Bernie Sanders' latest tergiversations and downright sleazy strategy to game the Democratic convention in his favor is blatantly anti-democratic as well as anti-Democratic. His alleged strength in the process has been based on his strong showing in the voter-suppressing caucuses, the extent to which that is true is embedded in these paragraphs comparing the caucuses and primaries at Fivethirtyeight.
Counting only caucuses, Sanders has won 63 percent of the vote, 64 percent of the delegates and 11 of the 16 contests. In doing so, he has earned 341 elected delegates, compared with Clinton’s 195 delegates, for a margin of 146 delegates. These caucuses have had approximately1 1.1 million participants. As a point of comparison, turnout in the caucuses has been only about 13 percent of the total number of votes President Obama got in the 2012 presidential election in these states.2
Sanders has done far worse in the states that have held primaries. Counting just primaries, including Tuesday’s in Washington,3 Sanders has won only 42 percent of the vote, 42 percent of delegates and 10 of the 34 statewide contests.4 Clinton earned 1,576 elected delegates, compared with Sanders’s 1,158, for a margin of 418. The turnout in these contests has been far higher than in the caucuses, with a little more than 24 million votes cast. That’s about 49 percent of the total number of votes Obama got in the 2012 election in these states.
The figure of 1.1 million voters in caucus states as compared to more than 24 million voters in primary states is rather breathtaking. If this nomination process were an election system in a Mississippi or Alabama under the Voting Rights Act, the use of voter suppressing caucuses would have once constituted a reason for an injunction to be filed, but it is still the basis of the alleged champion of democracy, Sanders, demanding that super delegates in those states with caucuses give him their vote. Considering the tiny numbers of those participating in the caucuses he doesn't have any kind of case that his results were representative sample of the voters as a whole.
That is shown by the results in Washington state where its wacky system of having a binding caucus and a non-binding primary runs as perfect an experiment as could be designed demonstrating that. From the same article at Fivethirtyeight.
Whether [Shaun] King intended it or not, he implied that caucuses — which often require hours of participation and mean lower turnout — are representative of what would happen if a larger electorate had its say. Well, a funny thing happened in Washington on Tuesday: The state held a mail-in, beauty-contest primary — so voting was easy, but no delegates were at stake. (The Associated Press has declared Hillary Clinton the winner.) The results are still being finalized, but Clinton leads by about 6 percentage points with more than 700,000 votes counted. Sanders won the Washington caucuses, which had 230,000 participants, by 46 percentage points.
So, turnout was much higher in the Washington primary than in the caucuses, and Clinton did much better. Something similar happened in Nebraska, where Clinton lost the early March caucuses by 14 percentage points and won the early May primary, in which no delegates were awarded, by 7 points.
In short, when the number of votes cast for the same candidates in the same state was more than twice as large, Clinton easily won over Sanders. It would be good to have more examples because I can't think of a better reason to get rid of the caucuses because they suppress votes and have a good chance of producing a less acceptable candidate for the party nomination.
Shaun King is a crack pot and a horses ass but I'm afraid he's typical of those who are sticking with Bernie Sanders to the bitter end and beyond. No fact is going to alter their fantasy and their paranoid wishful thinking. If anything the fact that Sanders, the candidate of the self-defined left, is the one who has had to rely on the most anti-democratic feature of the process, the caucuses. Given this a good argument could be made that the super delegates who pledged to Clinton from those states are expressing the wishes of those who were unable to participate in the anti-democratic caucuses. They certainly seem to be more typical of Democratic voters, in general, when the system facilitates the casting of votes. Even one of the most insanely irrational Bernie or Busters I know of online loves to brag about how the by-mail vote in Washington State elections results in far higher votes than in states where that is made harder. There are few states with a process more blatantly vote-suppressing than a caucus, I doubt any which tried one would even be able to get it through the Roberts court, the voter suppression of it is so blatant.
I, for the life of me, can't believe that Bernie Sanders is doing what he's doing and saying what he's saying because it is at odds with his whole career in politics and the claimed aspirations of his supporters of whom I was recently one.
That Bernie Sanders is grasping onto that rotted strand of argument is certainly counterproductive of any good intentions he might have. It discredits him and it discredits any supposed movement he can salvage out of his support. I don't think that movement will be led by any politician or any big name lefty. That model has been a failure since before Eugene McCarthy so notably didn't produce anything enduring. I would recommend you go back to this morning's lecture and listen to what Walter Brueggemann says about the difference between social justice coming from the top down and the bottom up. I think the Sanders supporters are a good example of top down in the same way that the elite faction exiled to Babylon as compared to the bottom which were left in Jerusalem. I think that people who understand that context because they take such information seriously are far more likely to be the source of an enduring struggle with a chance to make lasting change than the whiter, more credentialed Bernie Sanders supporters.
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