(Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.)
[D]on’t look now, but Bernie Sanders just might win the California primary June 7.
The latest poll, by the Public Policy Institute of California, has Sanders just 2 points behind Hillary Clinton, who leads him by 46 to 44 percent.
That poll could be an outlier. Most other surveys show Clinton farther ahead. But the Public Policy Institute poll is the most recent — the phone calls were made between May 13 and 22 — and in March the PPIC poll had Clinton ahead by 7 points, indicating a small but perceptible shift in the Vermont senator’s direction.
So were it not for one complication, the night of June 7 could be a big one for the “political revolution” Sanders seeks to lead.
The complication is that well before the polls close in California at 11 p.m. EDT, Clinton will almost surely have clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.
Who needs California when you have New Jersey?
Blasphemy to a movie star, perhaps, but politically true this year. Barring some bizarre event, an hour or so after 8 p.m., when New Jersey’s polls close, Clinton will have gone over the top. Assuming she gets at least 40 percent of the 126 pledged delegates Garden State voters will choose that day, she will have more than 2,383 delegates committed to voting for her at the Democratic National Convention in July.
That’s a majority.
It will be so pronounced by the broadcast and cable networks, who will declare Clinton the nominee even before the California results pad that majority no matter who wins there.
It’s true that the networks have no official powers, and that 525 of Clinton’s delegates (this is the latest projection of CBS News) are superdelegates who are free to change their minds. Some or all of them could join the 39 superdelegates who have endorsed Sanders. Indeed, if just half of her superdelegates switched to Sanders, the two candidates would be tied.
But the chances of this occurring are (again, barring some bizarre event) effectively zero. Many of the superdelegates are elected officials — senators, House members, governors, a few state legislators — for whom breaking a political commitment is akin to a mortal sin.
It’s one they might be tempted to commit if, after all the votes are counted, Sanders had won more actual votes and therefore more pledged delegates than Clinton.
Theoretically possible. All he has to do is win 68 percent of the votes in the remaining contests to end up with a lead in pledged delegates.
To call this unlikely would be a gross understatement. Outside of Vermont, Sanders has won no primary by anything close to that margin. Nor does any poll project a blowout like that in California, New Jersey or anywhere else. In fact, they project losses.
But even should he win them, he could not make up for her overall lead in delegates. That’s because she has a big lead in the actual votes of actual voters.
That’s how you win elections.
In the 35 primaries held so far, Clinton has received 3 million more votes than Sanders. He’s won most of the caucus states. But caucus turnouts are tiny compared with primary turnouts, and some caucuses report only the delegates won by each candidate, not the number of voters who came to support that candidate.
Sanders won some of the 14 caucuses (this includes some in U.S. territories, such as Guam) by huge margins, cutting Clinton’s overall lead by … well, by maybe 135,000 votes, as computed by The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” staff.
That lead could go up or down a bit depending on what happens June 7 (and will surely go up after the last primary June 14 in Washington, D.C.), but it’s not likely to dip below 2.5 million.
Sanders and many of his supporters have described the entire nominating process as rigged. They have a point. But processes do not spring from nature. They are all arranged. Just as a “political boss” is a political leader of whom one disapproves, the way a process is arranged gets called “rigged” by those who do not approve of the arrangement, or its results.
In this case, the “rigging” institution is the Democratic “establishment,” a term rarely defined by those who employ it, raising the suspicion that it does not exist.
But it does, and can be divided into two main segments. The first consists of elected Democrats and the leaders of Democratic-leaning interest constituencies such as the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.
Some of these folks are for Sanders. Were most of them for him, then he would be the choice of the Democratic establishment, which would no doubt please him. But they aren’t. Most of them are for Clinton. In supporting her, they are exercising their judgment, which is what they are supposed to do.
The other part of the establishment is the Democratic National Committee. It — or at least its chair, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz — has been obviously pro-Clinton, which is not what it is supposed to do (and which Wasserman Schultz denies).
But here are two things to remember about the DNC. First, if the biggest problem you have is that the DNC opposes you, you don’t have any problems. The DNC hardly bestrides the political world like a colossus. Decades ago, it decreed that no state should hold a primary until March and New Hampshire should not necessarily have the first primary. New Hampshire replied (in effect), “Don’t bother me, little boy.” The DNC caved.
Its impotence surfaced again this year. One reasonable complaint of the Sanders forces is that the DNC set the candidate debate schedule so some of them were on Saturday evenings, all but guaranteeing a small audience, which might benefit Clinton, the early front-runner.
The audiences were kind of small. The net political impact was kind of zero. First of all, Clinton handled herself well in the debates. And Sanders raised a great deal of money, with which he bought himself a great big megaphone (outspending Clinton in many states), which he used to get his message across. Lots of voters responded to that message, and Sanders won a lot of votes and a lot of primaries.
Not quite enough, but not because he was not heard.
The DNC is also legitimate, both Democratically and democratically. Most of its members are chosen by state committees, whose members are chosen by county or congressional district committees, whose members are chosen by local (town, precinct, ward) committees, whose meetings are well-publicized and open to all. The DNC qualifies as a constituent assembly of the nation’s Democrats.
If Sanders supporters are unhappy with the DNC, they can take it over. Just organize folks to go to those meetings, sit through them and elect their allies to the county and state committees.
It’s happened before. That’s how conservatives elected enough delegates to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964. It’s how Christian conservatives took control of the Republican Party organization in Iowa.
It isn’t easy. It takes commitment and persistence, which Sanders supporters may lack. Bernie Sanders may not really be a socialist, but because he calls himself one, the “political revolution” he proclaims is the closest America has come to a socialist movement in decades.
In that context, the difficulties of sustaining socialist politics may best have been described (as were so many things) by Oscar Wilde. The problem with socialism, he said, is that “it takes too many evenings.”
