He also said that the danger posed by another Trump term doesn’t excuse Biden from scrutiny but “actually makes him more subject to scrutiny.”
To leftists and progressives fed up with Biden, particularly his commitment to Israel as it continues to bomb civilians in Gaza, the assessment was not just fair — it was obvious. But more centrist Democrats, including those most likely to have appended “Blue Wave” and “Resistance” labels to their social media accounts in the Trump years, were appalled at what they saw as a betrayal by one of their own.
I think that’s all very reasonable and well-put. That said, I wanna give a little push-back, mainly bc superdelegates.
Sanders lost overwhelmingly on superdelegates, and the difference in number of delegates awarded to each candidate would have been less than half as big if superdelegates weren’t considered (IMO superdelegates were and are stupid).
Also, I recall that for most of the primary, Sanders was usually leading in pledged delegates, but was always behind on total number of delegates due to superdelegates.
I think Hillary got a large upswing of normal voters by the end of the primary bc she was in the lead, voters saw the writing on the wall, and they wanted to make her victory decisive. But I think voting for Bernie would’ve been more palatable if he was the one who constantly looked to be in the lead.
Of course, that’s just speculation. And given that Sanders only got 43.2% of the popular vote (though tbf that doesn’t include lowa/Maine/Nevada/North Dakota/Washington/Wyoming [source] )…yeah, it’s reasonable to say we needed more change than just the DNC stepping back.
Losing by less is still losing. And the superdelegates have always just been a sneaky way to run up the numbers. They switched to Obama when he won more delegates to make it look like the party is united behind its nominee. We can’t know for sure they’d have done that with Bernie, but that’s because he didn’t get more pledged delegates.
This was never true, just more of the misinformation that was rampant in the Bernie political spaces. Clinton won most of the early states, and where Bernie won was usually not by much while Clinton had some southern blowouts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries