While Bernie Sanders popularity and message is gaining momentum and support, many still cling to the idea that Hillary is a sure thing. Despite the fact that she consistently fails to poll ahead when pitted against a Republican candidate. A recent national poll to look at the question was NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, it found, Sanders beats Trump by 15 percentage points compared to a 10-point win for Clinton.
Yet what we see is a broken system. It turns o
ut, the Democratic party decides its nominee in as extremely undemocratic way – and is a ticking time bomb for the party and its voter base if Sanders keeps winning.
The Democratic Party’s nomination will ultimately be decided by more than 4,700 delegates at its nominating convention in the summer. Most of those delegates are allocated based on votes in each state’s primary or caucus. However, the party also assigns what are known as “super delegates” – 700 or so people who aren’t elected by anyone during the primary process and are free to vote any way they want at the convention. They are made up of members of Congress and members of the Democratic National Committee – which is made up of much of the establishment that Sanders is implicitly running against.
According to University of Georgia lecturer Josh Putnam, super delegates exist solely to allow DNC elites to better control who ultimately becomes their nominee. “The reason super delegates came into being in the interim period between the 1980 and 1984 elections was to allow the party establishment an increased voice in the nomination process,” he wrote on his blog in 2009.
While they only make up about one-sixth of the total delegates, they are more than enough to swing the election either way – even if a candidate clearly wins a majority of votes and regular delegates during the primary season. In other words, it could make the primary elections meaningless. Bernie could end up decisively winning the popular vote but still have the nomination stripped away from him at this summer’s convention.
Now, there is still a long way to go before this could ever become a reality. There’s a very good chance that Clinton will end up winning the public primary elections in the end, but it’s also entirely possible the super delegates will realize the mayhem it will cause if they expressly go against their voters’ wishes and cede their votes to Sanders.
But given the unprecedented support Sanders seems to be causing inside the party’s establishment, anything is possible.
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