Democrats suffer from a socialist approach to primaries
Instead of clarifying who will win the Democratic presidential nomination, each successive primary seems only to further muddy the waters. The FiveThirtyEight forecast currently projects that the most likely winner of the Democratic nomination is “no one” (65%) followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (20%) and former Vice President Joe Biden (15%). The first brokered convention since 1952 is not only possible but increasingly likely.
Why are the Democrats having so much trouble settling on a nominee? Answer: socialism. No, I don’t mean Sanders’s toxic socialist agenda that is dividing the party (though it is). I mean that the Democrats’ nominating process is socialist compared with the Republicans’ more capitalist approach.
Like good capitalists, the Republican system favors winners over losers. Eight states have winner-take-all primaries, in which the winning candidate in the statewide vote gets all of the state’s delegates, even if he or she has earned less than 50% of the vote. Another 10 states are winner-take-more or winner-take-most systems, while another 12 states are proportional with a winner-take-all trigger. Only 18 states have a completely proportional system, while three more have conventions. This means the weaker candidates get knocked out sooner, making it easier for a clear winner to emerge. After Super Tuesday in 2016, Donald Trump had won about 35% of all the votes cast but earned 43% of the available delegates.
Contrast this with the Democrats’ socialist approach, which seems to apportion delegates on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” There are zero Democratic winner-take-all states. (Candidates who clear a 15% threshold either statewide or at the local level are awarded delegates.) Indeed, in the Iowa caucuses the result was actually winner-take-less; Sanders won the popular vote, but Pete Buttigieg emerged with more delegates.
The Democratic nominating process is also socialist when candidates get to the convention. If no one wins on the first ballot, then a group of 771 “superdelegates” — the Politburostyle group of unelected party insiders — can jump in on the second ballot and help swing the nomination in favor of the candidate of their choice.
Under current projections, Sanders will win 1,599 delegates — a plurality but not a majority — coming up short of the 1,991 needed to secure the nomination. He would be followed by Biden with 1,455 and Bloomberg with 595 — enough to win the nomination if Biden-Bloomberg were a single candidate. Sanders would fail to secure the nomination on the first round, at which point all delegates would be unpledged — and the superdelegates would enter the fray.
If party insiders help take the nomination from Sanders — the candidate who won the most primary votes and had the most delegates — his supporters will cry foul. Party leaders will respond that the majority of Democrats voted for a more moderate candidate and that by picking a less radical standardbearer, they are in fact responding to the will of the people
The party would go into the general election deeply and irreparably divided. Many Sanders supporters would refuse to support the Democratic nominee — as they did when Hillary Clinton was the nominee. Some would stay home. Others might even end up voting for President Trump, because he would be the only anti-establishment candidate left in the race.
In 2016, that is precisely what happened, much to Trump’s benefit. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, about 12% of Sanders primary voters supported Trump in the 2016 general election, giving him the margin of victory in the three key swing states: In Pennsylvania, 16% of Sanders supporters — 117,100 people — voted for Trump; Trump won by just 44,292 votes.
That could happen again, thanks to the Democrats’ socialist approach to the nominating process. In other words, socialism could sink the Democrats’ chances in November — whether Bernie Sanders is the nominee or not.