Clinton backers feel Bern
Rome’s Wendy Davis is not fond of the “hit list.”
WASHINGTON — Nancy Schumacher says she just wanted to do her civic duty, and so she heeded the call to become a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton. But in the year of the angry voter, not even an administrative assistant from Elk River, Minnesota, can escape the outrage.
“Some of the (phone and email) messages called me names. Some of them called Hillary names. And others said I was a stupid (expletive) and something bad will happen to me,” said Schumacher, a Democratic committee member. “It’s kind of hard to take sometimes.”
Bernie Sanders defied expectations to turn his long-shot presidential bid into a real threat for the Democratic nomination. Now, as his path to the White House becomes allbut-impossible, some of his supporters are lashing out at a system they believe was engineered against them from the start.
While Sanders decries a “rigged” economy, some of his backers see signs of corruption everywhere — even in the party their candidate hopes to lead. Some have turned their frustration on superdelegates, the party insiders whose ability to back either candidate give them an outsized role in picking the nominee.
The superdelegates include public officials: governors, former presidents and even Sanders himself. But they also include people like Schumacher, volunteers who’ve generally stayed behind the scenes.
The Sanders campaign assures everyone that it doesn’t condone harassment.
Yet a Sanders backer named Spencer Thayer created the “Superdelegate Hit list,” a website to share the contact information of superdelegates so they can be pressed to switch their votes. Thayer later dropped the word “hit” after it attracted criticism.
The name change didn’t reassure Clinton-backing superdelegates.
“It’s not comforting to be on anything that’s called a hit list,” said Wendy Davis, a city commissioner from Rome, Georgia.
In 2007, Davis was tasked with wooing superdelegates for the presidential candidate of former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
Now, a superdelegate herself, she was shocked when Sanders supporters accused her of being bribed by Clinton for her support.
“I have been a loyal volunteer for this party. You impugn my integrity and suddenly think there’s something you can say that will draw me to you,” she said. “It’s that a whole bunch of people who haven’t been involved in the details of presidential campaigns started paying attention and suddenly don’t like the rules.”
Barry Goodman, a lawyer in Detroit, suddenly found his firm’s Yelp business review page besieged by bad ratings.
Democrats aren’t the only ones facing this kind of barrage: Some Republican delegates say they have also found themselves at the receiving end of death threats and other personal attacks from supporters of GOP front-runner Donald Trump.
But Clinton won the support of many superdelegates even before votes were cast in the primaries, and that has drawn the wrath of many Sanders partisans.
Clinton is 91 percent of the way to capturing the nomination, meaning that she can lose every remaining primary by a wide margin and still become the party’s standard-bearer, according to an Associated Press analysis.
It also means Sanders would need to flip hundreds of superdelegates to his side to have a shot at the nomination — including many from states that Clinton won.