On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton made history and secured the amount of delegates necessary to be the Democratic nominee. But while she celebrated her win, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders vowed to continue his fight for the White House.

And Sanders’ subsequent comments are a bit of a shame. While there are some positives to him continuing in the race, there are also some very powerful negatives.

First off, I think it is important to note that Sanders is playing a game that he is familiar with: while yes, he is an Independent, he has been in politics for almost four decades. When votes started going Clinton’s way, he claimed that the election was rigged and riled up his supporters over the notion that the system was out to exterminate him. He talked about superdelegates like they had never existed in previous primaries, and complained that they are undemocratic–while now saying that he is going to win the nomination by flipping superdelegates–something that he has yet to accomplish.

Image Courtesy of [Gage Skidmore via Flickr]

In addition, it is troubling that Sanders, who hails himself as a revolutionary, ignored the fact that Clinton had just made history as the first woman to receive a major party nomination, stubbornly refusing to even bring it up during his speech Tuesday night.

When the Associated Press announced that Clinton had enough delegates to clinch the nomination, anger poured onto social media from Sanders’ supporters who felt that once again, everything was against them–even basic math. His supporters called out that this announcement was a breach of journalistic integrity…because how dare the AP do the research and talk to every superdelegate (who according to Sanders supporters, apparently don’t even count at this point)? The superdelegates will be decided in July, they wrote, adding that there is so much time for the superdelegates to flip and that the AP was just in the pockets of the establishment.

@AP_Interactive @AP STOP REPORTING FALSE FACTS. You should be ashamed of the reporting you’re doing. Superdelegates don’t count until July.

— Jacob Sever (@JacobSever) June 8, 2016

Some of these people probably supported the superdelegate situation in 2012 when now-President Barack Obama was in the same position, and Clinton had conceded. That race was closer mathematically than this one.

The AP ultimately decided to issue a statement regarding the findings, in which the AP sasses the critics who claim the news organization just made everything up–implying that those critics do not understand how the American political system works.

We are at the point in this election where Sanders has the opportunity to do something incredibly influential for his many supporters: show them that sometimes you lose, but you need to get back up and keep fighting in other ways. He can either teach them to fall with grace, or to reject a system that probably isn’t going to be systematically changed anytime soon and stop participating forever.

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias put it well when he said:

Those lessons, clearly visible from Sanders’s own career, are that big change is hard and if you try for it you are likely to lose, but just because you lost is no reason to give up. It’s also no cause to whine about how you’ve been cheated or take refuge in denial that it’s truly over. You need to dust yourself off, move on to the next thing, and try to win more votes in the future.

If Sanders continues to hold onto, and reiterate to his supporters, that he will be able to pull off a miraculous win at the convention, then he is lying to his fanbase. Not only will he find difficulty in persuading Clinton’s superdelegates (who supported her before Tuesday) to switch to his side, but he would also need a whole lot of them to do so in order to make up for his deficit. However, the one thing he does have going for him is that people will listen to him, they will be fired up, and they will believe that he actually can win this–even if it is a far-reaching idea.

Yglesias added:

People who’ve already emotionally invested themselves in the Sanders campaign — already gone to rallies and argued with uncles and called out corporate media shills on Twitter — are going to be highly predisposed to align themselves with whatever tactical notions Sanders puts out there.

Not to mention that Sanders’ last ditch effort for delegates looks an awful lot like college students around the country scrambling to get an A in a class that they have a C in walking into the final: “Hmm…let’s see…I just need to pull off a 170 percent on the final to get an 89.5 in the class…I can do that!”

Unlike Sanders, however, college students, at some point, concede to their studies and focus on another subject that they know they will get a better grade in.

Julia Bryant

Julia Bryant is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street from Howard County, Maryland. She is a junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Economics. You can contact Julia at JBryant@LawStreetMedia.com.

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While New York voters were casting their ballots in the state’s primary on Tuesday, many Bernie Sanders supporters were hoping for a last-minute court intervention to open up the primary after a series of registration issues. While the challenge focused largely on issues with registration records, many voters were upset by the rules surrounding the state’s closed primary. When many independent voters realized that in order to vote in the Democratic primary they had to have already re-registered with the Democratic Party back in October, many were understandably upset.

Voters in New York and across the country have started to feel increasingly disenfranchised as the campaign reveals some of the weirder aspects of the American primary system. But the more you look at the way we nominate candidates in the United States, it becomes clear that the bizarre and varying campaign rules make very little sense.

Between delegate allocation that ranges from proportional to winner-take-all, superdelegates, open and closed primaries, caucuses, the outsized influence of states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and the possibility of brokered conventions, the primary process is unnecessarily complex and in some ways, undemocratic.

While most people view the primaries and caucuses as a series of state-wide elections where voters go to the polls and pick their respective party’s nominee, the reality is much, much more complicated. Primaries are a race for delegates, which are allocated by state but do not always live up to the democratic vision of elections that most have. Complexity in the primary system makes the process unnecessarily confusing, and tends to give a greater voice to the parties than to the actual voters.

Neil Irwin at the New York Times made a laudable attempt to find some good out of the current system, arguing that the complexity requires candidates to hire effectively and manage a large, sprawling campaign. Irwin makes a good point in that the complexity of the campaigns can help us weed out candidates, but it doesn’t matter in so far as elections make voters feel like the parties are trying to marginalize them.

Now it’s fair to say that this election is pretty different than past nomination processes. Everything is particularly competitive, and as a result, each delegate means a lot. This has caused many to pay closer attention to exactly how the process works, and for most, they don’t like what they see.

There are a lot of factors that have caused many to feel disconnected from the two political parties, but this election has made disaffection a political message. The so-called outsider or anti-establishment candidates like Trump and Sanders have made a point of directing ill will toward the parties and the election results. While criticizing the establishment could be chalked up as a political maneuver, when it comes to the nominating process both candidates have a point. Superdelegates and closed primaries favor the Democratic party because they give party insiders direct influence and can prevent independents from participating. And when half the Republican party is talking about a contested convention that could give the nomination to someone who didn’t win the popular vote, people are justifiably upset.

While some may argue that these quirks have a significant impact by shifting media coverage and the public’s perception of the campaign, they may not change the ultimate outcome. But that doesn’t really matter when the current system still makes many Americans feel excluded. The rules surrounding the nomination process simply become another way for people to be mad at the establishment.

A perfect example of this just occurred in New York. Would Bernie Sanders have won if the state held an open primary? Probably not. But New York’s particularly restrictive re-registering rules made it so independent voters, who tend to lean toward Sanders, still weren’t able to vote. So now the issue distracts from the race and causes many to get angry at the establishment. It also gives the Sanders campaign an opportunity to trash the system and add fuel to the fire.

But underlying all of this is the fact that the complexity distracts people from the issues and erodes trust in our democratic institutions. A casual observer of the primaries is inundated with strategy and horse-race media coverage based on obscure rules that change each election cycle and vary by state and party. Because of this process, we have candidates saying that there is a “rigged system” and we have young voters turning against their party because of a perceived bias in favor of the frontrunner.

Now I’m not saying that fixing the absurdity that is our nominating process will solve these problems. People will still feel marginalized and disconnected from mainstream politics. But when it comes to the most basic form of civic participation, Americans need to feel like their vote counts and that election outcomes are legitimate.

We have a long way to go before the American people trust their institutions and feel included in the democratic process. But when it comes to elections, there’s no reason why we can’t fix some of the more ridiculous idiosyncrasies. Any voter should be able to look at a state’s election results and assess the current state of the race. And there should be very few opportunities for politicians and their supporters to argue that the parties are trying to control the race.

Simple reforms like doing away with superdelegates, allocating all delegates based on the popular vote, making every election an open primary where voters are free to register and vote for the candidate of their choice, and unifying the rest of the rules to prevent large discrepancies between states would go a long way in making this process more accessible to the average news consumer. More dramatic reforms like fixing the election schedule so it doesn’t favor states that aren’t representative of the rest of the country would also help. While this may be treating the symptom and not the problem, reforming the nomination process would certainly prevent a lot of distraction on the campaign trail and make voters feel more included in the nomination process.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Let’s Face it, the U.S. Primary System is Ridiculous appeared first on Law Street.

Yes, you read the title right.

On Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show” Trevor Noah sat down with Democratic National Conference (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to discuss the current presidential primary race from the Democratic side.

In between discussing the RNC’s Republican “clown car” and her party’s use of superdelegates, the conversation turned a little PG13 when Noah asked Wasserman Schultz if the DNC is conspiring to prevent Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from securing the nomination against Hillary Clinton. Noah asked,

A lot of people feel that Bernie Sanders … is being cockblocked by the DNC. Is there any merit to this?

The question comes after Wasserman Schultz has repeatedly faced scrutiny over the low number of debates the Democrats have had during this campaign cycle, and accusations that she’s acted more in the interest of Clinton due to biased favoritism.

Now my guess is, it isn’t very often that Wasserman Schultz finds herself being questioned on whether or not she’s “cockblocking” someone. That being said, she managed to handle the question pretty well firing back,

You know, as powerful as that makes me feel, I’m not doing a very good job of rigging the outcome or… “blocking” anyone from being able to get their message out.

She added,

The reality is that I have a job as national party chair that is one that requires a thick skin. It requires me to be able to absorb the body blows so our candidates can stay above the fray.

Watch the full clip below

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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