The Democratic Primaries Are Over, And Clinton Won

On June 6, 2016, the Associated Press announced that Hillary Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Despite the efforts of the Bernie Sanders campaign to prove otherwise, the Democratic primaries are over.

The protests can already be heard from Sanders supporters and surrogates. Their argument is that Clinton has not yet received the number of pledged delegates required for the nomination, since the AP’s announcement of Clinton having the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination was a result of combining her 1,812 pledged delegates and her 572 “superdelegates.” The reason this argument stands is because superdelegates technically do not vote until the Democratic National Convention in July.

While Clinton has technically not won the nomination yet, especially with a number of states voting on June 7, conventional logic says that it’s over. FiveThirtyEight forecasts that Clinton has an 89 percent chance of winning the state of California and projects her doing so by a 9-point margin.

For Sanders to actually have a chance at winning a majority of pledged delegates, he would have to beat Clinton in landslide victories in all remaining contests. This won’t happen. Sanders supporters saying he can win the majority of pledged delegates is similar to a basketball team losing by 50 points saying they can still win in the final 10 seconds. It’s technically not impossible, but it’s not going to happen.

Another argument that the Sanders campaign has been pushing is that Sanders can still win if all the superdelegates switch their votes from Clinton to him at the convention. If this already is not extremely unlikely, it is contradictory to what he has said in the past. The Sanders campaign has previously called for getting rid of the superdelegate system, based on the unfairness it creates. Now, however, Sanders is suggesting that superdelegates switch to him, despite Clinton having amassed millions more votes. His suggestion is undemocratic, and would go against his previous narrative that superdelegates should not decide an election.

What must be looked at carefully, though, is the reason that Sanders thinks superdelegates should choose him over Clinton. He points towards a number of recent polls that show him soundly beating Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, yet show Clinton in much closer races with Trump.

The problem with this argument — other than the aforementioned disregard for democracy — is that polls at this point in an election cycle are nearly irrelevant. In June of 2012, there were various polls that showed the race between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to be too close to call, followed by polls that had the president leading by 9 points.

Using 2012 as an example, take a look here at how polling shifted during the election period, and pay attention to the large amount of outliers that do not fit the trend line (notice how these more extreme outliers lessen as Election Day grows nearer). Polling averages on June 6, 2012 showed Obama winning by only 1.2 percent – by September, though, Obama was polling 4 percent higher than Romney. Polling averages many months before the election simply aren’t reliable, and they should not be used as the main argument by Sanders to try and win over superdelegates.

Another thing that one should consider when looking at these polls is that Sanders is still relatively unknown to most of the population. While this may have hurt him in the primaries, it is certainly helping him in these general election polls. When independent voters are given a choice between Sanders and Trump, the choice is made easier for them because of how little they know about Sanders. Trump’s large media presence and his dominance of news cycles has led to even the most politically unaware citizen knowing about his statements and policies. So, if one holds an unfavorable view of Trump as a result, they most likely will choose Sanders when questioned, with the logic that Sanders (“whoever he is”) surely must be better than Trump.

Clinton has been in the political spotlight for over 20 years, and, like Trump, has become a household name. Voters know who she is and what she stands for. There is not much new information that could sway a voter’s decision when comparing her and Trump. Imagine, though, the consistent Republican advertisements labeling Sanders as a socialist between now and November. While simply calling him a socialist is not necessary accurate, it is arguably enough to signal to independents that he is too extreme for the United States. Combine that with both the fact that Americans now have shorter attention spans and Trump moving towards the center for the general election (as people forget his more extreme statements that won him the nomination, e.g. the ban on Muslims), it’s plausible that independents will see Trump as the less extreme choice come November.

What will most likely happen is that Clinton will have won a majority of pledged delegates by the convention in July, and Sanders’ plea to superdelegates will fall short. Then, there will be no denying the facts: the United States has its first-ever female nominee for the highest office in the nation, and the Democrats will fully focus on defeating Donald Trump — hopefully, with Bernie Sanders’ help.