The Fix: No matter how you measure it, Bernie Sanders isn’t winning the Democratic primary
When you walk into Hillary Clinton’s national campaign headquarters in downtown Brooklyn, the first thing you see is an unsubtle reminder of the state of the race. There on the wall facing the reception desk is a huge chart, with every single pledged delegate and the state in which each was won indicated. There it is, in a series of filled-in blue and pink boxes: Why Clinton will almost certainly be her party’s nominee.
That bit of data hasn’t been universally embraced.
The delegate count is the only tally that matters in determining who will win each party’s nominating contest. It’s always been that way, but over time the selection of those delegates became more democratic. Right now the nomination process exists as a sort of demi-democratic process in which elections were retrofit to work with the internal decision-making processes of each party. So there are still vestiges of weirdness: caucuses, unpledged delegates and superdelegates and the conventions themselves. These are not the way purely democratic elections work.
Which is why some people are skeptical. The New York Times had an article over the weekend detailing the extent to which people think the process is at odds with democracy. It included this paragraph:
It is not true that Sanders is having trouble catching Clinton “because of her overwhelming lead with ‘superdelegates.’ ” He is having trouble catching her because he trails her badly with pledged delegates (as on that sign at Clinton headquarters), and the states he keeps winning are smaller states with fewer delegates given out.
In fact, by every possible democratic measure, Clinton is winning. She’s winning in states (and territories) won, which isn’t a meaningful margin of victory anyway. She's winning in the popular vote by 2.4 million votes — more than a third more than Sanders has in total. In part that’s because Sanders is winning lower-turnout caucuses, but it’s mostly because he’s winning smaller states. And she’s winning with both types of delegates.
So why is this bewildering? Because it seems like Sanders should be gaining big ground against Clinton — and so “superdelegates” get blamed.
Party nominations are not federal elections. They’re party-run and have a lot of idiosyncrasies as a result. But more voters have voted for the front-runner in each party than for the runners-up. That’s what democratic results are supposed to look like.
The question that’s worth asking is why supporters of trailing candidates think that democracy is being subverted and who benefits from their thinking that. But we’ll leave that to you to assess.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/11/no-matter-how-you-measure-it-bernie-sanders-isnt-winning-the-democratic-primary/
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They can't deny him the nomination if he ends up ahead in the pledged delegate count. They might hate it, but they'll have little choice.
It ain't that complicated. If a candidate is ahead by 250 pledged delegates and 2.4M votes, then that candidate is winning by any measurable standard.
