It was rigged!*

I don’t agree with Bernie Sanders’ position on immigration, trade or his theory of political change. But there’s one major point I must concede to Senator Sanders: the Democratic Party primary process was rigged. It’s just that it was rigged in Bernie’s favor.

1. The primary calendar was rigged in Bernie’s favor

The Democratic nominating process kicked off with a series of contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. These are all small, shitty states that very few people live in. They are cheap places to campaign. You don’t need a lot of name recognition and you don’t need to run a lot of ads in big, expensive media markets. Any random dude with a car can drive around the state meeting voters one-on-one without much time pressure or cost. This is a huge advantage for upstart candidates like Bernie without a national name or fundraising base.

Since they are the first few contests, the results in these states tend to receive vastly more media attention per vote cast than later contests. This allows outsider candidates without much money or name recognition to invest all of their resources in early states and steadily build momentum and a national profile in a way that wouldn’t be possible if California, New York or Texas kicked off voting.

And it’s not just the size of the states that worked in Bernie’s favor, but also the demographics. Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly white and not at all representative of either the country or Democratic Party. Bernie’s near-win in Iowa and big win in New Hampshire launched him into the national spotlight and helped him raise unprecedented amounts of money. Those results were possible because “the system” was “rigged” to privilege the states and voters most sympathetic to Bernie.

You can see this very clearly how Bernie’s campaign relied on the media and fundraising that came from a steady stream of primaries and caucuses to raise his national profile.

The Democratic Party could organize the nominating calendar in any number of other ways. There could be one national primary. A big diverse state like New York could go first. We could have a series of regional contests. What’s hard is envisioning a calendar that would have been more sympathetic to Bernie than the one we had.

2. Caucus rules were rigged in Bernie’s favor

Bernie’s campaign complained very loudly about closed primaries, particularly in New York. But the majority of his wins came in states with radically more restrictive caucus rules. Fifteen of the 22 states Bernie has won as of tonight, including most of his largest victories, came in caucus states.

Caucuses, where people are forced to show up and vote — sometimes publicly — at a fixed time are fine for college students and folks without much to do on a Tuesday night. But they’re not great for single parents; seniors and people who might need to work the night shift. It’s no accident that Bernie does best in states where the rules make it easy for college students and liberal white professionals to vote and raises barriers for single mothers, seniors and working people.

This isn’t purely speculative. Bernie won the Washington caucuses where 220,000 people voted in March. Because of a quirk in state law, Washington also held a non-binding primary in May where 660,000 people voted. Hillary won that second contest handily. However, the delegates were awarded to Bernie based on the low-turnout caucus.

3: The “corporate media” was biased in favor of Bernie

The Corporate Media has an agenda. That agenda is getting people to read their stories and watch their newscasts so they can sell ads and make money.

An uncontested election is a boring story. The media has a financial interest in making an election seem as competitive as possible for as long as possible. That’s why Bernie’s proposals got a disproportionate amount of coverage early on and why even though it’s been clear Bernie wasn’t going to win for months, the race was still presented as a toss up.

Some publishers even admitted this.

4. But none of this matters since money buys the election, right?

Bernie has been insisting all year that money buys presidential elections, but if that were true he’d be winning. So would Jeb Bush.

Bernie has been outspending Hillary nearly 2–1 since January and his campaign has outspent Hillary’s campaign over all. When you count Hillary’s Super PAC spending from last year, the two campaigns are even.

Hillary won because millions more people voted for her.