ON JULY 12 BERNIE MADE his much-anticipated endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. We had been working on the details of the event for some time, as reported by ABC’s MaryAlice Parks on July 6. Various states had been considered before the campaigns mutually decided upon New Hampshire. While no longer a truly purple state, it can be purplish.
Bernie’s campaign had really taken off after his big victory in New Hampshire, so holding the event there could have local benefits for the Clinton campaign, in addition to the expected national impact. From our perspective, it allowed us to say thank you to the Granite State.
I did not attend but was in close contact with Robby Mook. Bernie gave a thirty-minute endorsement speech in a Portsmouth high school gymnasium: “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that. She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States.”
He made the case for why people who supported his campaign should join him in helping to elect Hillary Clinton: “I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president.”
He reminded his supporters what they had been fighting for during the nominating process, highlighting the areas where the campaigns had come together and going down a list of his central planks: higher minimum wage, affordable college, access to health care, the environment, criminal justice reform, immigration reform. And he made the case that electing Hillary Clinton would bring forward movement on these issues and that electing Donald Trump would move us backward.
He also assured everyone that he was not just endorsing Hillary Clinton at that event but that he would be campaigning for her across the country: “Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton president—and I am going to be in every corner of this country to make sure that happens.” It was a promise that he followed up on through the fall.
In closing, he said, “Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here today.”
I talked with Robby Mook after the speech. “Well, what did you think?” I asked.
He was very pleased. “It was great. It was perfect,” he said.
Some in the media missed the entire point of the speech. Perhaps taking swipes at Bernie had just become a reflex. Chris Cillizza, in perhaps the most insight-free column on the endorsement, wrote: “It’s hard to imagine that she or her campaign team were thrilled with Sanders.” Actually, it wasn’t hard to imagine at all, because they told us that they were. Hillary Clinton herself, caught on a hot mic as they embraced on stage, said to Bernie, according to the New York Times, “You were great, so great,” and “Thank you so much.”
Cillizza criticized Bernie for focusing on the issues that were central to his campaign and for talking about how the campaigns had found common ground on many after the primaries were over. But that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton did in her remarks. If it wasn’t obvious, and reading the Cillizza column it apparently wasn’t to some, both Bernie and Hillary Clinton were speaking to the millions who had supported Bernie in the primaries. The millions who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries didn’t need convincing. They were already on board.
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There was one more item of business before we arrived in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention, and that was the meeting of the party’s rules committee. In addition to the policy changes Bernie worked to advance, his pre-convention agenda also included many changes to the Democratic Party’s rules to make both the nominating process and the party itself more democratic, more transparent, and more open.
Chief among the concerns was the issue of superdelegates. That some 700 elected officials and party insiders had 50 percent more say over who would be the Democratic nominee than the over 39 million people in California was, well, undemocratic. The existence of superdelegates is justified by the antidemocratic impulse that the establishment needs a check on rank-and-file Democrats to prevent the nomination of an unacceptable candidate. The Republicans don’t have superdelegates. The fallacy that party insiders are better able to pick a winning nominee than tens of millions of primary voters is borne out by the last general election. Donald Trump, who had little establishment Republican support, prevailed in November against Hillary Clinton, whom the Democratic establishment—in many cases before a single vote was even cast in the primaries and caucuses—was absolutely convinced was the strongest possible choice.
Back in November 2015 NPR had reported that Clinton had a 45-to-1 advantage over Bernie in superdelegates (359 to 8). By some counts, by mid-February 2016 Clinton had 415 superdelegates to Bernie’s 14, meaning she had almost 17.5 percent of the delegates she needed. The reason for Clinton’s broad support among superdelegates was obvious. Many of the superdelegates, although not all by any stretch, were more comfortable with Hillary Clinton’s more moderate, establishment politics. She was also viewed as the likely winner of the nomination and by the overwhelming majority as the most electable against the Republicans—consistent public polling to the contrary notwithstanding. Why back a long-shot campaign and risk the wrath of the Clintons?
The way each candidate’s delegate count was reported was that the number of superdelegates was generally combined with the number of pledged delegates. That meant Bernie was always shown as being way behind even as he was racking up wins with voters. In many ways this was most damaging early on, when relatively few pledged delegates had been chosen, because it created a sense of futility for those seeking an alternative to Clinton.
In that sense the existence of the superdelegates taints the entire Democratic nominating process. It has been said that superdelegates have never overturned the will of the voters. The candidate with the plurality of pledged delegates has always won the nomination. But that ignores the effect that superdelegates have on creating the momentum for a candidate to win the greatest number of pledged delegates. During the campaign, Bernie found an unlikely ally in critiquing the way superdelegates were being reported as part of a candidate’s total: Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
People attain superdelegate status in different ways. Some are elected Democratic officials: U.S. House members, senators, governors, the president and vice president. Most are party officials: state party chairs and vice chairs and member of the Democratic National Committee (both those elected at the state level and those appointed by the chair).
Opposition to superdelegates is not limited to Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren has publicly spoken against superdelegates, as has former congressman Barney Frank, who backed Clinton.
In our discussions with the Clinton campaign about electoral reforms, we could not come to a consensus on eliminating superdelegates altogether. Nor was it possible to come up with a mutually agreed-upon list of other electoral reforms and specific party reforms in the short period of time we had after the primaries. While we might have been able to come up with a short list of needed reforms, it would necessarily have been incomplete. As talks progressed, it was clear that what we would develop was a meaningful process to carry out electoral and party reform. Our main concern was that the process not be just window-dressing, and that the justified concerns about the electoral process and the operation of the party get addressed.
The strongest opposition to eliminating superdelegates came from the Congressional Black Caucus. As reported by Politico in June 2016, the caucus sent a letter to party leaders opposing the elimination of superdelegates and the creation of universal open primaries. The expressed concern about superdelegates was that the caucus members did not want to be put in a position of running against their constituents to gain delegate slots at the Democratic convention. Their expressed concern about open primaries was that they diluted minority voting influence. As we saw earlier, closed primaries may be disproportionately locking out young voters of color.
An issue the Black Caucus did not address is that the automatic inclusion of every member of Congress as a superdelegate undermines minority influence in the presidential nominating process at the Democratic National Convention. That’s because the makeup of the combined Democratic caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate is less diverse than the pool of Democratic National Convention delegates as a whole. In fact, for the 2016 convention, the congressional superdelegation had 20 percent less African American representation than the delegates overall; Latinos, almost 36 percent less; Asian Americans, almost 25 percent less; LGBTQ, almost 78 percent less. For Native Americans the number is incalculable because the number in the congressional superdelegation is zero. That means automatic inclusion of every Democratic member of Congress creates a pool of votes for the nominee of the party at the convention that is marginally whiter, straighter, and more male than it would otherwise be.
We went back and forth with the Clinton campaign for weeks trying to come up with an acceptable way forward on rules changes. The issue of electoral reform was a critical one for our supporters. Many believed (rightly, in my view) that, despite what voters wanted, the nominating process—while not designed specifically to disadvantage Bernie Sanders—created tremendous additional hurdles for any candidate not fully embraced by the Democratic establishment.
The actual meeting of the rules committee was right before the convention. The ratios of representation on the rules committee was the same as on the platform committee. We were again in an environment where our delegates could be heavily outvoted by the combined numbers of the Clinton- and DNC-appointed delegates.
We continued negotiating as the rules committee proceedings continued. The main sticking points were issue of superdelegates and developing a serious process for considering and resolving the other issues after the election. The Clinton staffers preferred a looser, less binding process. We wanted more safeguards.
If we could not come to a resolution on the reform agenda with the Clinton campaign, we would have to quickly organize for a floor fight at the convention. If we could not come to terms, Bernie fully intended to take the issue of superdelegates in future nominating contests to the convention floor. It likely would have been messy, so it was something the Clinton campaign desperately wanted to avoid.
As the deliberations in the committee wound on, we finally struck what both sides believed was a workable compromise. We would establish a Democratic Unity Reform Commission with an open-ended mandate to take up these issues after the election. From our perspective, the commission contained two critically important elements. One, a series of procedural safeguards. These included representation ratios of ten Clinton appointees, eight Sanders appointees, and only three DNC appointees. In addition, the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is required to take up the commission’s recommendations, and if it does not adopt the commission’s recommendations, then those recommendations are taken directly to the full DNC membership. This was important to ensure that recommendations for reform did not get buried in the DNC bureaucracy.
Two, superdelegate reform. This tied the hands of the commission. The compromise didn’t eliminate superdelegates or even reduce their overall number. But it required that the votes of all the superdelegates whose status was not based on being an elected official had to be cast at the convention in proportion to the will of the voters.
That addressed the primary concern raised by the Congressional Black Caucus that no current superdelegate would have to run against a constituent to be a delegate to a future convention. But it decreased the number of superdelegates who would be unpledged by over 60 percent. Even if a candidate could lock up every unpledged superdelegate—which even Hillary Clinton did not do—that total would equal only around 12 percent of the total delegates needed to secure the nomination—not 30 percent. The reduction puts more power in the hands of the Democratic rank and file.
Even though the campaigns had agreed to the compromise, we were determined not to proceed with it unless our delegates to the rules committee were on board. We hastily called a meeting with our delegates in a small conference room. It was a packed, standing-room-only gathering. We went over the details of the compromise. There were some questions from the assembled group, but they quickly saw the major breakthrough that had been achieved, particularly on the issue of superdelegates. We left our Bernie-delegate caucus meeting. The rules committee reconvened and the compromise was approved. And it was on to the convention.