Inside Job

by Steven Rosenfeld

  The first frays were inside ball, but they revealed the DNC was privately operating as a subsidiary of the Clinton campaign (even if publicly posing as a neutral referee). In mid-October, Wikileaks—we now know, assisted by Russian intelligence agency hackers—posted an April 2015 memo from Charlie Baker, Clinton campaign chief administrative officer, to the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta.6 It outlined the televised debate schedule that her camp wanted—and got. They were to be minimal, held on weekends when audiences were smaller, and were announced without input from Sanders.

  By mid-December, the disputes reached a new orbit. As part of his candidacy, Sanders agreed to use the DNC’s national voter database. Both major parties have these, where, in addition to all the public information from state voter registration files (name, address, party, etc.), the campaigns add tidbits like whether a voter likes their candidate, what issues matter to them, whether they will volunteer, and more. That information comes from phone calls and by going door-to-door by campaign workers. Bernie kept his donor list separate from the DNC, but his campaign had been using the party’s voter file as they built a national organization.

  Besides mutual feelings of distrust, there were accusations that Clinton’s staffers, and then Sanders’s staffers, had been spying on each other’s voter files. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz responded by shutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to the database in mid-December, at a time when Sanders was raking in millions from small grassroots donations daily. Groups like MoveOn launched petitions. The Sanders campaign sued the DNC before cooler heads prevailed.7 The episode, nonetheless, cemented its belief the party was all in for Hillary.

  These brazen attempts to tip the scales were precursors to what unfolded in the first electoral contests involving voters—the party caucuses and primary elections. Even more examples surfaced as the nominating season ended, when Wikileaks released stolen emails from top DNC staff with anti-Bernie plots, including possible lines of attack. Those came as Clinton loyalists fumed that Sanders was not conceding and had the audacity to keep campaigning through the convention. They forget that Clinton kept pushing similarly in 2008 to regain delegates she lost in Florida and Michigan after those states unilaterally moved up their primaries and were penalized by the DNC. Some of these behaviors and reactions were due to the emotional turmoil found on every presidential campaign. But there were other ways state parties and the DNC rigged their voting rules.

  Sanders was more than aware of the DNC’s biggest insider bias: its superdelegate system. This is where 713 of 2,383 national convention voters—to nominate their 2016 presidential candidate—were preselected Democratic elected officials, state party leaders, loyalists, and lobbyists. Superdelegates only exist for one purpose: to take the nomination away from duly cast primary votes and caucuses. While party brass said that has not happened, and in fact would never happen, their existence is not merely an antidemocratic facet of its way of doing business. Superdelegates undermine the Democrats’ moral authority to criticize the blatant and often racist efforts by the GOP to disenfranchise voters, especially nonwhites in blue epicenters.

  Sanders downplayed the DNC’s affirmative action for insiders, believing these Democrats would back him if he won the popular vote in the caucuses and primaries. But unlike Bill and Hillary Clinton, his team had yet to compete in these contests, let alone master each state’s intricacies where party loyalists intentionally acted and deprived him of victories. That inside edge surfaced in the very first contest, the Iowa caucuses in late January.

  2

  WHO WON IOWA?

  BERNIE HAD EVERY REASON TO BE upbeat about Iowa. He followed a trail blazed by George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. After Democrats had a disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago, where Democratic Mayor Richard Daley ordered city police to crack down on anti-Vietnam War protesters, the DNC was forced to respond to entirely accurate accusations that their power brokers controlled the nomination process. They responded by moving Iowa’s grassroots caucuses to its first-in-the-nation position.8

  McGovern, a senator from nearby South Dakota, didn’t win Iowa’s 1972 caucuses, even though his antiwar platform eventually brought him the nomination. However, Carter, a relatively unknown governor from Georgia, started showing up in Iowa in 1974 and set the precedent followed by most candidates since. He went from town to town, stopping in diners, giving speeches before local civic clubs, recruiting volunteers, appearing on local media, and ignoring the national press, which dismissed anyone they disliked. Two years later, Carter was the nominee and then the next president. After he lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, a DNC commission reinstated superdelegates to make sure an outsider like him was never nominated again.9

  Bernie moved to northeastern Vermont four years before the Chicago debacle. Like other 1960s countercultural types, he was an urban intellectual refugee drawn to a state whose rural lifestyle was punctuated by short summers, long winters, mud seasons, hardscrabble farming, and voting for Republican presidents. He fell in with the proud but tolerant locals, a mix of personal libertarians, neighborly socialists, and antiestablishment types. His tell-it-like-it-is—but never lie—style worked. Old Vermonters touted their self-reliance, but they knew what life was like before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal brought electricity to their farms. The natives may not have liked Bernie’s politics, but they knew where he stood. They respected his consistency and, over time, started voting for him.

  Nearly a half century later when Bernie began campaigning in Iowa, he was more than at home. He even had an advantage that Clinton did not. He was new; a Socialist novelty who quickly showed he was a dogged campaigner and dead serious on issues. The last socialist candidate who ignited as big a grassroots movement was Eugene Debs, who had long inspired Sanders. Debs ran for president a century ago, including once from a jail cell, after Democratic president Woodrow Wilson had him arrested for demanding peace and social justice.10

  Everything Sanders had going for him, from his moral compass to his passionate delivery to his long-distance runner stamina from an athletic youth, served him well. As the Iowa’s caucuses approached, his campaign estimated that he had held more than a hundred rallies and town meetings and had spoken to seventy thousand people.11 His staff was filled with supporters who would not be put off by participating in that wintery event, including young techies who devised apps to track voting.

  What Bernie’s campaign didn’t have, notwithstanding the loyalty among Iowans that the Clintons had built up over the decades, was the support of the Iowa Democratic Party’s top leaders. Nor did his burgeoning campaign have an understanding of how chaotic, opaque, and unaccountable the caucus process could be. Vermonters were familiar with their state’s presidential caucuses and town meetings, where, after debate and huddling in the corners of libraries and gymnasiums, the winners and issues are openly decided. But that’s not what unfolded in 2016’s opening contest where the coverage and messaging would be critical.

  What unfolded on caucus night was as predictable as it was offensive to participants and observers who expect our democracy to be fair, transparent, and accountable. As the results started pouring in, Sanders and Clinton were running neck and neck. Other Democrats, like Maryland’s ex-Gov. Martin O’Malley, were behind. The Sanders team used its app to report local results to headquarters, while the caucus chairs were calling in or using a Microsoft app from the party. As results started adding up, so did complaints about the process.

  “Too many questions have been raised,” was how the editorial writers at Iowa’s foremost newspaper, the Des Moines Register, put it days later. “Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems. Too many of us, including members of the Register editorial board who were observing caucuses, saw opportunities for error amid Monday night’s chaos.”12

  Let’s pause
there. Opportunities for error, coming after the DNC colluded with Clinton in the debates and tried to impede Sanders’s fund-raising, begin to show how winning is not simply a matter of getting 50 percent plus one. To win in modern America, whether as a Democratic Party presidential contender in a state party caucus or in a general election against Republicans, requires specific margins, given the rules of the contest at hand.

  The Iowa caucuses winner was not who won the popular vote, but who won the most delegates to the next stage in the process, its state party convention. As Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in their book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, Iowa’s caucuses were “a math exercise that didn’t necessarily require Clinton to win more total votes but to take a majority at the right set of caucus sites.”13

  Clinton’s campaign knew this. They positioned themselves to quickly declare victory. At 2:30 AM on Tuesday, February 2, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had won 699.57 “state delegate equivalents” to the next stage in the process, while Sanders had won 695.49 “state delegate equivalents.” Only one precinct out of 1,682 across Iowa had not reported. That locale, Des Moines No. 42, where Sanders won, was presided by a voter who only agreed to do so after showing up late and was unaware he had to report the results that night. Five minutes after McGuire’s announcement, Matt Paul, Clinton’s Iowa director, issued a statement claiming victory and declaring nothing would change it. Her campaign staff was in full giant-killing mode.

  “Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa caucus,” Paul said. “After thorough reporting—and analysis—of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates. Statistically, there is no outstanding information that could change the results and no way that Senator Sanders can overcome Secretary Clinton’s advantage.”14

  That no outstanding information claim was a lie and Iowa’s politicos knew it. The headline of the Register’s analysis was, “Iowa’s Nightmare Revisited: Was Correct Winner Called?”15 Four years earlier, Mitt Romney was named the GOP winner, but an audit of the counties showed Rick Santorum had more votes—along with finding that some precincts had not reported. However, unlike Iowa Republicans, McGuire and her party rejected an audit and refused to release the raw vote counts. The party wouldn’t budge from its opaque delegate-allocation math. Clinton’s victory would stand.

  The Register editorialized but got nowhere. “Something smells in the Democratic Party,” it wrote, fingering McGuire, who “dug in her heels.” A two-tenths of 1 percent difference between candidates would “trigger automatic recounts in other states,” it wrote, hoping a reasoned argument might have traction. “Her path forward is clear: Work with all the campaigns to audit results. Break silly party tradition and release the raw vote totals. Provide a list of each precinct coin flip [when candidates tied] and its outcome, as well as other information sought by the Register. Be transparent.”16

  By the time McGuire made her announcement, both Sanders and Clinton had left the state. Both were headed to New Hampshire for the nation’s first primary, where voters cast ballots and every vote is counted equally. “I can tell you, I’ve won and I’ve lost there, and it’s a lot better to win,” Clinton said the next day. Sanders, in his post-2016 book, Our Revolution, didn’t say anything about Iowa’s antidemocratic tally or its flawed caucus process.

  “Most of the media correctly perceived the night as a victory for us,” he wrote. “From the first day of the campaign, we knew that we would have to do well in the early states to establish credibility and let the world know that we were in this for the long haul.”17

  Bernie’s retelling took the high road. His campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, started to say that he was “the most electable Democrat,” a line he would repeat throughout the spring. Weaver may have been right. But Iowa’s caucus was not an election, per se. It was a high-stakes process where those at the helm in precincts—doing it the way it has always been done—were more likely to be incompetent than corrupt.

  At the state party level, there was a different intransigence: a system of counting that is not the equivalent of one person, one vote. Should anyone have been surprised that Iowa’s party hid behind math to help Clinton, not someone who had not been a Democrat until running for president?

  This is hardball, not the fair, rational process the Register’s editorial page sought. Anyone doing homework should have seen this coming. In 2008, Clinton’s campaign made a similar move when it stretched the truth to say it had won Texas—which national media reported—even though Obama later emerged as the victor. Democrats in Texas cast ballots in a two-step process: a primary during the day and caucus at night. Clinton won the primary. But Obama won the caucuses. As reporters waited for her speech in Columbus, Ohio—also holding its primary that day—her campaign ludicrously said tens of thousands of Texans may have illegally caucused for Obama. That baseless accusation finessed her victory declaration in two states that night, which she needed to try to blunt Obama.18

  After Iowa’s caucuses, Clinton’s campaign panicked. With the help of allies in the DNC, they added an unscheduled televised debate before New Hampshire’s primary. That broke the schedule they helped write and refused to budge on a few months before. But the extra debate didn’t help Clinton and probably further legitimized Sanders’s stature. He won New Hampshire, Vermont’s eastern neighbor. Weaver kept saying that Sanders was the most electable Democrat. But what Sanders’s campaign would soon find out in the next state they needed to win was there were other fine-print rules and barriers to a fair contest.

  3

  LAS VEGAS RULES

  SANDERS HAD ONE BIG CHANCE TO upset the Clinton campaign before the race headed to South Carolina and then to early March’s Super Tuesday, where eleven mostly southern and central states were expected to deliver for Clinton. That was Nevada, a western state with a racially diverse population centered in Las Vegas to the south and Reno to the north. Nevada is not a wealthy state. But it is nothing like Iowa and New Hampshire. It is more like California, a mix of rustic downtowns and sprawling suburbs and residential neighborhoods. Las Vegas was home to a very powerful union, the Culinary Workers local, whose fifty-eight thousand members, mostly Latino and black, work in the corporate-run hotel, casino, and hospitality industry.

  Bernie hadn’t spent as much time in Nevada as he had Iowa and New Hampshire. In Our Revolution, he said that was the right choice because he had to make a strong start to be taken seriously as a candidate. By the time Nevada’s mid-February caucuses came, he’d held seventeen events in the state, including a large outdoor rally at the University of Nevada in Reno. On Election Day, he stopped by Culinary Workers picket lines in Las Vegas and visited hotels and casinos along the strip, including some where the Nevada Democratic Party had set up caucus sites in rooms normally used for conventions. Bill and Hillary Clinton also made the rounds, visiting employee lounges and urging workers to vote.

  Like Iowa, Nevada’s Democratic Party ran the caucuses according to their rules. It had an obscure delegate allocation formula and multistep nominating process that began at local precincts, moved to county, and then to state conventions. Sanders ran into obstacles not seen in Iowa and New Hampshire. These were institutional decisions that affected who would likely participate and how easy that would—or not—affect voter turnout. It well may have been that despite growing momentum, he was not going to beat Clinton as he had run out of time to have become known in the state where no candidate goes town to town, or holds forth in diners and civic clubs. But his chances would have been better if the Nevada Party—and its true leader, Senator Harry Reid—had played fairer and squarer.

  Jon Ralston, the Nevada press corps dean, recounted in a USA Today commentary how the party rescued Clinton.19 Ralston said Reid, the retiring Senate Minority Leader, claimed he was neutral but was working for a nervous Clinton camp. First, Reid told the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union president not t
o endorse a candidate. He agreed and predicted his members would skip the vote. Then, Reid lobbied casinos to let the workers get time off to caucus. He then pushed the union to deploy “swarms of organizers to turn out mostly Latino workers, who would likely vote for Clinton.” I was at one of the casino sites and saw waves of employees arrive just before the cut-off time to participate. Most, especially women, said they were for Clinton. When asked why, several replied that if she were in trouble, Hillary’s husband would tell her what to do.

  Ralston said the credibility of “Prince Harry” was on the line and he delivered a result “that could indeed prove to be a contest that saved Clinton’s campaign.” The rescue was a good story and surely contained elements of the truth. But it doesn’t note what else happened that added to Clinton’s victory on February 20. Out of the eighty thousand or so participants statewide, the party said Clinton had won 52.64 percent of the delegates to the county forums while Sanders won 47.29 percent. One vote doesn’t equal one delegate equivalent in the party’s math, but there were not more than twenty-five hundred participants at the six Las Vegas casino precincts. What Ralston didn’t say, but what was in Reno newspapers, was a laundry list of factors that could tilt close elections.

  Nevada Party leaders know that whoever won Las Vegas would win the state. So what did they do for which Sanders had no recourse and was beyond Reid’s efforts? First, the party’s caucuses are closed to voters who are not registered as Democrats. Closed primaries are not unique to Nevada, but they prevent last-minute enthusiasts or independents from participating if they didn’t register as Democrats. The party also had no caucus sites at Las Vegas universities, a setting where Sanders was likely to draw supporters. In Reno, there were caucus sites on campuses, which contributed to Sanders winning northern Nevada despite other snafus.20