The five step plan for making sure Bernie Sanders isn’t the Democratic nominee
Bernie Sanders has won two out of the first three states, and he’s gotten around thirty percent of the vote thus far, so naturally his over-the-top supporters have decided that this means he’s definitely going to be the nominee. That’s not how anything works, fortunately, because Sanders would almost certainly lose to Trump – for reasons that are obvious to everyone outside Sanders’ base.
Here’s the thing. Bernie Sanders is not currently on a path to the Democratic nomination. The rules say that no one can win the nomination before the convention, unless they have more than 50% of the total delegates. Sanders agreed to these rules. In fact he supported this particular rule back when he thought he might enter the convention with the second-most delegates. But the reality now is that he could enter the convention with the most delegates, while still being far below 50%. That means we’ll have a brokered convention, where the delegates end up realigning behind different candidates until someone ends up with a majority. Considering how despised Sanders is among those Democrats who don’t support him, it’s unlikely he’ll end up with the brokered nomination. Here’s the five step plan for making sure he’s not the nominee:
1) First we have to make sure everyone understands that the established rules require a brokered convention if no one enters with a majority of the delegates. During the last debate, Bernie refused to state that he’ll abide by this rule. He can’t just break the rule and magically declare himself the nominee with less than 50% of the delegates. But if he can dishonestly convince the general public that the rules are somehow being changed to conspire against him, it’ll give him leverage. We need everyone to know the truth, which is that if Bernie argues against a brokered convention, he’ll be the one trying to break the rules. There’s a term for breaking the rules of a contest: it’s called cheating.
2) Next we have to make sure Sanders doesn’t get anywhere close to 50% of the delegates. If he enters the convention with something like 47% of the delegates, and the next closest competitor is thirty points behind him, he’ll have most of the leverage. But if he enters the convention with something closer to 35% of the delegates, and some of the actual Democrats have numbers like 30% and 20%, it’ll give us the leverage for forcing Bernie to play by the brokered convention rules.
3) No one needs to drop out – yet. If we come out of Super Tuesday with one of the four actual Democrats thoroughly dominating the other three, it’ll be time for a couple of other to drop out, so we can unite behind our best shot at pulling ahead of Sanders. If we go into a brokered convention with [Democrat X] having 40% of the delegates and Bernie only having 35%, that’ll make it much harder for Bernie to pull a fast one. But if Super Tuesday ends up being muddled between the four actual Democrats, it’ll actually make for the strong argument that all four of them should remain in the race all the way to the convention. In such case we’ll want the four of them collectively taking as many delegates away from Bernie as possible, to make sure he’s nowhere near 50%.
4) We’ll need to get heavily involved in state conventions and pick our delegates wisely. Late in the 2016 primary race, when Bernie Sanders was trying to seize the nomination from Hillary Clinton even though she had a majority of delegates and she was ahead of him by millions of actual votes, Bernie’s most rabid fans flooded the state conventions and tried to install rogue “Bernie or Bust” types as delegates. We’ll need to attend these conventions and make sure we pick reasonable people as delegates, because they’ll likely end up picking our nominee.
5) Don’t panic. Only three states have voted thus far. Bernie Sanders can’t hide his disastrous health issues forever. And the increasingly asinine tweets he’s begun posting, that are almost Trump-like in nature, could end up backfiring on him. There’s still a good chance that one of the four actual Democratic candidates could end up winning more than 50% of the delegates, thus putting Bernie out of his misery before the convention. As always, fatalism is your enemy. Vigilance is your friend. Plot your activism accordingly. Oh and by the way, if Bernie gets more than 50% of the delegates, we’ll all have to get behind him, in a last ditch effort at defeating Trump. Bernie would very likely lose to Trump, but we’d have to get behind Bernie anyway. If that idea makes you sick to your stomach, it’s all the more reason to work harder to make sure Bernie doesn’t get 50% of the delegates.
