ROLLING THE BALL (MOSTLY) DOWNHILL
HAVING PUSHED THE BALL UPHILL for much of the campaign, we were now at a point where we hoped to see it roll downhill over the course of the next eight contests so that we would enter the pivotal New York primary with a lot of momentum. If we were successful, we might have a chance to win in Hillary Clinton’s adopted home state on April 19. March 15 through the New York primary was dominated by caucuses. Only two states were holding primaries, and only one of those was a closed primary. There was a possibility we could run the table. Arizona, with its closed primary and pattern of early voting, would be the most challenging; and it was in the first group of three states to vote on March 22, along with Utah and Idaho. Four days later, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington would have their turn, followed by Wisconsin, on April 5, and Wyoming, on the ninth. Our internal benchmark polling showed us ahead in four of the contests. In three others, we were within the margin of error. This was a new position for us to be in.
But after the breakneck pace at which we had all been running, we needed a little bit of downtime both to recharge our batteries and to reassess our best path forward. We flew to Sedona, Arizona, and stayed at the Las Posadas Inn, a series of two-story buildings housing suites set among the red rocks. It was exactly the kind of place you go to escape the rat race. When it became known that we were going to be “down” for a couple of days, rumors began to swirl in the media that we were planning to withdraw. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
My line to the media was that we were just having a team meeting in the locker room at halftime. It evoked images of a team catching a second wind after a tough first half and then coming back out and turning things around in the second half. Plus, who doesn’t like a good sports metaphor?
The truth was the metaphor wasn’t really forced. We did have a lot of planning to do. Since our huge victory in New Hampshire only a little over a month earlier, the path to victory had become much narrower. We wanted to stay on it, and key was not only winning states—which we clearly had to do—but winning them convincingly, to create momentum and eat into that now rather large lead the Clinton campaign had in pledged delegates.
We met in the Mission-style living room of Bernie’s suite. Sitting on the brown leather couches, Tad handed out a state-by-state list of the contests, with the delegate results of those that had passed and percentage targets in the remaining states. The targets were ambitious, to say the least.
Bernie sat on the edge of his couch, leaning forward. “So how we gonna win this thing?” he asked the room. It was an open-ended question typical of the kind he used to begin meetings.
“Look, I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy,” Tad started. “We are going to have to start winning, and winning big. We have got to win in Wisconsin, and then New York will be a pivotal showdown. If we can beat her in her home state it is really going to shake people’s confidence in her, and then we will see a lot of those superdelegates start to take a second look at the race. And if we do that, then we can succeed in Pennsylvania and push for a sweep in early June, including in large states like California and New Jersey.”
That was the theory of the case in a nutshell. We then turned to scheduling, media buys, and other more nitty-gritty logistical details. It was not long before Bernie was back on the road crisscrossing the country, talking to voters.
Arizona was to prove the first hurdle in the second half that we could not clear. Our internal polling showed the state within reach, and it was home to our first congressional endorser, Rep. Raul Grijalva, who himself had traveled the country for Bernie and whom we featured in our paid advertising. On election night, the networks called Arizona for Secretary Clinton. When they did, the vote count that they were reporting, and the percentage of the overall vote that represented, was totally out of sync with what our models were showing should be the case.
While campaigning in western states, Bernie started making some appearances in California to lay the groundwork for the June 6 contest there. We were at a Bernie rally in San Diego that night as the Arizona returns were coming in. One of my closest friends from high school, Earl Greenia, showed up with his daughter to see Bernie, and in hope that I would be there. Earl had had much more conservative politics than I did when we were younger (probably still does), but he had been at Bernie’s 1988 congressional victory party (which turned into a congressional narrow-loss party) and admitted he had voted for Bernie that day.
I brought Earl into the backstage area and we stood at the back dock of the convention center. It was a surreal experience in many ways. Earl and I had been close friends in northern Vermont. Now, not only was I talking to him at a Bernie rally in California, but he had a daughter who was a big Bernie fan. Talking to an old friend from simpler times was a very memorable moment in those stressful days. I got Earl’s daughter in to meet Bernie after the rally, and he signed her “Future to Believe In” placard.
Even though I was catching up with Earl, I still had to attend to business. What concerned me was not that Secretary Clinton was winning in Arizona (although I can’t say I was pleased with that), but that the turnout was so far off from our assessment. We had been right in every state previously (and would be in every state going forward). In particular, the “day of” vote totals, as opposed to the early vote totals, were drastically lower than we had anticipated. It was the only time in the campaign that I called a network to question their reporting on returns.
I talked with a top CNN political reporter I knew. “Something is wrong here,” I said. “This turnout is way low based on everything we had been expecting.”
The reporter said, “Let me check into it and get back with you.” I think that the reporter took my concern seriously because we did not make a habit of questioning election night reporting and estimates. I got a call back not long after.
“They’ve rechecked with the AP and they say it’s right,” the reporter said. It turns out it was correct. Some two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote had been cast earlier than election day. According to an MSNBC analysis, only 7 percent of the early vote represented voters under thirty; 41 percent of the early ballots were from voters over sixty-five. That was a real problem for our campaign. In order for the Arizona electorate to match the 17 percent national average under-thirty turnout in the Democratic primary process, some 37 percent of voters casting ballots on election day would have to be under thirty. That didn’t happen anywhere, and given the disproportionate number of young people who are not registered with any party, it certainly wasn’t going to happen in Arizona’s closed primary.
That being said, Bernie generally did better with “day of” voters than with those voting early. But the election day balloting was completely botched by the Republicans, who control the process in Arizona.
As was widely reported, the authorities in the largest county, Maricopa (which the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips points out is home to 60 percent of the population), cut the number of polling sites from 200 in 2012 to only 60—one for every 21,000 voters, reported the Arizona Republic. Many observed that the shortage of voting locations was particularly acute in minority communities. This created massive lines that resulted in some voters not casting their ballots until after midnight—five hours after the official closing time, and hours after Hillary Clinton had already been declared the winner by the national networks.
We knew that there were problems all day in Arizona. Long lines were being reported, and story after story poured in from our supporters who tried to vote before work but had to leave. They then returned at lunchtime to vote, but their lunch hour ran out. Returning a third time after work, they were forced to leave the line because of children waiting at home. People were effectively disenfranchised by the outrageous lines.
Additionally, voters were being barred because of so-called computer glitches that changed their registration from Democratic to nonaligned, as reported by Salon’s Lisa O’Neill and others. That meant that they couldn’t vote in the closed Democratic primary, even though they had registered as Democrats. O’Neill told the story of one voter who had been a registered Democrat since 1988: Arriving to vote, he learned that his party ID had changed mysteriously. One aspect of this “glitch” was that people who had switched their party ID from nonaligned to Democrat before the deadline found that the change had not been made and that they were barred from voting. Let’s sit and ponder for a second the question of who those voters would have overwhelmingly supported.
As the polls closed and voters were still standing in long lines, our campaign used social media and our field volunteers to encourage voters to stay in line even after the race was called for Hillary Clinton. She might win, they explained, but for purposes of delegate allocation, the margin mattered.
All the mess that was the administration of the primary in Arizona destroyed whatever opportunity there was to have a close result there, let alone an outright win. The Maricopa County recorder in charge of the disaster blamed the long lines on the large number of independent voters who waited only to be told that they were ineligible to vote in the closed primary. We know that many such voters were registered Democrats who were victims of those pesky computers and their glitches.
It’s also not surprising that many independent voters arrived at the polls believing that they could vote in the Democratic primary. In Arizona’s primaries for state and local office, independent voters can vote in the primary of their choice. Only the presidential primary is closed to them. The day after the debacle, the state’s Republican governor called for the presidential primaries to be opened to independents, according to AJ Vicens at Mother Jones. Time will tell whether his call was serious or just political cover in the face of voter outrage.
In the wake of the problems in Arizona, the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, and our campaign jointly filed suit to prevent this massive de facto disenfranchisement of voters from happening again. This was not the first time we had sued a state to protect voters. Our campaign and state organizations had previously successfully blocked the Republican secretary of state in Ohio from disenfranchising young voters in that state.
Without getting too deep at this juncture into the debate over caucuses versus primaries and open primaries versus closed primaries, the troubles in Arizona highlight one important issue. Some of the critics of caucuses and open primaries point to the potential for Republican meddling (largely through imagined mass strategic crossover voting—something that really does not occur) as a reason to support closed primaries. In truth, there was no Democratic nominating contest in 2016 the integrity of which was more compromised by Republican malfeasance than the closed Democratic primary in Arizona. (Primaries in general put the integrity of the Democratic nominating process in the hands of state officials—in recent years, largely Republicans. One other reality of primaries is that all the voter suppression and disenfranchisement measures enacted by Republicans in state after state to keep people from voting against them in the general election are imposed on the Democratic nominating process.)
Even with the problems in Arizona, Bernie ended the day knocking down the Clinton campaign’s delegate lead by twenty-five. He won Idaho with 78 percent of the vote and Utah with 77 percent. The overwhelming totals in the other two states were important indicators that we could in fact rack up victories by large margins.
Four days later, we went three for three with overwhelming margins. Bernie got 79.6 percent of the vote in Alaska, 69.8 percent in Hawaii, and 72.7 percent in Washington. He had wanted to visit Alaska and Hawaii, but travel time and expense made it impossible. Jane ended up visiting both on his behalf, so those victories belong to her. Significantly, Hawaii is the least white state in the nation. It is and always has been a majority-minority state. And as AlterNet’s Sarah Lazare pointed out, in a story with a headline that called out media “whitewash[ing]” of Bernie’s support, over 30 percent of Alaska’s population is comprised of people of color.
In terms of delegates that day, Washington represented a huge step forward because of its large number of pledged delegates (101 total). Clinton’s lead was cut that day by another 66 delegates. In just two days’ contests, including Arizona, where we lost by 15 percent, her delegate lead had dropped by 91. The ball was indeed rolling down the hill, and it was picking up speed as we moved to Wisconsin.
The schedule once again allowed Bernie to campaign heavily in a single state. After a few days in Burlington, he was back on the road in the Badger State. He held over a dozen rallies and town hall meetings and numerous smaller meetings with leaders of various communities, and appeared at the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s annual dinner. He only left the state for two days—to do stops in Pittsburgh and New York City, where, on April 1, he met with the editorial board of the New York Daily News (more on that to come).
Because of Bernie’s ability to spend a lot of time with voters in Wisconsin, where we invested in a full ground operation and paid media, the state handed Bernie his sixth win in a row, on April 5, with a margin of over 13 points. Bernie got the results that night in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was holding a rally in advance of its April 9 caucus. He had had to cancel an earlier planned event near the end of March because of a snowstorm, so this was his only appearance in Wyoming.
Bernie would end up winning the Wyoming caucus by over 11 points. Because of the delegate allocation formula there, he and Hillary Clinton both received the same number of pledged delegates. It would be our seventh win in a row. We had been concerned about the outcome at one point, because there seemed to be a huge influx of absentee votes (yes, some caucuses allow absentee voting) after the declared deadline for their submission, and they didn’t come from our campaign. To make matters worse, they were counted in the house of the state party chair, without any paid Bernie staffers being allowed to observe the counting. We won in the end, even if the delegates were split. The caucus was a few days in the future when Bernie took off from Laramie to head back East for the pivotal contests in New York, on April 19, and in five other northeastern states a week later, on the twenty-sixth.