Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has accused the Democratic National Committee of tilting the party’s convention in favor of frontrunner Hillary Clinton, arguing that the committees have been filled with his rival’s supporters.
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The 67 district-level delegates from Washington had generated some debate on social media, where Sanders supporters questioned why he had not yet received any of those delegates in a state he won big.
Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer if he would accept a hypothetical offer to be Clinton’s running mate, Sanders said he would talk about it with her after the convention. Some in the Green party have been trying to discuss the idea with Sanders, though others oppose the idea. That petition now has 21,000 signatures and counting.
Pressing salt on the wounds, Sanders supporters demanded that Clinton dropout of the race and #HillaryDropOut became the number one trending hashtag on Twitter, being tweeted more than 300,000 times in 24 hours.
The incident also fueled a long-held belief in the Sanders camp and among his allies that the DNC was stacking the deck in favor of Clinton. As one local Democratic activist in my community put it, “Bernie may be the better candidate, but there’s no chance he’ll ever be elected as a third-party candidate”.
Turn on any Sunday news show over the past year, and it’s nearly a guarantee you will see a conservative talking about how they will “never support Donald Trump”.
“There’s so much more that unites than divides us”, said Phil Bartlett, chairman of the Maine Democratic Party.
Both perspectives are misguided, though. In West Virginia, Sanders has focused on poverty, Politico reported this week. It which has already energized tens of millions of people – especially young people.
The Vermont senator has vowed to campaign through the end of the primary season in mid-June and advocate at the convention for his policy goals on addressing wealth inequality and overhauling the campaign finance system. There is also considerable disgust among Republicans and independents with the corrupt USA political system and the venal candidates it puts forward for them to chose between.
OR and Kentucky vote next on May 17, and OR also presents an opportunity for Sanders to cash in on the overwhelmingly white, progressive electorate as he did with other Northwestern states.
On Saturday, Sanders netted more than two dozen delegates over Clinton in Washington state after the party released vote data broken down by congressional district. “Superdelegates have been in place in the Democratic Party for decades now and really, it’s most important from my vantage point, these are folks who know personally these two candidates”.
That may be hard for many battle-scarred progressives to believe, but it is worth the effort.
In Guam, the party said Clinton won 60 percent of the vote to earn four of the seven delegates at stake.
They also don’t have to only choose between Trump and Clinton. They’ll just dismiss his endorsement as “politics as usual”, and will make other decisions on their own.
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“I will continue to run an issue-oriented campaign”, Sanders said.
