Apoplectic at the Trump
presidency and fearful of the horrifying long-term consequences of a potential
second Trump term, Democratic voters are involved in a heated debate over which
candidate to put up in 2020. The three candidates who are running away from the pack in opinion polling have been subjected to withering criticism—by Democrats. According
to whichever sect of armchair critic you’re interacting with at the moment, Joe
Biden is too old and too cozy with corporate interests, Bernie Sanders isn’t
really a Democrat and besides, we need a female candidate, but Elizabeth Warren
is too far left and can’t win a general election.
The level of engagement is
healthy and necessary, but the debate is riddled with false
narratives from 2016 that threaten to keep Donald Trump in the White House
until January of 2025: the Dems lose
when they don’t go left, Trump should be easy to beat, the Dems have abandoned working-class voters, and the most persistent myth of all, that
Bernie Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary
if not for the actions of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Pushed aggressively on
social media by Russian bots, the Bernie-was-robbed talking point split the
American left wide open in 2016 and helped convince a decisive number of swing
state Sanders supporters to stay home on election day, vote for Trump, or waste
their vote on Green Party candidate and Putin darling Jill Stein.
Amazingly, this myth
continues to linger in the minds of many well-intentioned but misinformed people,
poisoning their attitude toward the Democratic Party, frontrunner Joe Biden
(disdainfully referred to as “the DNC’s candidate”), and even the act of voting
itself.
The particulars of
the Bernie-was-robbed theory are that Sanders would have won the primary if not
for the Clinton campaign’s control of DNC strategy and resources, debate
scheduling, closed primaries, registration challenges faced by new voters, and
the allotment of delegates and superdelegates.
The charge that Clinton’s
control of DNC strategy and resources played a key role in her primary victory
is a classic example of the correlation-proves-causation logical fallacy. Deep
in debt in 2015, the DNC cut a deal with Clinton that gave her an unusual level
of power over party decisions in exchange for her fundraising assistance. The arrangement was unsavory, and leaked emails showed that
DNC members wanted Clinton to win, but Sanders supporters never provided
concrete data showing precisely how the wishes of a relatively small
number of powerful people made a major difference in a year-long
campaign spread over 50 states and multiple U.S. territories that drew 30
million votes.
Flowing from this broad charge were a number of grievances. Sanders supporters had conniption fits when the DNC blocked the Sanders campaign's access to the party's shared voter database, but the block was initiated because a Sanders staffer hacked the Clinton campaign's voter data, and the issue was resolved quickly. Sanders supporters complained about Clinton's access to DNC financial resources, but this funding made up just a fraction of Clinton's total primary outlays and Sanders spent twice as much money as Clinton in 2016, so the impact was minimal.
Sanders supporters claimed that their candidate was hurt by the DNC decision to schedule a limited number of party-sanctioned primary debates, and few debates during prime time hours. But the presumption that Sanders would have significantly benefited from more exposure is purely speculative and ignores Clinton’s razor sharp performance in all of the debates she was in in both 2008 and 2016. No public figure in the modern era has been more consistently prepared and on-point in this format than Clinton, and there’s little evidence that Sanders gained ground from the debates that were held in 2016. In fact, other than the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, in which Obama was uncharacteristically sluggish and on the defensive, no political debate from the past couple decades moved public opinion other than around the margins.
Since Sanders beat Clinton among independents, his supporters cried foul over the number of primary races that were closed, i.e. primaries that only allowed registered Democrats to vote. Whatever the merits of giving non-Democrats a role in choosing the Democratic candidate, the primary rules were decided at the state level, not by the DNC, and were in place well before the 2016 primary. While criticizing the closed primaries on “Face the Nation,” Sanders himself said, “I wouldn’t use the word ‘rigged,’ because we knew what the rules were.”
Sanders supporters claimed that their candidate was hurt by the DNC decision to schedule a limited number of party-sanctioned primary debates, and few debates during prime time hours. But the presumption that Sanders would have significantly benefited from more exposure is purely speculative and ignores Clinton’s razor sharp performance in all of the debates she was in in both 2008 and 2016. No public figure in the modern era has been more consistently prepared and on-point in this format than Clinton, and there’s little evidence that Sanders gained ground from the debates that were held in 2016. In fact, other than the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, in which Obama was uncharacteristically sluggish and on the defensive, no political debate from the past couple decades moved public opinion other than around the margins.
Since Sanders beat Clinton among independents, his supporters cried foul over the number of primary races that were closed, i.e. primaries that only allowed registered Democrats to vote. Whatever the merits of giving non-Democrats a role in choosing the Democratic candidate, the primary rules were decided at the state level, not by the DNC, and were in place well before the 2016 primary. While criticizing the closed primaries on “Face the Nation,” Sanders himself said, “I wouldn’t use the word ‘rigged,’ because we knew what the rules were.”
A third piece of the
theory that the 2016 primary was “rigged” was the contention that the challenges
faced by new voters and voters who were purged from voter rolls was the work of—or
done at the bidding of—the DNC. One could claim that the rules regarding
registration of new voters and the purging of voter rolls hurt Sanders more
than Clinton, as he did well among first-time voters, but the guidelines were
made by state and local government officials (many of them Republicans), not
the DNC. And some of these practices disproportionately disenfranchised people
of color—Clinton’s strongest constituency. Far from defending voter
suppression, Clinton proposed major reforms to increase access to the ballot while her campaign sued to overturn voting restrictions in multiple
states.
Sanders supporters also made a
lot of noise about delegates and superdelegates. The attacks on the allotment
of delegates among Sanders supporters could be seen as legitimate in those
states where Clinton received a higher proportion of delegates than she had won
in the popular vote, but Sanders’ supporters lacked such outrage when their
candidate benefited from other states’ undemocratic caucus systems, in which
delegates parceled out weren’t proportional to the popular vote.
As to superdelegates, Clinton’s
broad support from the beginning of the primary process may have given
her a psychological advantage (in convincing people to vote for Clinton because
they thought her candidacy was inevitable), but her superdelegate lead over
Barack Obama in the beginning of the 2008 primary had no impact on that race,
and for all of the sound and fury about delegates and superdelegates in 2016,
delegates and superdelegates had virtually nothing to do with the results of
the primary.
If one believes that
the party nominee should be chosen by the popular vote, as Sanders supporters
said when it came to the disbursement of delegates and superdelegates, then
Clinton won the primary easily, by 3.7 million votes, a 56%-44% margin.
(Ironically, once the votes were cast and it was clear that Clinton would win
the nomination, Sanders told NBC news that the superdelegates “have a very
important choice to make,” insinuating that they should consider flipping to
his side and making him the nominee, though he had lost the popular vote
overwhelmingly.)
A close look at the composition of primary voters removes any
mystery as to why Clinton won by a landslide. Sanders
did well among young voters, independents, and rural voters, but these blocs
make up a small share of the Democratic primary electorate. Clinton won or tied
all economic and educational strata and dominated bigger voting blocs:
older voters, moderate Democrats, registered Democrats as a whole, as well as
suburban and urban voters—African-Americans in particular. Today’s Democratic
Party is diverse and increasingly urban; it’s mathematically impossible to become
the Democratic nominee solely by winning independents who aren’t allowed to
vote in many primaries, rural and white voters who are shrinking as a
percentage of the total, and the 18-27-year-old demographic, who vote in the
smallest numbers.
For all of the hostility leveled
at Clinton from the left, and the constant claim that she felt entitled to “a
coronation,” the simple fact is that she worked much longer and harder for the
nomination than Sanders. Starting in 1972, when she
registered voters of color in Texas for the upcoming presidential race between
George McGovern and Richard Nixon, Clinton spent decades campaigning for
Democratic candidates, raising money for Democratic candidates, going to party
events and planning meetings, holding policy forums and town hall meetings,
networking with party functionaries, and cultivating key constituencies. And
unlike Sanders, she didn’t change her registration at the last minute to run in
the primary; she had been a registered Democrat for 48 years when she ran in
2016. Decades of grunt work created a loyal foundation in the Democratic base
that Bernie didn’t have.
In short, Hillary Clinton won
the nomination the old-fashioned way—by earning it—but the anger and
indignation spawned by the demonstrably false “rigged primary” talking point
drove a crucial number of Sanders supporters away from Clinton and helped to
give us President Trump.
Those who continue to peddle
this noxious myth in 2019 (or cart out the DNC whipping boy yet again to sneer
at Joe Biden’s consistent lead in the polls) only fuel baseless rancor and
splinter the anti-Trump vote, just as Vladimir Putin planned it. The bottom
line is that there are more of us than there are of them, and winning at the
presidential level is very, very straightforward: united we stand,
divided we fall.
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
The Iraq War turns 16; America sleeps
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
The Iraq War turns 16; America sleeps
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
