I’ve a lot of discourse online about how the Democratic Party held back Bernie Sanders from becoming president in 2016 & 2020 during the primaries. But my question to that is, are primaries not decided by the voters to get the most delegates? If the people didn’t vote for him, how is that the Dems’ fault?
A counter I see for that is that Dems endorsed his primary opponent to sway the vote. I dont really think that would have much impact on committed voters. Trump got almost no help in the primaries in 2016 and still won.
Is this narrative true and I’m just oblivious?
Yes, voters choose the candidate when they participate in the primary. But before the primary ever happens there’s a lot that goes on in terms of determining who will run in the primary, and what resources they have to run a viable campaign.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged
Not only did the DNC go out of its way to steer resources toward Clinton, there were leaked emails wherein party officials were brainstorming ways to undermine the Sanders campaign with negative messaging.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/23/487179496/leaked-democratic-party-emails-show-members-tried-to-undercut-sanders
I understand all the underhanded tactics. But if Bernie was as popular as I believe he is. Wouldn’t the voters just reject Clinton and vote for him anyways?
Yes, but how do you think candidates get “popular?” With Hillary’s and the DNC’s thumb on the scales, Hillary’s campaign had an unfair and underhanded influence on the public.
I’m not sure if anything Hillary’s campaign did was “illegal”, but it definitely broke things like the DNC’s own bylaws.
Yeah man, I understand that. But the end of the day, why didn’t he get more votes?
…because fewer people voted for him than for Hillary?
Not quite sure what kind of answer you’re fishing for here.
He just wasn’t “as popular as you believe he was.”
I think what they are trying to ask is why did all the DNC undermining still stop people from voting Bernie. The point being that it came off that he was so popular that even DNC with all their undermining shouldn’t have gotten in the way of him winning the nomination.
I feel like we’ve said this to OP already too, but:
However it may have come off, not enough people voted for him to win him the primary. He wasn’t that popular. For reasons mentioned elsewhere.
It’s possible some people who favored Sanders over Hillary voted for Hillary in the primary anyway fearing that she was more likely to win the primary and not wanting to chance unintentionally boosting the chances of someone other than Hillary or Sanders getting the nomination. I don’t know of any polls or anything that might have indicated that was or wasn’t the case. But that still means people didn’t vote enough for Bernie.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this and this is just my understanding of how to answer this question
You may or may not realize that most voters don’t usually go out well in advance and research all potential candidates, selecting the one they feel represents their values the best. Many of them don’t even check in to the conversation until the primaries are over and they can make a simple red vs. blue choice. Among voters that do participate in primaries, they mostly rely on information they learn about those potential candidates by watching advertisements, endorsements from other well known politicians, clips from debates, news and social media coverage, etc.
Creating that information (ads, debates, news coverage, social media, etc.) requires two things: money and momentum. Money comes first, and is disbursed according to the process the other commenter described-- the party talks with its donors and collectively they decide who to fund.
In Bernie’s case, he was systematically deprived of money by the DNC as described above, in addition to his moral philosophy of not taking money from big donors. Instead, he funded his campaign through small donations-- which he earned a LOT of-- but he still had fewer funds to generate advertisements, to host events, to “get the word out”.
Without this funding and support, Bernie couldn’t generate momentum as effectively. The fact that he is as popular as he is despite the lack of support from the party illustrates how popular his platform is, but that isn’t enough to get disengaged voters interested. Further, in his case, other party members actively wanted him to NOT be the nominee, so there were fewer endorsements, more intentional maneuvering by the party to convince voters to vote for other candidates, etc.
In essence, the idea that having the purest moral and policy philosophy is the most important element to winning the nomination is naive: it takes money and support from institutions, or else no one will ever even know what that pure philosophy is.
Lots of great points here. I supported Bernie in those Primaries because long before he was looking at the presidency, he was the first politician that made me think “THIS guy is looking out for ME.”
It’s very likely that others who hadn’t heard of him before then, didn’t get to hear enough to think he could beat Trump.