Saturday, April 30, 2016

Dear Democrats: Stop Bullying Sanders Supporters Into Backing Hillary Clinton



Democrats are setting themselves up for a crushing loss in November unless Clinton backers stop bullying Bernie Sanders supporters. Here’s why.

Neither candidate will clinch the nomination before the convention

After losing four out of five primaries on Tuesday, the overwhelming question from Hillary Clinton supporters is whether or not the legions of voters backing Bernie Sanders will fall in line, accept Clinton’s inevitable coronation, and vote for her to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

This is an unfair and illegitimate question, and completely ignores why Sanders was able to activate so many people across the country and persuade nearly 9 million people thus far to vote for him.

That question of whether or not Bernie Sanders’ voters will support Clinton ignores the fact that out of the remaining 1,016 pledged delegates, neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders will reach 2,383 pledged delegates before the Democratic National Convention in July. Almost half of those delegates will come from California alone.

This is significant, as Sanders is steadily closing in on Clinton’s polling edge in the state, cutting her lead down from double digits to just two points. As such, he has a very good chance of winning the state, given that California’s primary allows independent voters to vote in the Democratic primary. In terms of pledged delegates, Sanders may very well be within two percentage points of Clinton at the DNC if he wins 60 percent of the remaining pledged delegates. This is not an unlikely scenario, given the favorable outlook of the remaining states.

In other words, Hillary Clinton will only be the Democratic nominee if super-delegates tip the scales for her on the first ballot. Assuming Clinton already has the nomination locked up, with over 1,000 pledged delegates still at play in states mostly favorable to Sanders, is unrealistic and naive. Democrats’ bullying of Sen. Sanders supporters to betray their candidate and vote for his rival is premature and divisive.

The Democratic Party desperately needs new blood

By attempting to turn the Democratic primary into a coronation for Hillary Clinton, Democratic Party leaders have shown they aren’t interested in cultivating new leaders or increasing engagement among younger voters. The fact that the Democratic establishment’s only choice to lead the party in 2016 is the candidate who lost the last contested primary eight years ago speaks volumes.

Establishment Democrats have a bad habit of running loser candidates. In Wisconsin, moderate Democrat Tom Barrett, who lost by 5 points to Scott Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial election, was the state party’s top choice to run against Gov. Walker after activists successfully triggered a recall election. Despite Barrett’s establishment endorsements from Bill Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, he lost by an even wider margin to Walker in the recall election.

In fact, aside from re-electing President Obama in 2012, Democrats have been losing badly across the nation for six consecutive years. There are only 18 Democratic governors currently in office, the fewest in over a century. Only 43 percent of all state legislators across the United States are Democrats while 56 percent are Republicans — a trend of waning Democratic power at the state level continuing unabated since 2012. If anything, Democrats should be welcoming Sanders’ supporters and their ideas into the party if they’re interested in having any hope for future elections.

Current Democratic Party leaders are fresh out of ideas

Democrats currently holding office have shown little in the way of strategy for how to enact progressive policy victories. As US Uncut reported earlier this week, leading Democrats in Congress, like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, are actually aligning with the pharmaceutical industry to fight their own president’s efforts to lower prescription drug prices. And even though they’re bending over backwards to elect Hillary Clinton, Congressional Democrats have no strategy or will to retake the House of Representatives.

Even if Hillary Clinton, who is running as a “progressive who likes to get things done” is elected, how does she plan to get things done with Republican majorities in the House and Senate? And if the Democratic Party’s leader in the House is already scheming against a Democratic president, how does Clinton plan to even rally her own party to pass meaningful legislation?

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has brought new blood and new ideas to the Democratic Party, and manages to fill arenas full of supporters and break voter turnout records in many of the states he’s won. Sanders is the first Democrat to bring New Deal policies back to the Democratic Party since the Clinton-led corporate takeover of the Democratic Party in the nineties.

These policies — like tuition-free public universities, universal healthcare as a human right, and a massive investment in millions of new public sector jobs — motivate young people and independent voters to register as Democrats and vote for Sanders. If Democrats want to keep the White House in November, they should push Hillary Clinton to adopt as many as possible.

Hillary Clinton and the DNC have no interest in bringing in new blood or new ideas

As The Hill reported on Friday, Hillary Clinton is already promising to resist the pressure to adopt Sanders’ policies as her own if she wins the nomination. This will undoubtedly turn off the millions of voters who showed up for Sen. Sanders throughout the primary process from voting for Clinton in the general election. In addition, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has already stacked the deck in Clinton’s favor by rigging the party’s national convention process.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the heads of the two most important standing committees at the DNC are Clinton superdelegates. Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is co-chair of the platform committee, where policies Democrats will run on for the next four years are adopted. The other co-chair is Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who is a senior advisor for Ready for Hillary.

Former Congressman Barney Frank (who is very vocally anti-Sanders) is heading the rules committee, which decides the convention procedures, along with former Texas State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, who endorsed Clinton and stumped for her on the campaign trail.
Several months ago, Schultz also made sure the members of these committees were favorable to Clinton:
In January, the party chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, appointed dozens of Clinton supporters and advisers to the three standing committees of the Democratic Party convention. Of 45 potential members submitted by Mr. Sanders, she appointed just three, according to Mr. Sanders’s campaign.
Even if Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders enter the convention with a 51-49 split in pledged delegates, party bosses could rig the process to make sure Sanders won’t be the nominee. Barney Frank has the power as rules committee chairman to schedule Bernie Sanders’ speech to delegates for 10 AM on a Friday morning, or make sure the DNC’s first ballot vote, in which super-delegates can give Clinton a plurality, happens before Sanders has a chance to address delegates.

Bullying #BernieOrBust voters won’t help Hillary Clinton

Nearly one-third of Sanders’ supporters are pledging to not vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election, and some have pledged to not support her even if Sanders stumps for her.

In recent months, Sanders supporters have endured constant bullying, having been labeled sexists and “Bernie Bros” more times than can be counted; they’ve been told by Clinton herself that they don’t do their own research; they’ve been called “unrealistic” in pushing for progressive reforms despite massive victories in the fight for a higher minimum wage; they’ve even been told there’s a “special place in hell” for women not supporting Clinton. What’s unrealistic is expecting Sanders supporters to put their feelings aside and vote for the candidate who has directly insulted them.

If Clinton secures the nomination, she will lose unless Bernie Sanders and his supporters are lifted up by the party, and the ideals they uphold are taken seriously and adopted into the Democratic platform.
Anything less would ensure at least four years of Donald Trump as president.

Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com.

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