Democratic presidential candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T. has changed his tune now that he’s near the top of the throne.
He’s warning Democratic superdelegates to keep out of the race — a major flip-flip from his opinion on the matter in 2016.
He’s now saying that if he wins the popular vote – even if it’s a close race – he should earn the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
And some Democratic insiders believe the socialist is attempting to rig the system himself.
“I think that the will of the people should prevail,” the independent senator from Vermont said last month. “The person with the most votes should become the nominee.”
But that’s the complete opposite of what he said just four years ago.
Sanders in 2016 urged superdelegates – hundreds of party insiders and elected officials who are automatically given delegate status at the convention – to intervene on his behalf even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and the most normal delegates.
He then told NBC’s Lester Holt that his campaign was “on the phone right now” with the superdelegates trying to make that happen.
“You’d be defying history,” Holt reminded him. “You’d be defying the will of the voters.”
Sanders was at the time unmoved.
“Defying history is what this campaign has been all about,” he said.
That wasn’t a one-off instance, either.
In a CNN interview that year, he said he wasn’t “a great fan” of superdelegates in general. But as long as they’re there, they should vote for him – even if he had lost the popular vote.
And at another point, a reporter asked if superdelegates should step in even if he had lost the popular vote, “in essence rejecting the opinion of the voters.”
Sanders was unequivocal, saying he hoped to win a majority of pledged delegates – but if he didn’t, he would “welcome” the superdelegates to step in, override that vote and make him the nominee.
Now, he’s done a complete 180, shunning the intervention or use of superdelegates altogether.
Now, it seems he wants to listen to the will of the voters, whereas in 2016, he tried to silence them.
But unlike 2016, the superdelegates will not vote in the first round at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, when it’ll take a straight majority of 1,991 pledged delegates to win.
Though, if no one reaches that number by then, all bets are off. In the second round, superdelegates will be allowed to vote, and pledged delegates will be allowed to change their own votes.
According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Biden now appears poised to capture the threshold of 1,991 delegates to win the nomination, based on the political website’s predictor.
If its projections are true, and Sanders also still captures the majority of vote totals, he’ll look to convince party officials to choose him based on the popular vote.
Capturing the popular vote would give him a plurality — in other words, not a majority. Sanders is insisting that that’s enough to earn him the nomination and that superdelegates should accept this.
But the superdelegates have other plans.
“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, told the New York Times. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”
Rep. Greg Meeks, D-N.Y., accused Sanders of trying to “game” the system.
“I’m not for gaming the system,” he told Politico.
It’s easy to see why the superdelegates won’t support Sanders.
They’re longtime party insiders and leaders. In other words, the very people Sanders has railed against repeatedly. The establishment. Having a chance to deliver the nomination to Biden instead would no doubt please many of them.
A contested or brokered convention also raises another prospect: Neither Biden nor Sanders will win … and the nominee could be someone who didn’t even run.
“At some point you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,’” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., told the Times. “Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”