Subject: ICYMI: Superdelegates will decide who wins the Democratic nomination — but not until the convention
From: Michael Briggs <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 May 2016 17:59:01 +0000

New York Daily News: Superdelegates will decide who wins the Democratic nomination — but not until the convention

By Shaun King

Wow. This is incredibly interesting.

In May of 2008, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is currently the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, served as co-chair of Hillary Clinton's campaign against Barack Obama. Even though the campaign was down on delegates, Wasserman Schultz actually said superdelegates should side with Clinton anyway, since she was the stronger candidate come the general election.

She said:

"Senator Clinton won last night. She will win next Tuesday. She will win in Puerto Rico. And the case needs to be made to the superdelegates — who, Governor, at the end of the day, that's who's going to decide this — that Hillary Clinton is the strongest potential nominee in the fall, and that's what we're going to — the case we're going to continue to make."

Well, here we are, eight years later, in May of 2016, and in virtually every single poll about the general election, Bernie Sanders outperforms Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.

Not only that, but Sanders outperforms Clinton with independent voters and young people by huge margins. Both demographics will be key come November.

In other words, it certainly appears that Bernie Sanders, and not Hillary Clinton, is the strongest Democratic candidate for the general election against Trump.

The truth is, again, that superdelegates are likely going to decide who is the Democratic nominee.

Let's do the math:

The nominee needs 2,383 delegates to win the nomination.

Currently Hillary has 1,768 pledged delegates and Bernie has 1,494 for a difference of 274 delegates.

930 delegates remain.

Hillary Clinton needs 615 pledged delegates to cross the threshold she needs. That's a bit more than 65% of the delegates and she is not predicted to win even one of the remaining states by that margin.

In other words, after the final primaries are held in June, Hillary Clinton will not have won enough delegates to be the nominee.

The superdelegates will have to decide.

In many ways, the choice comes down to either the evident reality that Sanders performs better against Trump than Clinton or loyalty to the candidate who is clearly preferred by party insiders.

In response to this line of thinking, Clinton loyalists like to say that she's ahead of Sanders by 3 million votes, but upon closer inspection, that's actually not true at all.

In 12 states where Bernie won, they held caucuses in which individual votes are not tallied in the same way as they are in closed primaries.

For instance, in Washington state, which has nearly 7.1 million people, Bernie won 72.7% of the vote there, but not one single vote is counted toward the numbers where Clinton claims a 3 million vote lead over him.

In Alaska, Bernie won 81% of the vote, but not a single vote is counted toward this tally that the Clinton campaign leans on so heavily. The same is true for Maine. There, Bernie won by 29%, but because all three are caucus states, the vote tallies aren't even included.

This means we really don't know the vote difference between Clinton and Sanders.

The Clinton campaign knows this. Their friends in the media know this, but they continue to allow the campaign to tout that 3 million number even though they know full well that it's not accurate. The Democratic primaries and caucuses simply don't have accurate popular vote totals.

Not only that, but an even bigger lie has been told to the public about superdelegates.

The popular trope among Hillary supporters now is that she earned them because she won certain states or is ahead in the popular vote. That's a complete farce.

There were 359 superdelegates who pledged their vote to Hillary Clinton before even a single vote had been cast. That represents 68% of the superdelegates who have pledged to support her.

They didn't pledge their support to her because she was ahead in the popular vote or because she won Texas and Georgia. They pledged their support to her nearly a year ago. They believed then that she was such a strong candidate that it was a safe bet for them to throw their vote to her.

It's likely that they never imagined that Bernie Sanders would win 21 primaries and caucuses with 9 still remaining. Nobody could've predicted that.

It's likely that they never imagined that Donald Trump would not only become the Republican nominee, but that he would actually resonate with millions of Americans.

So, even as Bernie began to win state after state after state, superdelegates who had already pledged their public loyalty to Clinton no longer supported the actual will of the voters in their own states.

Right now, in spite of the shocking success of Bernie's campaign, 93% of superdelegates who have made their votes clear are backing Clinton. Again, the hype about them supporting Clinton because of the popular vote is a lie.

If 93% of them were supporting Bernie right now in addition to those already in his camp, Bernie would have 2,019 delegates and Hillary would have 1,807.

To say that the presence and intentions of these superdelegates hasn't made a difference is simply disingenuous. They are included in almost every public tally and makes it seem as if Hillary Clinton simply can't be beat.

I've said it before and I'll say it again — Hillary Clinton is going to absolutely struggle against Donald Trump.

It was a mistake for the superdelegates to pledge their support to her before anyone ever voted. It was a mistake to make a former Co-Chair of her campaign the Chair of the DNC. And it would be a mistake for the superdelegates, who don't actually get to make their intentions official until July, to blindly stick with Clinton when the polls show the trouble that's ahead.

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