The good news for Bernie is that his loss is looking slightly less inevitable than it did a week ago. Polling is abruptly tied in Nevada, he's narrowing the gap in Florida (Clinton 50%, Bernie 26%) and he's catching up in Ohio (53% to 39%). Sadly his chances in South Carolina are not so good: Nate Silver has his chance of winning at 2% right now. It's 4% in Michigan.
But even if he manages to catch up, how much will that help? Voters will of course play an advisory role in the selection of the nominee, but they don't have the final say. It's delegates who decide — party appointees, about a sixth of whom aren't bound by the primary or caucus votes.
That's why, even though Clinton and Bernie tied in Iowa and she lost among voters in New Hampshire, she's currently beating him in delegates, 394 to 44. That's a way bigger gap than there was between Hillary and Barack in 2008. Even if Bernie can pull off some more electoral wins, right now he's still losing the nomination by a pretty huge margin.
If that seems a little undemocratic, that's because it's supposed to be. The Democrats created superdelegates back in the 70s and 80s after voters lined up behind some particularly unsuccessful candidates. Party bosses decided they knew better than voters, so they created a system whereby the governors, senators, and various luminaries got to pick their candidate independent of voters.
"Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grass-roots activists," said DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I think she meant this to sound like a good thing, rather than a horrifying admission. "We want to give every opportunity to grass-roots activists and diverse committed Democrats to be able to participate, attend and be a delegate at the convention. And so we separate out those unpledged delegates to make sure that there isn't competition between them."
If we read between the lines here, it seems like she's saying that grass-roots activists don't normally have much of a chance of succeeding at the convention, and so the superdelegates exist so that those long-shot candidates are able to participate. That is some fine bullshit, given that almost 100% of the superdelegates are lining up behind the presumptive nominee.
That's probably why Hillary was already declaring victory back in October, when she'd crossed the 500-delegate threshold months before voters were allowed to start picking delegates of their own.
Bernie, bless his sweet balding heart, remains publicly optimistic about his chances. He said he'd do "quite well" in South Carolina, where 73 percent of black voters support Clinton.
"I think they will start coming over to us," he said this weekend, adding that he just met with a few superdelegates the other night. That's nice.
His supporters have launched a petition asking the superdelegates to switch their support to whoever voters choose. It currently has a little over 100,000 signatures, all of which are even less binding on the process than actual votes.
If anything, this just highlights how important it is for you to take steps to affect political change, either by voting or by working your way up through the party system to become the governor of your state. Both have an impact, but one's far more effective than the other.
