the superdelegates start as uncommitted delegates and are chosen by virtue of being sitting democratic representatives and senators, democratic state governors, state democratic party chairs and vice-chairs, former presidents and vice-presidents, and retired senate and house leadership. if any group can be said to represent the party establishment they do and they make up around 15% of the total number of convention delegates. by the rules of the democratic party they are permitted to back any candidate they choose and they are also permitted to change their minds as the race goes along. in the 32 years since they were established they have never chosen a nominee who did not have a majority of the delegates by the end of the primaries, even this year. if sanders had gotten a majority of the delegates by the convention the vast majority of the superdelegates would have gone to him too, although bill clinton might have gone ahead and given his vote to his wife.
i think my answer to your questions here are yes, and the superdelegates have nothing to do with the primary because they are independent of that part of the delegate selection process.
But I think the problem was that many of them declared their support of Clinton well before most primaries were even underway. That certainly must have swayed some primary voters.
Lots of faithful Democrats have gone to lengths to attempt to negate these instances of bias. Typically resorting to technical reading to determine rule breaking. Yes, I mean like you.
These instances reveal the state of mind between the DNC and the Campaign, specifically that Clinton was the chosen victor, and that any information that needed to cross the chasm was sent. There was no need to discuss âhey, we are going to gang up on Sanders on thisâ because it was understood, the practice rote and every day. The entire state of mind of the DNC and the Campaign was explicitly against the DNC rules.
Go at it with a tweezer if you want. It changes nothing. The DNC and Clinton subverted the democratic process, and part of the outcome of that is a Trump presidency. Congratulations Clinton apologist - you are complicit.
it isnât a âtechnical reading,â itâs not going âat it with tweezers,â itâs the plain reading of the rules. this isnât a contest for chair of the social committee, this is a bruising fight for the nomination to the highest elected office in the united states. sanders gave clinton hell throughout the campaign and he lost both in delegate counts and in primary votes cast and after it was over he supported clinton on the stump. he, at least, understood what was going on.
as far as the counterfactual of sanders winning the nomination, i quote myselfâ
Yes Iâm a faithful Democrat, no Iâm not faithful to the (outgoing) DNC leadership, yes I agree that the DNC leadership was strongly biased towards Clinton and did things (like the debate scheduling) that gave her an advantage, and certainly I would have liked to see a less-vulnerable candidate fronting the party. However, language has meaning and power, and there is no reason not to be accurate with the choice of language. The DNC did not break rules, Clinton is neither a crook nor corrupt nor is she owned by the banks, as much as she is certainly an economic moderate conservative who rubs shoulders with the power elites.
The Dems have adjusted their nomination process repeatedly since it came out of the back rooms in the 60s, obviously they need to do it again. It isnât easy finding a process that allows a Sanders but doesnât allow a Trump, for sure we should keep trying, and maybe this round it would have been better to err on the side of boldness rather than caution.
Well, you are wrong because Clinton was all these things by the measure of the majority that elected Trump, so whether its true in fact, it was true in practice. It was a grave mistake made by the DNC by allowing Clinton to dominate the process, and allowing them to break the rules that ensured her nomination. Was it criminal? No. Was it cheating. Yes, cheating in the most juvenile way. Cheating in a way that should have terminated her candidacy, and worse that smaller things that have ended campaigns in the past.
Navarro, your take is absurd - you postulate then that the election was lost at the outset, because Sanders could not have possibly done better than Clinton, and as we all know Clinton seized defeat from the jaws of victory. You can prove your view point to me when you rewind time and let Sanders run against Trump. Till then you are counting wishes.
[quote=âlava, post:47, topic:89323â]
and as we all know Clinton seized defeat from the jaws of victory.
[/quote]Bernie and Obama both lost PA in the primaries in April, and Bernie would have had to pull Obama 08 numbers in WI to win.
as can you. [quote=âlava, post:47, topic:89323â]
Was it cheating. Yes, cheating in the most juvenile way. Cheating in a way that should have terminated her candidacy, and worse that smaller things that have ended campaigns in the past.
[/quote]
when the plain reading of the rules goes against you, you repeat yourself even more emphatically. iâm not a trump voter, you canât convince me by repeating falsehoods until you magically make them true. itâs clear that you have no stake in the democratic party, that you havenât worked your ass off over the course of this campaign to try and make a difference, that it is more important to you to sit back and smugly proclaim âi told you soâ without regard for the suffering this will cause to people here and across the world. at this point youâre no better than my aunt and uncle who voted for trump, in fact youâre worse because you know this will be a disaster while they think this will be a godsend.
And you are everything that just crushed the Democratic party, and will keep crushing it until you open your eyes and admit to what is plain truth to those outside the Party. No, I did not work for the Democratic party, because it was not working for people like me, but for itself and its benefactors. No, Iâll work for the future Democratic party if it in fact gathers the will to toss out the likes of those that just led us down this path.
And you, by sticking up for this broken system you are in fact the one responsible for this mess we are in, but enabling Clinton, and the kind of party that would rally behind her despite her obvious flaws, and set itself up for the loss we now have to live with. The party was supposed to be unbiased, it was not. And you want to snivel at me for not being able to deliver the letter of the rules? And you canât see how right there you are they myopic Democrat ready to follow Clinton off the cliff, taking every single one of us with you. You smug bastard, you should be so lucky that this will be the last of the likes of you inside the party.
Uh, yeah there was. The DNC insisted on backing an unelectable candidate, when theyâre supposed to get behind their best chance for the sake of the party and the country.
PA voted Hillary in after Bernieâs primary campaign was in full momentum, and not in a squeaker. Bernie would have required a massive shift in voters like Obama achieved with one problem: Bernie is not Obama. Bernie will never be Obama, and good for him his effect on the future is much more hopeful.
I am saying it would be closer, but there is absolutely no possible way for Bernie to crush Trump.
BTW, there is nothing in the OP about Bernie beating Trump.
Personally, I donât know what would have happened had Bernie been the candidate. I suspect that he would have won, but thatâs based in gut feeling as much as anything else. Weâll never know.
However, none of that has any bearing on the questions posed in the OP.
Iâm particularly trying to be fair because I fell into the early (TV) exit poll trap that said there was something like a 20% swing between 2016 and 2012 with white working class voters in MI. There was also multiple sources pulling fluctuating participation numbers on Wikipedia for the election and caused problems too.
I also was caught off guard the amount of direct personal effects of the election on my life and thought Bernie would have won at first, only to see the numbers come in throwing all of that off entirely. Itâs very important to realize that Clinton might end up with 63+ million votes and still have lost the election as the final votes are tallied. The most horrifying part of the election is that Trump may have won easily on an above average turnout with a 7 digit difference on the popular vote.
Iâve been trying (with limited success) to to discuss this crap productively, so Iâm trying to be careful with what I say.
TL;DR Everyone vote, increase the participation numbers even if you throw your vote down on yourself. Trump/Clinton/etc winning the election with 25% of the voting populationsâ participation will mean nothing will ever change.
given that by the time the votes are finished being counted she will likely have 2,000,000+ more votes than trump will it seems odd to regard supporting her as following her off a cliff. the vagaries of the electoral college have twice resulted in a loss by the popular vote winner in the past 16 years. is the electoral college her fault as well?
and by the way, although i feel somewhat obliged to apologize for it in retrospect, i was not sniveling about your unconcern about the actual rules of the democratic party, i was sneering. i do think it would give you somewhat more perspective on things if you would volunteer to work voter registration drives, take part in get out the vote efforts, take part as an election worker helping to oversee an election. if there is a candidate you prefer for the nominee attend party meetings and become a county or state delegate to your stateâs party convention. iâve spent 30 years working to make my county party more inclusive and more liberal. with our get out the vote efforts my county went for the republican by the smallest margin since carter won the county in 76. for texas that is an accomplishment.
i admit you got under my skin because you attack what you donât understand and seem uninterested in doing the actual work of trying to make a difference.
As I have tried to remind people many times over the last year-
The DNC is a private organization. They can do things however the fuck they want, and it really makes no difference legally or otherwise, whether people think their method is fair.
The question we should be asking is not whether they rigged their own primary- They have every right to do so- Itâs why in the fuck are we allowing two PRIVATE organizations to be the gatekeepers for our PUBLIC offices?
FYI I have done all the things you mention, not in this election, and I will again as I see fit.
And yes, Clinton has led us off a Cliff, or more precisely the DNC which she stacked in her favor. Trump was a lame candidate, and it was only Clintons own vulnerabilities that made her weak enough to lose in this fashion. Iâm not saying it was not close - my point is it should not have even been close.
But you blame me, blame Sanders for what was Clintonâs folly, and weâll all be paying for it for the next four years.
I am not pissed at Bernie, I am pissed at Clinton. If anything she might have done better if she had fully internalized the anti-establishment messages from the Sanders campaign that resonated with so many.
I think we all underestimated how much people really just did not like Clinton. And while sexism is certainly a factor, I do not feel it was the overriding reason she could not get people to vote for her. All those jokes about how wooden she was on SNL, all that âI am now approaching you like a regular person, as I practicedâ and âIâm going to attempt a casual leanâ, that stuff spoke to her lack of charisma, which fed into lack of trust and the corruption claims, the wholesale lack of ability to articulate just what the heck she was for other than ânot Trump.â
It was really eye opening to see Lessig absolutely rip into the Clintons after the campaign. He did think they were corrupt and only held his tongue because he knew the alternative was so much worse.
Doesnât matter, the much worse is what we got, and ⌠it is what we deserved, frankly.
