The Democratic challenger thinks he still has a shot at the nomination. He’s wrong
|OAKLAND
IN A dismal primary season, the enthusiasm and moral purpose of Bernie Sanders’s clamorous supporters has been uplifting. Reflected in the vast crowds that have flocked to hear the crotchety senator from Vermont, and the vaster sums he has raised—over $210m so far, mostly in donations of less than $30—it suggests that America’s democracy remains vigorous. It is also a tribute to the clarity and justified outrage with which he has described problems from corrupt campaign financing to choking student debt. Yet all things have their measure, and the outpouring of Bernie-love offered up by a crowd of 20,000 Sandernistas, at an open-air rally in Oakland on May 30th, seemed mostly inane.
As Mr Sanders clambered onto a wooden stage, wearing his customary $99 suit, with a face burnt purple by the sun and broadly grinning, his adorers screamed and showered him with flowers. “Bern-ie! Bern-ie!” they chanted, yelling louder whenever the senator waved or chortled to acknowledge the adulation of which he, a septuagenarian social democrat, is such an unlikely object. Feeling the Bern has become for the most devoted Sandernistas an all-consuming pleasure; “Bernie or bust”, “Bern the system”, their slogans read. “He’s the only politician who speaks of the downtrodden,” said Jennifer, an actor, who swore she would write Bernie onto the ballot paper in November even if his rival, Hillary Clinton, wins the Democratic nomination. And if that should hand victory to Mr Trump? “That’s her problem,” she shrugged.
As almost anyone would, Mr Sanders, who a year ago was hardly known to most voters, shows signs of believing the hype. He revels in the adulation more visibly than he used to. More important, and bizarrely, he appears sincerely to believe he can win. With a big turnout in California, the biggest Democratic primary, he told the crowd in Oakland, “We are going to capture a very good majority” of the state’s 475 pledged delegates, “then we will go into the Democratic convention with a great deal of momentum and we will come out with the nomination.” He is currently trailing Hillary Clinton in the Golden State by around seven percentage points: a formidable gap, given her advantage with the Hispanic voters who make up over a quarter of its electorate, but closable. All the same, Mr Sanders’s prediction seems so unlikely as to be almost delusional.
He has done unexpectedly well; but Mrs Clinton has never looked especially threatened by him. Mr Sanders has won almost 10m votes; she has won 13m. The senator’s best, perhaps only, hope of victory lay in mobilising his advantage among white liberals and in caucuses, where the result can be swayed by a small number of well-organised diehards, for an early assault. He aimed to win the first three contests, in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. This, he hoped, would shatter the aura of inevitability that was his opponent’s greatest advantage. But Mrs Clinton won in Iowa and Nevada, gained massive momentum in the southern states that followed, and so built a lead of around 300 pledged delegates—twice as big as Mr Obama ever managed over her in 2008. And that is without factoring in her much bigger advantage among the 715 Democratic officer-bearers, or “superdelegates”, who will also vote for the candidate at the convention; 543 have already come out for her.
In short, Mr Sanders appears to have lost. Yet he is hurting Mrs Clinton by refusing to acknowledge this. The excitement around his campaign always showed up her woodenness as a campaigner; it takes a lot of loud pop music to work up an atmosphere at Mrs Clinton’s rallies. His persistence in winning clusters of smallish states that play to his strengths—typically those, recently including Washington, Utah and Idaho, that hold caucuses—has meanwhile given his supporters, and some journalists, an exaggeratedly rosy view of his progress. For the most part, this has been to Mrs Clinton’s advantage; it suits her to be seen fighting. Yet it is has latterly denied her the boost in the polls that is customary for a presumptive nominee, and which her Republican rival, Donald Trump, is now enjoying. Having trailed Mrs Clinton in head-to-head polling by double digits in April, he is now more or less level-pegging with her.
Desperate to heal their feuding party, and turn its fire on Mr Trump, Democratic bigwigs have for weeks implored Mr Sanders to bow out. If the way the Republicans are rallying to Mr Trump is a guide, the reunification could happen rapidly—indeed the Democrats’ primary wounds look less deep than the Republicans’ did. Asked whether they would support Mrs Clinton in November, many of those in Oakland recoiled at the question: “Of course we would!” said Annette, a teacher, as behind her a hawker did brisk trade in “Fuck Trump” posters and badges. It is also apparent that some of Mr Sanders’s advisers are turning their thoughts to what he might demand as the price of his surrender. There is talk of making Mrs Clinton raise her pledge of a $12 minimum wage to the $15 Mr Sanders is promising.
A defeated candidate is not generally in a position to make such demands. But Mr Sanders, who only joined the Democratic party last year and is aggrieved by its leaders’ preference for Mrs Clinton, seems minded to test that. Having implanted surrogates into the convention’s rule-making committee, he expects to influence its policy agenda; that is normally inconsequential but, in the event of an aggressive loser, could be fraught. “If he does lose, the party is going to have to help him help Clinton,” says Tad Devine, a Sanders adviser.
Painfully for Mrs Clinton, Mr Sanders meanwhile persists in criticising her personally, especially over her fund-raising on Wall Street, thereby softening her up for Mr Trump. How long can it go on? Mr Sanders has no serious chance of overhauling Mrs Clinton’s lead of 268 delegates in the nine remaining votes, the last of which, Washington, DC, is on June 14th. He would need to secure 68% of the delegates available, which, given that the Democrats hand them out in proportion to vote share, not all to the winner, is almost unimaginable. To justify his pledge to fight on, he therefore needs at least to win most of the remaining states; above all California.
It is by far the biggest prize of the Democratic primaries. Winning it handsomely would also bolster Mr Sanders’s only serious argument for turncoat superdelegate votes: that he is likelier than Mrs Clinton to beat Mr Trump. The polls, which give Mr Sanders a double-digit lead over the Republican, give some support to that. Yet if Mr Sanders loses California, on the night that Mrs Clinton is likely to cross the requisite threshold of 2,383 delegates, counting superdelegates, they would be immaterial. Mr Sanders would have lost his last shred of an excuse for fighting on. Even his closest advisers admit this. According to Mr Devine, “California is the sine qua non.”
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "California, here we come"
