No, the DNC isn’t screwing Bernie Sanders with Superdelegates

If your Facebook feed is anything like mine — populated by mostly young, coastal, white liberals (and a few aging hippies) — you’re probably seeing dire warnings and incensed rants about how the DNC has “screwed” Bernie Sanders with superdelegates. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, up to her old tricks again! On the surface, it seems like a reasonable complaint: after all, Sanders won in the New Hampshire primary by a 22-point margin. So how, then, is it that he’s now behind Clinton in the delegate count? At the time of this writing, Sanders won 15 delegates in New Hampshire and Clinton won 9. But, add in the the Granite State’s 8 superdelegates (6 of whom support Clinton, with 2 yet to endorse), and suddenly Clinton and Sanders are tied at 15.

The explanation — without diving headlong into the rabbit hole of delegate math — lies with the superdelegates. In a primary election or caucus, the majority of delegates are assigned based on the popular vote or caucus results, but a smaller portion are made up of elected officials, party chairmen and women, DNC members, and essentially the elites and insiders of any state Democratic Party — in New Hampshire, 7 of the total 32 delegates. Despite headlines like Paste Magazine’s dire “After Sanders’ Big Win in New Hampshire, Establishment Figures Want To Scare You With Superdelegates,” superdelegates have no obligation to vote with “the will of the people.” That’s what the 25 other delegates are for. Superdelegates, or “unpledged delegates” as they’re sometimes called, can endorse whomever they personally support for the party’s nomination. In New Hampshire, all 7 support Hillary Clinton.

Nationally, this trend holds true. In all, there will be about 4,763 delegates up for grabs in the 2016 Democratic primaries, of whom 712 (or just under 15%) are superdelegates. Drill down into this number, and we find that 431 of these 712 have endorsed a candidate for the 2016 nomination. Nationally, the committed superdelegates break down in much the same way as they did in New Hampshire: 412 support Clinton while only 14 have endorsed Sanders. (Two superdelegates had endorsed Martin O’Malley prior to his exit from the race, former Maryland Democratic Party Chairwoman Yvette Lewis and O’Malley protege Rep. Eric Swalwell.) The score so far — that’s Clinton with 96.6% of the superdelegates if you’re keeping track — clearly shows where the Democratic Party establishment’s loyalties lie. Even if the remaining 281 superdelegates who have yet to endorse all fall in line behind Sanders (which would itself be a strange and shocking development), the count would round out to Clinton with just shy of 72% of the superdelegates. Taken as a whole, it means that in the race to the 2,382 delegates needed to win the nomination, Clinton had amassed 17.3% of the delegates needed to win before the first votes were even cast. If we extrapolate her 96.6% advantage in the committed superdelegates to predict her eventual total superdelegate count (which, to be fair, is almost certainly not an accurate way to predict who the remaining 281 will endorse), she’d wind up with 687 superdelegates, or a nearly 29% head start on her way to 2,382. Even in the entirely likely event that the remaining superdelegates do not endorse Clinton’s candidacy with the same wild abandon that their predecessors have, it’s clear that the PLEO delegates (Party Leader and Elected Official, yet another term for superdelegates or uncommitted delegates) overwhelmingly support Clinton.

And they have every reason to. Sanders, though he has caucused with Democrats and is as progressive as any elected official on the left, has spent his political career as an independent. A charming nod to the intrinsic “ickyness” of party politics, to be sure — but also a choice which (much to the chagrin of Vermont Democrats) has allowed him to do very little to support the campaigns of other Democrats. His desire to excuse himself from the loathsome hours our representatives spend dialing for dollars has also meant that he has not done the hard work of party building, not just to act as the support structure that he clearly did not need, but to support the up-and-coming, State-level candidates who now make up the slate of superdelegates in New Hampshire and across the country. Sanders’ decision to go his own way, without an established party infrastructure to support his campaigns, may have started as a decision to skip the party bosses and take his message straight to the people, but by the time he announced his campaign for President — as a sitting United States Senator with 35 years of experience as an elected official, 25 of them spent in the United States Congress — it was the state-level candidates and junior members of Vermont’s Congressional delegation who needed him.

The result is that Sanders does not have the support of the Democratic Party machine, because they have not had his support. That’s not to say that he won’t get the support of Democratic primary voters — clearly, he has — but if his chances for the nomination depend on getting the support of the down-ticket Democrats that a “party insider” would have spent years campaigning and fundraising for, it should be no surprise that their view of the Senator is markedly cooler than the view of the voting public. That his colleagues in Vermont — Senator Patrick Leahy, Governor Peter Shumlin, and even former Governor and Presidential candidate Howard Dean — have all endorsed Clinton speaks volumes to the importance of party infrastructure, not to mention the importance of doing your part to build that infrastructure.

The upshot? If you’re going to go outside an established party to run (and win) with the people alone, don’t be surprised when you win with the people — and the people, alone.

Note: as several stories have mentioned, including the Paste story linked above, superdelegates are under no obligation to vote for the candidate they have publicly endorsed at the Democratic National Convention. The driving point of stories like this and others is that the DNC is using the existing superdelegate count to make Clinton’s candidacy look more inevitable than it actually is. However, no Democratic Presidential primary election in modern history has ever been decided with the superdelegates voting against the popular vote.