in 2020 too.
