The only senator to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is “absolutely” opposed to a convention-floor battle to flip superdelegates who support Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told the Washington Post on Wednesday that Sanders should bow out if Clinton wins a higher number of pledged delegates as well as the popular vote.
“When a nominee wins a majority of both those categories, it is time for us to come together, link arms and go forward,” Merkley said. “It would be inconsistent, given the commentary on super-delegates, to depend on super-delegates to turn over those first two categories of evaluating party members’ support.”
While the Sanders campaign and its supporters initially criticized superdelegates—party insiders who can change their allegiance to a particular candidate—as undemocratic, top aides are now betting the future of the campaign on convincing those delegates to join their side.
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on MSNBC last week that it was “a fact” that superdelegates would decide the nomination.
“Nobody is going to get to the convention with the number of pledged delegates they need to win,” Weaver said. “That’s just mathematically impossible for either candidate.”
As of Thursday, Clinton was 90 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to win the nomination outright, while Sanders was 850 delegates short. Clinton has secured 1,768 pledged delegates out of 2,293 total, compared to Sanders’ 1,494 out of 1,533.
Clinton also leads the popular vote with 12,989,134 votes to Sanders’ 9,957,889.
Top Sanders adviser Tad Devine was noncommittal when asked by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent whether the campaign would help convince Sanders supporters that the election’s outcome was legitimate.
“We’re still involved in this process, so it’s hard for me to declare what’s going to happen at the end,” Devine said. “As we look forward, there are a lot of issues of deep concern.”
runs to r/politics to count how many posts are calling him a sellout and Hillbot
At this point, any attack on Hillary from the left is effectively support for Drumpf.
When I was a young man, our nation was fighting a terrible war in southeast Asia. A folk singer of the time, Pete Seeger, wrote a song about the ever-worsening carnage and involvement-without-end. That song was “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” It is beginning to apply to my beloved Democratic Party. We are now knee deep in the big muddy.
How do we get out? The stakes are pretty high.
I sure hope he is right. The threat to the USA from proto-fascist Donald Trump so far outweighs any problems people might have with HRC that it is laughable.
Anyone who claims no difference between Clinton and Trump willfully has their head in the sand. The last thing we need is a messy convention.
It is the end of the world. I am very, very concerned.
Look, the only way that the superdelegates would not vote for HRC at this point is if she were to fail miserably in the remainder of the primaries. And I mean really fail, to a point that almost unimaginable. There will be no major controversy at the convention.