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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Nope, it's around 45% of the delegates, not counting superdelegates, which (supposedly) will always vote for whoever wins in pledged delegates barring a catastrophe.
(1500 Sanders delegates)/(1776+1501 total delegates awarded thus far)= 0.45804, 45.8% of the delegates. Even with the super-delegates, it's still around 40% of the total delegates.
edited 5th Jun '16 12:55:57 PM by CaptainCapsase
Regarding the super-delegates, the issue is it's a very undemocratic system in a party that's supposed to be a big tent. There was also the matter of delegates pledging to vote against Sanders even in states where Clinton was non-viable.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:01:07 PM by CaptainCapsase
To the surprise of basically nobody, Donald Trump pinatas are selling like hotcakes in latino communities.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.![]()
Huh, okay then. Doesn't really matter though.
Your comments didn't read like that was the issue you had with the super-delegates. It sounded like they were supposed to vote for the one with the most votes as opposed to who they wanted, and then changed their minds, when that was never even the system. They were always supposed to vote for whoever they wanted.
And what does being a big tent have to do with it?
edited 5th Jun '16 1:04:05 PM by LSBK
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Yes, that's the way the system works, but imagine how people would be reacting if Sanders won in terms of pledged delegates (say he was running against Biden instead of Clinton), was polling just as well as he is versus Trump, and the superdelegates voted against him. They'd be furious, and for good reason. It doesn't matter for this particular campaign, but it's a scenario I could very easily see happening in a future cycle.
As far as the comment about a "big tent", the issue is the two party system forces groups that would otherwise be voting for completely different parties to share a pool of candidates. That being the case, it's unacceptable in my opinion for the primaries to be as restrictive as they are now.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:16:01 PM by CaptainCapsase
@Captain Caspase
Yes, the superdelegates are so undemocratic that Sanders is trying to steal them from Clinton to bolster his failing campaign. Apparently the great hope of democracy doesn't think they're undemocratic (at least not when he needs them), so I don't know why his supporters love to harp on them so much.
And yet it's not what's happening, so who cares? Not to mention that, imagine if a candidate like Sanders won based on the caucuses, which shut out all the but the most fanatical voters. Can you imagine how upset people would be by that? Yet I don't hear a call to get rid of the caucuses.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:16:15 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
I'd like to eliminate both superdelegates and caucuses, they're both idiotic.
Also, I'd argue that criticism is more than a little hypocritical; if you're happy to excuse Clinton taking billions of dollars over the course of her career from corporate interests, and expect she's going to live up to her promise to reform campaign finance law, you have no grounds to call Sanders out for railing against the superdelegate system while simultaneously attempting to win them. For my part, I'm not particularly happy that he's trying to do that, and I'm now rather skeptical of his commitment to electoral reforms.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:23:41 PM by CaptainCapsase
I am not sure if Sanders relying on superdelegates or Hillary getting campaign donations is hypocritical. They both need them to get their fixes through - sometimes you need to play the game in order to eliminate it afterwards.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
You do, but in the Clintons' case, they aren't just playing the game, they more or less invented it
, having pioneered the modern campaign finance strategy of American politics. Bill Clinton did anyway, but that's one part of his Presidency where Hillary's level of involvement isn't debatable.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:30:24 PM by CaptainCapsase
I'm okay with Clinton because there's absolutely no evidence, despite the increasingly hyperbolic accusations from Sanders and his clique, that who she takes money from has ever influenced her voting record. Not to mention that the "beholden to corporations" thing is vastly overblown, with a majority of the contributions Sanders so decries coming from people who work in industries, rather than the industry itself. Not to mention that Sanders himself has actually violated enough campaign finance rules to get three different warnings from the FEC
, and a 600+ page report
filed against him.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:31:37 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Clinton has spent a large portion of her career as an unelected official, and was only in congress during a period dominated by the GOP, where the vast majority of votes from the democrats consisted of voting against everything and anything being put forward by the senate majority except when party brass said otherwise.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:41:02 PM by CaptainCapsase
Then I guess Sanders is bought and paid for by the gun lobby. And all the people who violated FEC rules to give him too much money. And some of the people mentioned here
. Etc, etc. It's inevitable.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:44:42 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
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Well then if Sanders is bought and paid for, and you admit he's bought and paid for, your insistence on attacking Clinton for being the same becomes increasingly strange to me. If you can't trust Clinton to pass campaign finance reform because of who backs her, then you presumably can't trust Sanders either. In which case I guess you're just not going to get the reform you want.
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You are correct. I guess the New Deal didn't actually happen.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:47:51 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
It's a difference of degrees; the Clintons have raised upwards of 3 billion dollars over their career, most of which came from a very small, and very loyal cadre of ultra-wealthy donors (around 2700 people are responsible for over half of their fundraising, which when we're talking a sum of around 1.5 billion dollars is insane), who are very much against campaign finance reform as a class. The gun lobby is against gun-control, therefore I don't expect significant gun control victories from Sanders.
edited 5th Jun '16 1:50:27 PM by CaptainCapsase
Just like when Toyotomi Hideyoshi shut down the avenues for social mobility in Japan that allowed him to rise from peasant to near-Shogun, it's not hypocritical for people to use a tool to achieve power and then ban use of that tool, and when that tool is something repugnant like Citizens United, eliminating it is still a net good.

Not 45%, that's for sure. 20%? I'd call that a terrible showing.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman