Banned
Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 4,477
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Still more polls released today suggest that Hillary Clinton is on track to beating Bernie Sanders in states like New York and Maryland — which means that, by the time the polls close on April 26th (less than two weeks from now) the delegate math could look virtually impossible for the Vermont Senator to overcome.
But even if that does happen, Sanders has absolutely no reason not to fight on until the very last votes are counted in June.
This isn’t to say that Sanders will have any reasonable chance of winning if the pledged delegate gap does begin to look more and more impossible for him. Sanders is talking about flipping super-delegates from Clinton even if he continues to trail in pledged delegates, but that is very unlikely to work. Rather, the point is that, even if it all begins to look hopeless, Sanders has the money and every incentive to keep on going, and there is no reason why he shouldn’t do it. Indeed, there are good reasons for him to do so that go well beyond his own self interest.
The Sanders super-delegate strategy probably isn’t grounded in any genuine belief that it could actually work, should she prevail by a comfortable margin among pledged delegates. Bloomberg Politics has a good look at the Sanders strategy today, and it includes this striking admission from a Sanders supporter:
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“I don’t think I can make a good case for it,” said Bert Marley, the Idaho Democratic Party chairman and an enthusiastic Sanders superdelegate, when asked how Sanders could win over Clinton superdelegates.
“If you’re a true believer you just hang in there and hope something materializes that makes it work; that’s where I’m at at this time.”
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This is what the intimations about flipping super-delegates probably are really about: keeping alive the idea that Sanders still has a very realistic path, to keep his supporters engaged (and, perhaps, sending money).
And that’s fine. It’s perfectly defensible for Sanders to keep his supporters engaged and even sending money until the end, even if it does become apparent that he has no chance. Sanders picked up his first endorsement from a Senator today, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon put it very well:
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"It has been noted that Bernie has an uphill battle ahead of him to win the Democratic nomination. But his leadership on these issues and his willingness to fearlessly stand up to the powers that be have galvanized a grass-roots movement. People know that we don’t just need better policies, we need a wholesale rethinking of how our economy and our politics work, and for whom they work."
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By continuing to vote, organize, and send money until the last primary votes are counted, Sanders supporters will continue registering support for the idea that only fundamental change — only a fundamental re-imagining of American democracy — will do, when it comes to grappling with the challenges the country faces.
There are problems with the broader story Sanders tells. His ongoing insistence that Obama-era reforms were woefully insufficient — and his explanation for it, i.e., that Dems remain in thrall to plutocratic money and failed to rally the grassroots to break GOP opposition — are overly simplistic, give those achievements short shrift, and don’t fully reckon with our system’s structural realities.
But his impatience with the constraints on our politics — his demand that we need to shift what we define at the outset as “political realism” — has also had an undeniably positive impact on the debate, and it is precisely what is engaging many Sanders supporters in the political process, many no doubt for the first time.
If Sanders loses, there’s little doubt that he will do all he can to rally his supporters behind Clinton and to persuade them that she is also committed to moving the country in the same basic direction as he would. If so, having a national constituency that continues to be galvanized by (and continues to insist upon) his basic underlying idea could have a positive impact on Clinton’s agenda in the fall campaign — and, possibly, on a Clinton presidency as well. Sanders has every reason to keep this going for as long as possible.
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Loves it 
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. I wasn't using the racial term cracker lol
