Throughout the final grueling month of this campaign I have been bothered by the Sanders camp's sensitivity to counting the pledged votes of superdelegates.
I get that early on, including the supers in the primary / caucus vote results appeared to invalidate the results — or at least make them seem closer than the voting appeared. Including supers in the New Hampshire results was particularly egregious in that it appeared to completely negate Sanders’s big primary win. You could also make the point that the preference of the supers was fairly irrelevant since they would likely break for the pledged delegate winner anyhow, so people were getting worked up for no particular reason.
Once it was clear that Clinton was going to win the pledged delegate race in the middle of March, the only good rationale for flipping the supers’ preference was wiped out. At that point, it did become legitimate for the press to report on their preference and include stated endorsements in the delegate totals. The Sanders camp, however, maintains this is illegitimate because the supers have not voted yet. From their response to the news last night:
Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then.
Okay fair enough. Don’t base your decision on votes that have yet to be cast. That is actually an intellectually defensible position up to a point. The campaign does have the ability to try to persuade the supers to change their minds between now and July.
But how, pray tell, is the campaign going to persuade those superdelegates? Let’s refer again to last night’s statement:
Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump.
And how do they plan to demonstrate this? Reciting head-to-head public polling numbers for the November general election.
So on one hand, it is out of bounds to poll the voters in the nomination ballot at the convention and base reporting the status of the race on the preference for one candidate because the voters might change their minds.
On the other hand, the Sanders campaign is going to ask those same voters to toss aside the results of months of elections and millions of votes cast based on, wait for it, a poll of the voters in a much more distant contest who have six months to change their minds.
This is the questionable intellectual consistency that has alienated me from the candidate I voted for in the primaries. I hope he does the right thing and helps lead his supporters back into the fold for the good of the country.