There was a stretch of days and weeks in the not-too-distant
past during which Bernie Sanders was winning primary after caucus after
primary, but he still seemed unable to cut into Hillary Clinton's lead in any
meaningful way.Clinton had vaulted far ahead of the Vermont Senator with strong
showings in the first and second Super Tuesdays of the election. That reality,
coupled with the fact that most Democratic primaries award delegates on a
proportional, rather than a winner-take-all, basis made it tough for Sanders to
close the gap between himself and the former secretary of State.It didn't help
that a majority of superdelegates — elected politicians and party apparatchik
who can vote for any candidate — decided to throw their weight behind Clinton
early on.
Superdelegates are in place to to avoid scenarios like the one
currently playing out in the Republican race, and they tend to favor candidates
whom they see as most loyal to the Democratic Party. But Sanders' campaign was
convinced that, if the political revolution materialized for him at the polls,
superdelegates would have a hard time defending a decision to vote for Clinton.
"I think, at the end of the day, we're going to end up
with more pledged delegates than Secretary Clinton," Sanders said.
"And then I think the superdelegates are going to have make a very
difficult decision."
His supporters rallied around the message. A Chicago man
named Spencer Thayer created a website called the Superdelegate Hit List (later
renamed the Superdelegate List) that provided the names, phone numbers and
email addresses of each superdelegate and encouraged supporters to
"harass" them into supporting Sanders instead of Clinton. (Thayer did
not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Kim Metcalfe, Alaska's national committee woman one of the
state's four unpledged superdelegates, was on the list.
"I shut down my Twitter feed and my Facebook because it
was just overwhelming," Metcalfe says of the response she received after
declaring she would support Clinton. Some Sanders supporters continued to rail
against her using the hashtag #kimmetcalfe when her handle no longer existed.
She was called "a LOSER," "an
embarrassment," "a #pathetic #bimbo," "shameful,
irresponsible & disgustingly patronizing;" they cursed at her, and
made memes about her.
Metcalfe was unmoved. "People feel like I should
support Sanders, but I'm a Hillary delegate and I'm not going to flip to
Sanders," she says. "The rules are the rules, and I can support
whoever I want."
Metcalfe's experience, say Bob Mulholland, another
superdelegate who supports Clinton, was not out of the ordinary. "After
that hit list showed up, women — mostly women, DNC members — were getting
calls, including at home, at the office, 10:30 at night," he says.
"One man, Shawn Bagley here in California, he got a call at 2 a.m., he
nearly thought someone in his family was killed in a car accident." He
wrote a letter to the Sanders campaign complaining about the behavior.
As the dynamics of the race are changing, and Sanders' path
to the nomination is growing narrower, superdelegates are becoming all the more
crucial to the senator's campaign. "We want to make a case to
superdelegates that Bernie Sanders is the strongest candidate," senior
campaign strategist Mark Longabaugh told the LA Times.
That puts Sanders supporters who have previously railed
against superdelegates as "undemocratic" in a tough spot — for
instance, the coalition of Sanders supporters who created a petition site,
Don't Deny Democracy, asking superdelegates to vote for the candidate who wins
the popular vote.
Joshua Grossman, president of the super PAC Progressive Kick,
calls himself "the ringy-ist" of the website's ringleaders. "We
believe in democracy and that everyone's vote should count the same,"
Grossman says. "We do hope Bernie Sanders wins — this was done to help his
campaign — but it was a situation where principles and practicality were in
harmony with each other."
He says he stands by the message of his petition, even if it
ultimately works against his preferred candidate. "My position hasn't
changed; we should respect the cumulative will of the voters and whoever is
ahead in pledged delegates that were elected by the people," he says.
"The cumulative winner of the pledged delegate count is who should be the
Democratic nominee."
No comments:
Post a Comment