One year ago, the 2020 Democratic nominating contest ended, with Senator Bernie Sanders conceding to now-President Joe Biden. Following the sustained national tumult of the past 12 months, that race can feel like an irrelevant footnote, one that may as well have been fought a decade ago. But the lessons of that campaign, and its 2016 precursor, have yet to be reckoned with. Is the Democratic Party hopelessly intractable? Are all efforts to foment change from within doomed? The first step to answering those questions is to understand the institutional barriers Sanders faced in 2016 and 2020, and how we can interpret them in light of recent debates about election integrity.
Circling the Media Wagons
Sanders’s explosion onto the national stage in the summer of 2015 was at first met with incredulity. For a press and political establishment doggedly clinging to anti-communist anachronisms, that an obscure, 73-year-old independent senator calling himself a democratic socialist could consistently draw tens of thousands to his rallies was a matter of intense curiosity, but no real political significance.
Yet as Sanders rose steadily in the polls, and it became clear he was a legitimate threat to the coronation of Hillary Clinton, disbelief turned to vitriolic disdain. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post were among the worst offenders, portraying him as an angry old man overly dependent on white voters. His most vocal supporters were straw manned as “Bernie Bros” – racist, sexist young white men who viciously attack and violently threaten their opponents online. The obvious implication was that Sanders himself is bigoted and out-of-step with contemporary progressive politics.
The problem for the mainstream punditry perpetuating this narrative is that it is a complete myth, albeit a very convenient one. While Sanders struggled with conservative (in nature, not ideologically) southern black voters in both 2016 and 2020, he was the overwhelming favorite among African American millennials, and when he cleaned the floor in Nevada last year, it was because of massive Latino turnout. The Jewish Sanders also won Michigan in 2016, the only state with a substantial Muslim population. While Michigan ended up being a deathblow for his 2020 campaign, he again enjoyed strong support from the state’s Arab Americans. In Hawaii, the country’s most diverse state, Sanders beat Clinton in a 40-point landslide. Overall, people of color were more likely than whites to support Sanders, and his core constituency of young voters was disproportionately female.
Another common smear was the classic red-bait. I suspect one of the reasons Sanders openly declares himself a socialist is to preemptively disarm brain-dead attacks from the right (remember, these are the same characters who called Barack Obama a Kenyan-born muslim communist). By owning the label, Sanders hoped to dispense with a useless debate about whether or not he was a ‘socialist' (a word that contemporary discourse has rendered nearly as meaningless as ‘liberal’) and instead focus on the structural inequalities and corruption that inspired his run. Alas, the establishment media couldn’t help but spin him as a dangerous radical whose record was filled with supposedly scandalous trips to and statements about socialist countries.
Throughout his career, Sanders approached foreign policy with a sober, principled consistency. He proved capable of routinely condemning human rights abuses and authoritarianism abroad while providing compelling challenges to the dominant national security narrative. Examples include recognizing the genuine, benevolent pluralism of the Sandinista government in 1980s Nicaragua and Cuba’s achievements in education and healthcare. An entirely reasonable defense of the latter sparked a renewed cycle of outrage in late February 2020, when his campaign was at its zenith.
Approaching Latin American policy with this level of nuance and intellectual honesty would probably lead to better decision-making and outcomes. But by refusing to parrot the establishment narrative (that any regional government increasing the state’s economic role while espousing revolutionary or socialist rhetoric is an existential threat), Sanders invoked the wrath of the media. He is constantly slammed as an authoritarian apologist, despite being one of very few legislators willing to criticize the US government for overthrowing democracies and propping up dictators in the past.
It is not difficult to realize that if the senator (or anyone else for that matter) had instead suggested that in addition to repression and violence, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel were capable of doing some good things too, there would be no controversy. Thus, the hypocrisy of these attacks is easy to understand, but the logical conclusion of the arguments less so. Do establishment pundits actually believe that single-payer healthcare, tackling inequality, and mobilizing to fight climate change will turn the US into Venezuela? Are they insinuating that Sanders is a secret totalitarian, despite the fact that nowhere in his platform is there a call for central planning to replace competitive markets? Do they mean to suggest that the senator is a Russian plant?
Given the media’s enduring infatuation with Cold War tropes, one can at least see where inspiration for the latter comes from. But the rationale for automatically declaring any left-wing movement a national security threat never stood up to empirical scrutiny, and lost its premise entirely with the Soviet Union’s demise three decades ago. These arguments would only appeal to neoconservatives and nationalist baby boomers. Conveniently, the latter demographic is where Sanders is weakest – and the one with the highest voter turnout and cable news viewership. The former, once Republican stalwarts, have become enthusiastic Biden advocates.
For those still unconvinced of institutionalized media bias, consider the following hypotheticals. What if Sanders stood accused of sexual harassment, assault, or rape? Democratic partisans and their media allies rightfully embraced the #MeToo movement, but not out of principle. Instead, they applied it selectively to delegitimize political opponents, and would have gleefully pilloried Sanders had a hint of impropriety surfaced. Yet when Tara Reed came out with accusations against Biden, Democrats slandered her as a Russian tool rather than jump to her defense, proving the farcicality of vows to ‘believe women’.
What if Sanders touted cooperation with segregationists as evidence of his bipartisan credentials? Or launched into an incoherent, paternalistic rant about the importance of exposing black children to record players? The Bernie Bro narrative would have kicked into overdrive against a supposedly racist old white male. But when a different old white male did those same things, he was granted clemency as a member of the Washington club. And there is little doubt that had Sanders inexplicably appended a rambling diatribe about Venezuela to a debate response, he would be branded senile and dangerously unfit for office. Yet once the establishment coalesced around Biden as their best shot to maintain power, questioning his mental acuity became heresy.
Media deference to Clinton and Biden is disappointing but unsurprising. Rather than inform the public through impartial, adversarial journalism, prominent media figures are courted with special treatment and cajoled to produce fawning coverage. During the 2016 campaign, operatives on the Clinton payroll were routinely presented as independent experts on major TV networks, giving a sheen of objectivity to overtly pro-Clinton arguments. Then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sought to browbeat MSNBC executives into stricter adherence to the Clinton narrative. A CNN contributor tipped off the campaign about debate questions. Chumminess with political insiders is nothing unusual for the access-driven corporate media, but that makes it no less damaging. In 2003, media disinformation paved the way for a catastrophic war, and in both 2016 and 2020, it helped shift public opinion in favor of two of that war’s biggest proponents.
Structural Defense
As a former Secretary of State, Senator, and First Lady, Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite when the 2016 presidential primary season began. On name recognition alone, she was the polar opposite of the then-obscure Sanders, having been a major public figure for decades. And as the ultimate establishment insider, the media was automatically in the tank for her, as demonstrated above. Wall Street, pharmaceutical corporations, foreign powers, and other nefarious interests were confident enough in Clinton’s record to open the funding spigots for her campaign. But these are inherent challenges that any outsider should expect to face. What is illegitimate and unfair is how the Democratic Party establishment, at the national, state and local levels, conspired with the Clinton campaign to rig the primary process. This was the real travesty of the 2016 election cycle, and a major reason why Donald Trump spent four years in the White House.
Opportunities for malfeasance are baked into the primary election process. The mechanics of choosing a presidential nominee are tied to delegate selection for national, state, and local party conventions, creating a highly decentralized, fragmented process rife with layers of gratuitous bureaucratization. There is no possible rationale for filtering the popular vote through complicated, state specific schema of delegate allocation other than to dilute the will of the citizenry, for the benefit of political insiders and the special interests who support them. To be clear, the proportional nature of the Democratic presidential primaries is a dramatic improvement over the winner-take-all Republican system (essentially a protracted electoral college race), which inherently and inevitably erases millions of votes. But it is still far from an even playing field.
To start, Democrats still use superdelegates. A relic from the days when nominees were directly chosen by party insiders, superdelegates are elite operatives who vote alongside the pledged delegates (representing voters) to pick a nominee and set the party’s rules and platform. In 2016, most superdelegates declared their support for Clinton early on, allowing media outlets to plaster their primary coverage with graphs and delegate counts showing Sanders hopelessly behind before most voting had taken place. This was a massive distortion of the facts, as superdelegates were free to switch allegiance up until the convention. In fact, this proved pivotal eight years earlier, when superdelegates who previously supported Clinton acquiesced to the will of actual voters, and cast their ballots for Barack Obama. Presenting the election as a foregone conclusion when it was anything but likely discouraged marginal voters from showing up. Clinton was the benefactor, as this younger, less politically active slice of the electorate broke heavily for Sanders.
After heavy pressure from Sanders supporters, the DNC ultimately conceded to removing superdelegates from the first ballot of the 2020 primary, meaning they could vote only in the event of a contested convention (that is, if no candidate received a majority of pledged delegates). With a wide-open primary field featuring an unprecedented number of viable candidates, the prospect that superdelegates could have the final say hung over the 2020 cycle well into its final stages. Though the contest effectively ended after Super Tuesday, many reasonably worried superdelegates would prop up an establishment alternative if Sanders won just a plurality or even a narrow majority of votes.
Debacles in Des Moines
The problems of using delegates to pick a nominee and letting each state manage its own primary or caucus compound one another, leading to unnecessary confusion, dramatically increasing the risk of error, and impeding transparency. This is most apparent in Iowa, whose first-in-the-nation caucuses are preceded by months of media hype and campaign investment. There’s a good chance Sanders won the popular vote there in both 2016 and 2020, but received none of the real benefit – media coverage. Because Iowa’s population is small and non-representative of the country as a whole, the main advantage of winning it is the narrative of momentum.
In 2016, Sanders and Clinton essentially tied in the state, but the Iowa Democratic Party granted Clinton two delegates more than Sanders and then refused to conduct an audit or publish the raw vote totals. It is entirely possible that no deliberate rigging occurred, but the party’s obstinate rejection of basic transparency measures prompted reasonable suspicion – especially when the Sanders campaign’s internal math showed him winning the popular vote and Clinton expressing openness to an audit.
In 2020, Iowa Democrats sought to rectify the process with the laudable decision to publish the actual votes of everyone who showed up for each round of caucuses. But they failed to address underlying issues, and ended up outdoing themselves in a shocking display of incompetence and mismanagement. The results trickled out over days, and by the time it was known that Sanders won the popular vote and Pete Buttigieg eked out a delegate win, media attention had shifted elsewhere. Without the delegate nonsense, Sanders would have quickly been acknowledged as the winner and been able to take a victory lap. After months of buildup, countless hours of volunteer work, dozens of events, and millions of dollars spent, the Iowa caucuses ended in an anticlimactic mess that failed to produce a singular result capable of penetrating wall-to-wall coverage of President Trump’s first impeachment hearings.
As the 2020 “debacle in Des Moines” demonstrates, the asinine complexity of Iowa’s delegate allocation process virtually guarantees confusion and human error in reporting. With discrepancies left up to party officials, and when margins are razor thin, such as in 2016, it is not unreasonable to question whether results could ultimately be determined by individual bias, conscious or subconscious. It goes without saying that these officials would be predisposed to favor establishment candidates.
I devote this much attention to Iowa not because it is particularly important in deciding the nominee, but because it is emblematic of the problems in a staggered, delegate based, state-specific primary cycle. There are countless other examples of inexcusable mismanagement, opaque tabulation, and gratuitous procedural complexity that allow an uncomfortably large role for human bias.
What Constitutes Fraud?
Far more sinister is systematic voter disenfranchisement. This is usually associated with Republicans machinations to entrench minoritarian rule, but Democrats are no less adept at subverting popular will. Many states deliberately restrict the primary electorate to benefit certain types of candidates and disadvantage others, with closed primaries the most obvious offense.
On the surface, keeping nominating decisions within a political party makes sense – as a private organization, the party should be free to put forth whoever it wants, and the electorate can either accept that candidate or vote for someone else. The problem with this rationale is that it only applies to genuinely pluralist, multi-party systems. In the United States, single member districts and institutionalized political duopoly preclude voters from exercising meaningful influence absent open primaries (this is why, to paraphrase Cenk Uygur, primaries are far more important than general elections).
In effect, American presidential primaries serve as the first round of elections, with the general being the runoff. If two private organizations (often beholden to the same donors and special interests) unilaterally dictate which candidates may stand, that cannot be called full democracy. Iran’s Guardian Council, whose approval is required to run for president and the members of which are appointed by the Supreme Leader, comes to mind. Driven by the corruption and stasis that defines the two major parties, a large and growing plurality of Americans identify as politically independent. Disenfranchising those already underserved is both anti-democratic and morally reprehensible.
By contrast, the Sanders political project was premised on expanding the electorate by engaging this cohort – young voters, first time voters and those disillusioned with politics, all of whom are disproportionately registered as independents or not at all. Thus, the establishment had every incentive to exclude as many of them as possible, keeping the electorate older, more conservative, and more myopically partisan. It was a convenient way to rig the process against an opponent who consistently racks up 40 or 50 point margins among them.
In New York, a state infamous for machine clientelism, officials went even further. They set an absurdly early October 9, 2015 deadline to change party affiliation, over six months before the primary and long before most voters were paying attention to the contest or aware of the candidates. According to City and State, this alone disenfranchised “an estimated three to four million ‘unaffiliated' likely Sanders voters”. Arcane registration processes, unexplained affiliation changes, inadequate server capacity, official miscommunication, and a litany of other inexcusable offenses disenfranchised countless more. Worst of all, the New York City Board of Elections illegally purged 200,000 voters, a staggering 126,000 of them in Brooklyn. Sanders was born and raised in the borough, which hosted his then-largest rally ever just days before the primary.
Though the NYCBOE purges violated state and federal law, none of its members or staff faced prosecution. This is the most disturbing aspect of all – beyond tilting the race against Sanders, the board proved immune from the legal consequences of denying hundreds of thousands their right to vote. US election laws, already terribly fragmented and inconsistent, become completely meaningless when unenforced. Local administrators, often party apparatchiks, thus enjoy limitless scope to abuse and manipulate the electoral process as they please.
Borderline election fraud plagued Arizona’s 2016 primary as well. Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell slashed polling locations by 85% relative to 2008 levels, leaving voters to stand in line for up to 5 hours. Many prospective voters gave up or didn’t bother traveling to distant polling locations at all. Sanders’ base of younger, working class, and marginally involved Arizonans happened to be the most affected. In an astonishing display of paternalistic entitlement, Purcell refused to step down and in part attributed blame to the voters for getting in line. Whether her actions ultimately tipped the state to Clinton is unknown, but had a disaster of this caliber occurred in a developing country (say, Bolivia), calls for a rerun would be impossible to ignore. As in New York, this anti-democratic travesty attracted half a day’s worth of media attention and nothing more.
Though chances of a Sanders victory were exceedingly slim by June 2016, there were still enough outstanding pledged delegates in California for an upset. That didn’t stop an overzealous Associated Press from declaring Clinton the winner the night before voting commenced, citing unnamed superdelegates. One can imagine the outrage, shame, and embarrassment in Egypt or Russia had state media accidentally announced a Sisi or Putin victory before an election took place. Fortunately for the AP and other outlets that piled on, there was no sign of a dramatic Sanders over-performance (though countless potential voters likely opted to stay home upon hearing the news), and Clinton won comfortably. In the words of Glenn Greenwald, it is fitting that the nomination was “consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization — incredibly — conceals.”
At the national level, Sanders supporters long held suspicions about the DNC’s supposed impartiality, but the reality was worse than imagined. Flush with cash, the Clinton campaign essentially bought out the debt-laden DNC, cementing control over the national party in an August 2015 agreement. An ostensibly independent organization charged with supervising elections became a de facto arm of the Clinton campaign long before voting started. In this light, decisions to limit debates, hold them at unpopular hours to limit viewership, and oppose open primaries make sense. With complete operational control over the DNC, Clinton officials were free to skew the rules in their favor. Though blatantly anti-democratic, none of this is illegal, demonstrating the fragile state of a democracy in which one of two officially sanctioned parties can be effectively purchased by the highest bidder.
Democracy?
Reflecting on 2016 is particularly grating amid smoldering arguments over election integrity. There is disconcertingly bipartisan symmetry in recent efforts to delegitimize and manipulate electoral outcomes. Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 contest delivered a shock to the system and further tarnished liberal perceptions of America as a beacon of democracy. That military leaders felt compelled to affirm their support for a peaceful, civilian-driven transfer of power was troubling to say the least. But thanks to America’s institutional strength and Trump’s serial incompetence, the previous president never came close to the hyperbolic warnings of his most vocal detractors.
Nor was Trump’s refusal to accept election results as great an aberration as claimed. Following Clinton’s 2016 embarrassment, the Secretary and her allies refused introspection and instead rattled off a litany of excuses. The most damaging of these was the Russia narrative, which quickly devolved into a hysteria eerily reminiscent of the McCarthyite 1950s. The original premise was that by hacking DNC servers and passing emails to WikiLeaks, agents linked to the Russian state subverted American democracy. But the reason those emails were so consequential was that they proved DNC bias and malfeasance against Sanders, prompting the resignation of several top officials. Hacking that reveals corruption and wrongdoing, regardless of the source, is beneficial to democracy. If US intelligence uncovered graft or vote-rigging in Russia, Putin would no doubt howl about foreign sabotage just as Democrats have for the past four-and-a-half years. But that would be no cause to reject the findings.
Though the consequences of Russophobic delirium never manifested as acutely as the January 6th Capitol riots, they “had a corrosive effect on the ability of Democrats to perceive basic reality”. Media perpetuation of fabricated conspiracy theories led a shocking 66% of Democrats to believe Russia directly manipulated vote counts to elect Trump in 2016 – something no less dangerous than the similar numbers of Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen. Though Democratic and media elites decry disinformation and demand censorship to counter it, they are every bit as culpable in this regard as their Republican counterparts. Manufacturing and propagating lies should never be an acceptable political tactic, especially when used to deflect from the corruption of one’s own side.
Rhetorical ploys that baselessly cast doubt on election validity harm democratic political culture, but are far more dangerous when cited to justify ignoring elections altogether. A staggering 147 congressional Republicans tried to overturn Biden’s win earlier this year, veering closer than ever to advocating full-blown autocracy. That was an extreme case, but of late such power grabs have become standard fare for the party. Unfortunately, the 2016 connivance contra-Sanders and the 2020 threat to block him at the convention leave Democrats looking little better.
Despite strong parallels between 2016 and 2020, it is important not to conflate the two. It is plausible to argue that in 2016, state and local party meddling, restrictions on the franchise, and DNC cooption, taken cumulatively, could be considered election fraud. While similar constraints plagued Sanders in 2020, that outcome was ultimately sound. Vicious media bias and backroom politicking by Obama, though distasteful, do not constitute foul play. Sanders lost states he won in 2016, such as Michigan, Idaho, and Washington, and was ultimately doomed by a collapse in rural support. This is best explained in the debut episode of Greenwald’s System Update, which explores the multivariate factors behind the 2020 failure.
Biden’s relatively clean primary win rendered him a far more legitimate nominee than Clinton four years prior, bolstering his position in the general election (your author, a 2016 Jill Stein voter, was part of the shift). But left unresolved is whether the Democratic Party is salvageable as a vehicle for popular will and political change. To varying degrees, it has successfully coopted insurgents from Sanders to Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When juxtaposed against the obstinate strength of Joe Manchin, this weakness is especially disheartening. Fiscal largesse aside, the party shows neither the courage nor will to adequately confront pressing crises and unresolved injustices.
And there remains the specter of the party elite’s self-serving preservationism – though the establishment never tired of branding Trump a genuine fascist, a Russian plant, and a risk to democracy, Sanders posed such an existential threat to their interests that top Democrats admitted a preference for the former. Was that threat sufficient enough that, had Sanders prevailed, Democrats would engage in outright election theft? Probably not (Republicans ultimately coalesced around Trump despite pushes to replace him during and after the 2016 convention), but the question’s mere plausibility is disturbing. For now, the left must dig in, hone its electoral tactics, and keep an eagle eye on establishment mischief. Democracy is harder to undermine with everyone watching.