Going into this campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders knew he was facing an uphill battle. The political and media establishment wrote him off as a fringe candidate, a principled man on a mission to prove a point, but not a man who was going to win. In full disclosure, I felt this was not the case. My support for Senator Sanders goes back a few years and I thought he was going to turn heads because his message would resonate with a restless American public. It is for these reasons I decided to volunteer for his campaign.
Sanders knew that in order to be taken seriously, he needed to win. The other barriers could wait, in order to get far enough to have the opportunity to address them, he needed to win to keep a campaign alive. Well, they did win. But winning wasn’t always going to be enough.
Heading into this campaign, there was a presumptive knowledge that the Democratic Party viewed Secretary Clinton as the nominee-in-waiting, and that she would have the backing of the most active members of the party, from county officials to governors and everywhere in between. The fact that many of these officials, 720 to be exact, are counted as superdelegates can, and has, had a drastic impact on the race for the Democratic nomination.
The Sanders campaign knew this going in, but in recent days Senator Sanders has unveiled his strategy for attracting these superdelegates, who overwhelmingly favor Clinton. The plan is to press those superdelegates from states where the Sanders campaign won to go with the popular vote of their state.
Those who view the party through a more liberal, populist lens see superdelegates as an affront to democracy, a means for the party to protect themselves should the base throw their support behind a grassroots candidate who the party establishment sees as unelectable and a poor standard bearer.
Sander’s case seems to be more naive than what the senator should expect. Of course, superdelegates are undemocratic, and as long as they remain a part of the election process, they should obviously vote the way of their state. In state’s where Sanders won by huge margins, like New Hampshire and Kansas, he could actually be leaving those states behind in delegates. It’s an easy case to make.
What the campaign doesn’t seem to want to believe, is that the overwhelming majority of these officials will not switch allegiances to the Sanders camp unless he has a clear majority of delegates. It would be great to believe that they could convince enough superdelegates while simultaneously racking up enough to wins to come back, and I do believe it can be done, but many of these allegiances to the Clinton camp go back generations and are combined with great allegiance to the party. This is something Sanders cannot fully claim. As the longest serving independent in history, Sanders caucused with the Democrats but never joined to party, and often took principled stands against them when he believed they were wrong.
This is a problem that will not go away and time is not on the Sanders campaign’s side. The campaign knew it had some battles it had to put off in order to focus on getting enough momentum and victories to carry out a long nomination fight, it just now seems that the official fight for superdelegates is being launched, and it may have started a little late.
Featured image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, Available under a Creative Commons license.
