Superdelegates might doom Bernie Sanders — again

Why Sanders has to win the first DNC ballot if he's going to win at all

Bernie Sanders.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Alex Wong/Getty Images, jakkapan/iStock)

By this time in the last presidential race, Hillary Clinton had won 672 delegates in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had won 477. A 40 percent lead with most state contests still to go might not seem insurmountable — except for the Democratic Party's "superdelegate" system, in which hundreds of party leaders and elected officials choose which candidate to back at the national convention regardless of their states' votes. And in early March of 2016, Clinton had collected the endorsements of 458 superdelegates to a mere 22 on Sanders' side. At the end of the race, the gap had only grown, with Clinton's superdelegate count finishing at 609 and Sanders' at 47. The Vermont senator would have had to take huge majorities in the primaries to overcome that advantage. He couldn't do it.

Sanders fans were pissed, and understandably so. They and their champion sought rules changes for the next cycle, and the biggest one they got is that the 771 superdelegates can no longer participate in the first vote at the Democratic National Convention. Yet if no single candidate in that initial round wins a majority plus one of the ordinary, voter-pledged delegates (1,991 of 3,979), superdelegates get to jump in for subsequent votes.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.