Let’s do some history.
In '92, '00, and '04 they were nonfactors. In '92, they held off, because they were waiting for more Bimbo Eruptions regarding the Clinton campaign (a NYT story a week or two after Tsongas dropped out when Super Tuesday closed the deal and made Bill Clinton the defacto nominee highlights the reluctance of supers to declare). In '00, they held off for a bit to see if Bill Bradley was going to be able to challenge Al Gore. Once that writing was on the wall, they broke like a wave to Gore, but Bradley’s national campaign was already collapsed and without financing. In 2004, those willing to declare themselves in a January 16 NYT story were surprisingly strong for Howard Dean, though Kerry had support as well. Again, after Kerry buried the competition on Super Tuesday, the superdelegates broke towards him, but things were inevitable by then.
So that leaves two cases where the role of supers were highlighted, 2008 and 2016. In 2008, Hillary Clinton got a lot of superdelegate support right from the outset. But Obama was running a strategically and tactically superior campaign to hers, and managed to pick up two important and influential superdelegates after the South Carolina primary: Ted Kennedy and Byron Dorgan. After Obama kung-fued the Clintons on Super Tuesday and then ran the table on the I-95 primaries and in Wisconsin, supers started to flip over to him.
And so 2016. Clinton once again picked up a huge number of superdelegates almost from the outset, but a great deal of that was when it was thought that this was going to be an Al Gore '00/GWB '88 kind of campaign, where things are “open” but not really on the incumbent party’s side. And so everything I’ve read in retrospect about the 2016 campaign for Sanders makes a couple of things fairly clear: 1. he had a tremendous message, far more suited for the zeitgeist of the time than Clinton or the Democratic establishment at large, but 2. His campaign was ill-equipped to deal with how effective his message and delivery of that was and ill-equipped to turn that into a serious challenge. Jeff Weaver, in other words, is not Axelrod and Plouffe. What also was a difference between Bernie '16 and Obama '08 was that Bernie’s money didn’t really start flooding in until late summer/fall of '15. Obama was raking cash hand over fist from the start of '07. That early funding advantage allowed Plouffe and Axelrod to set up a campaign infrastructure across the country with field offices everywhere, trained staff (and trained campaign personnel to train volunteers), and merchandise ever at the ready. That was huge. When Obama won in Iowa, his campaign was ready to stand toe-to-toe with Clinton. Sanders simply didn’t have that same infrastructure advantage, and if there exists a logistical campaign genius who could have set something up in an incredibly short period of time…Jeff Weaver wasn’t it.
But that wasn’t the only thing, either. Obama – for all his “Change” rhetoric – was also part of the Democratic Party establishment. Bernie Sanders relationship with the Democrats is a lot more complicated and goes back decades. And for lack of a better term, there was (justifiable) mistrust between both of those entities. Bernie (rightly so) found the Democrats to be ossified, slow-reacting, party-first pragmatists who were slow to adapt to the views of their base. Democrats (rightly so) found that Sanders too often would have his own agenda even on important legislation that was important to the Democratic base. And, in fact, neither entity could even agree on what the Democratic “base” really entailed.
In any event, I have no idea how the 2020 race develops yet, or plays out. But even if Bernie runs for nothing else again, the upshot of his influence can be seen in the following ways:
- Open primaries have become more of a thing
- States like NY with ridiculous voter registration/party affiliation laws have begun to adjust them (some, like NY, with the speed of an ocean liner trying to make a U-turn…but other states have quickly adopted same-day voter registration)
- Superdelegates – created in response to the Mondale and Dukakis nominations, and then never again needed – have gone away.
That’s a pretty good legacy on just the voter rights front. Now if he (and Obama, frankly) would just come out against caucuses as being almost as bad in their own way as closed primaries…but that’s another kettle of fish.
