With Super Tuesday just days away, talk about the upcoming Democratic National Convention is hitting headlines with Elizabeth Warren slamming Bernie for wanting to change the rules:
POLITICO – Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday accused Bernie Sanders of seeking an unfair “advantage” in the Democratic primary with his about-face on the question of how many delegates a candidate must amass before clinching the party’s presidential nomination.
The remarks from the Massachusetts senator, aimed at her Vermont colleague, came during a CNN town hall in South Carolina, where Warren was asked by a Sanders supporter about her view that unless a candidate achieves a majority of delegates in the state primaries, the Democratic nominee should be picked at the convention.
“That was Bernie’s position in 2016, that it should not got to the person who had a plurality. So, and remember, his last play was to superdelegates,” Warren replied, referring to Sanders’ failed 2016 efforts to force a contested Democratic convention. “So, the way I see this is you write the rules before you know where everybody stands, and then you stick with those rules.”
The rules say the candidate must have a majority of delegates to be awarded the party’s nomination:
Sanders has insisted that any candidate who arrives at the Democratic National Convention with a plurality of delegates be awarded the party’s nomination, even though Democratic National Committee rules stipulate that the nominee must win a majority of delegates. The Vermont senator’s position has sparked criticism from some who have noted that he took the exact opposite position when he ran for president in 2016 and lost to Hillary Clinton.
Bernie is the only one pushing for a plurality instead of a majority:
At last week’s Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, Sanders was the only White House hopeful who endorsed the idea that the candidate who amasses the most delegates before Democrats’ July convention in Milwaukee should automatically become the party’s pick to take on President Donald Trump in November.
The other candidates onstage — former Vice President Joe Biden; former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar; and Warren — all agreed a majority of the delegates is needed to secure the nomination, per the party’s rules.
Warren says Bernie helped write the rules and now he wants to change them:
“For me, Bernie had a big hand in writing these rules. I didn’t write them, but Bernie did, when we were putting together — they were putting together the 2016 platform for the Democratic convention,” Warren said Wednesday.
“Those are the rules that he wanted to write and others wanted to write. Everybody got in the race thinking that was the set of rules,” she continued. “I don’t see how come you get to change it just because he now thinks there’s an advantage to him for doing that.”
We already know that Democrats are freaking out that Bernie could become the nominee of the party. If Bernie only wins a plurality of delegates before the convention and not a majority, then you can believe there’s going to be a huge fight at the convention to try and award the nomination to someone else with superdelegates (unpledged delegates).
The people who make up these unpledged delegates are Democratic leaders and elected officials. If not one wins a majority, the convention becomes contested and these superdelegates can vote for whomever they want to win. That’s how they can keep Bernie from winning the nomination.
I would add that the more viable Democratic candidates who remain in the race and keep soaking up pledged delegates from these caucus and primary wins, the better chance there will be of a contested convention. Which is incentive to stay in the race…