{"id":22570,"date":"2016-04-08T08:02:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T15:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/why-sanders-keeps-winning-but-may-not-be-nominee\/"},"modified":"2016-04-08T08:02:49","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T15:02:49","slug":"why-sanders-keeps-winning-but-may-not-be-nominee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/why-sanders-keeps-winning-but-may-not-be-nominee\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Sanders keeps winning but may not be nominee"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 The standard line in Bernie Sanders\u2019 campaign speeches goes like this: \u201cDespite what the corporate media is telling you, there is a path to the nomination.\u201d<\/p>\n

If such a track exists, it\u2019s far from clear what it is. Sanders is far behind Hillary Clinton is the race for delegates that will decide the nomination, needing to win 68 percent of those remaining to capture the nomination. Even after his recent run of success, he\u2019s nowhere near that pace.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not the corporate media he should be blaming, but the rules of a Democratic Party he only recently joined after serving decades in public office as an independent.<\/p>\n

The party has tailored its nominating process specifically to prevent an upstart candidate such as Sanders from winning it\u2019s nomination for president. And Sanders\u2019 top adviser, by the way, is a longtime Democratic Party insider helped write those rules.<\/p>\n\n

How it works<\/strong><\/p>\n

One word: Delegates.<\/p>\n

Not states won, not debate triumphs, not cash raised. Certainly, not what the Sanders campaign calls \u201cmomentum.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nominating contest is about winning 2,383 delegates, and the delegate math says Clinton is decidedly ahead of Sanders.<\/p>\n

The basics: All Democratic contests award delegates in proportion to the share of the vote \u2014 so even the loser gets some.<\/p>\n

That makes it hard for a front-runner to collect delegates and clinch the nomination as quickly as when the winner takes all. But the proportional system also makes it difficult for a trailing candidate to catch up if he or she falls behind by a large number.<\/p>\n

Clinton was able to amass a big delegate lead \u2014 at one point more than 300 delegates \u2014 by winning by large margins in the South, where there are large minority populations that largely back her over Sanders.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Sanders has mostly won smaller states that hold caucuses or won narrowly in larger states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, which has limited the number of delegates he\u2019s netted in his effort to catch up to Clinton.<\/p>\n

To date, Sanders trails Clinton by close to 2.4 million total votes cast and by more than 200 delegates. In 2008, when Clinton trailed Barack Obama by more than 100 delegates, she was never able to catch up to him.<\/p>\n

The current count: Clinton has 1,280 delegates won in primary and caucuses to Sanders\u2019 1,030.<\/p>\n\n

What about <\/strong><\/p>\n

superdelegates?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another factor: 15 percent of the delegates who get a vote at the Democratic National Convention are superdelegates, or elected officials and party leaders who can back any candidate they wish.<\/p>\n

They are the party establishment. And they overwhelmingly support Clinton.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press surveys those superdelegates and adds them to the tally if they say publicly who they plan to vote for at the convention. The AP doesn\u2019t count those who say they\u2019ve decided, but aren\u2019t willing to say so \u201con the record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clinton\u2019s strong support among superdelegates widens her lead even more \u2014 1,749 to Sanders\u2019 1,061.<\/p>\n\n

How it got this way<\/strong><\/p>\n

For decades, the leaders and activists of the Democratic Party struggled to control its presidential nominating process. The back-and-forth gave birth in 1984 to the superdelegate.<\/p>\n

They are insiders and political pros who are not bound to any candidate, and they act as deciders in prolonged nomination fights.<\/p>\n

The original idea was to give party elders a voice in the nominating process to avoid a repeat of what some viewed as a mistake in the 1972 election, in which George McGovern won the nomination but proved to be a weak general election candidate. He lost 49 states in the November vote.<\/p>\n

In 1984, under the superdelegate system, former Vice President Walter Mondale was the choice of the Democratic establishment and won the party\u2019s presidential nomination. He, too, lost 49 states in the general election.<\/p>\n\n

SANDERS\u2019 SUPERDELEGATE CONNECTION<\/p>\n

Tad Devine, Sanders\u2019 top adviser and a Democratic Party veteran of more than three decades, helped craft the superdelegate process.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s been quoted defending it \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to win a nomination in a contested race and almost impossible to win without the superdelegates,\u201d he observed in a 2008 interview on National Public Radio \u2014 and also pointing out that there\u2019s a danger of backlash if superdelegates wield too much power or operate in a less-than-transparent way.<\/p>\n

Devine told AP last month that the Sanders campaign expects the superdelegates to choose a candidate \u201cafter the voters have spoken \u2014 not before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

WHAT\u2019S UP IN WASHINGTON STATE?<\/p>\n

Sanders won the Washington state caucuses by more than 40 percentage points, but he has only 25 of the state\u2019s 101 delegates. (Clinton has nine.)<\/p>\n

Washington Democrats award most of their delegates based on vote totals in individual congressional districts. But the party has been unable to produce vote totals for each of those congressional districts.<\/p>\n

As soon as the state party parses the votes, the delegates can be allocated and Sanders\u2019 total will jump.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press writers Hope Yen and Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 The standard line in Bernie Sanders\u2019 campaign speeches goes like this: \u201cDespite what the corporate media is telling you, there is a path to the nomination.\u201d If such a track exists, it\u2019s far from clear what it is. Sanders is far behind Hillary Clinton is the race for delegates that will decide the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":22571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22570"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}