by Frank Holmes, reporter
While you’re enjoying your Black Friday, more than a dozen Democratic presidential candidates are spending every minute trying to figure out how to win, bribe, or steal the nomination next summer.
They’re meeting with pollsters, memorizing zingers written by slick image-shapers, and trying to pretend they’re running because they really care about you.
But they’re not the only ones crafting strategy. A disturbing number of Democratic Party insiders have let it slip that they are getting ready to rig the 2020 presidential primary…some are even saying it’s the only fair thing to do!
Remember 2016? After the Democratic National Committee decided it would hand Hillary Clinton the nomination, it scheduled the debates so no one would see them and fed her the questions in advance… and she was so unpopular that Sen. Bernie Sanders still pressed her all the way to the convention!
The Bernie Bros couldn’t understand why their candidate kept winning primaries and piling up delegates…but falling behind Crooked Hillary.
The answer was superdelegates—former elected officials and uncommitted party functionaries (think of them as elitist insiders) who get to vote for a candidate, too.
Sanders went down swinging, telling his supporters the nomination had been “rigged”…and he was right!
No matter what you heard, no candidate won a majority of delegates in 2016, or 2008 for that matter. The political elites used superdelegates to hand the nomination to Barack Obama in 2008 and then give it to Hillary in 2016.
Every single Hillary Clinton superdelegate erased the votes of 10,000 Democrats who backed Bernie.
After Sanders blew the whistle, the Democratic Party voted that superdelegates don’t get to vote…on the first ballot.
That had party elites and Clinton supporters boiling mad. One Hillary superdelegate called it “a political murder-suicide”…and the Clintons know plenty about suicide.
So, they worked in a loophole: if nobody gets a majority on the first ballot, then superdelegates get to pick the nominee again.
Now, D.C.’s powerbrokers are getting ready to set up their chance to crown one of their own—Democratic voters be damned!
“I think it will be a brokered convention,” said 2008 presidential candidate Bill Richardson, a major Clinton insider.
James Zogby, the pollster’s brother and DNC member, said he doesn’t see any presidential hopeful who has a prayer of winning a majority of delegates in the primaries, “early or late.”
There are too many candidates and, polls show them getting less popular the more voters see them.
Joe Biden’s held steady… but the latest polls show him in a dead-heat with Elizabeth Warren.
Bernie Sanders has a solid 15 percent of Democratic voters. Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are rising.
The race is fragmenting so badly with Michael Bloomberg, Deval Patrick, and Hillary Clinton filing papers or talking about jumping in.
Candidates don’t have much time to land a knockout punch. The Democrats decided to front-load their primaries again: 40 percent of all elected delegates will be chosen in the first month of voting.
Democrats also hand out delegates to any candidate who wins 15 percent of the vote in some states.
It’s easy to see losing candidates piling up enough early support to have a brokered convention…and that’s when the party elites spring into action.
If no candidate wins 1,885 delegates on the first ballot, then 771 superdelegates can vote for any candidate they want—even somebody who never ran in the primaries.
If things get to a second ballot, “we will look like a dystopian Hunger Games auction,” Biden supporter William Owen told Politico.
Left-wing activists hope that Warren and Sanders will get a majority of delegates and swap delegates between each other. “Don’t be surprised if Bernie Sanders becomes the kingmaker of the convention,” according to The Washington Post.
But more and more party insiders think Bernie and Warren are unelectable. They’ll stop them from getting the nomination no matter how many votes they win.
They’re looking for a savior to step in…and many of them owe favors to the Clinton political machine.
If things go to a second ballot, superdelegates could hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton like they did four years ago.
“Pushing it off to the second round just means that a divided base will once again have their voices stolen by a couple of hundred party insiders,” wrote conservative blogger Jazz Shaw at HotAir.com. “If you let the superdelegates steal the show again you will fracture your base in two elections in a row. And you’ll deserve the subsequent fallout.”
But the Clinton-Obama machine that runs the Democratic Party wants to keep rigging the election, no matter what…possibly for Hillary or Michelle Obama. And they don’t care what anyone, including their voters, feel about it.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”