Bernie had a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC too.

[Jim Lane]

42. If not getting questions answered were a crime...

A fair number of people on this board would be in prison on a "three strikes" sentence.

But, snark aside, I shall answer your question.

First, no, Sanders could not reasonably have expected such an agreement. Nor could O'Malley (who I know was a lifelong Democrat) or Webb (who I think was a lifelong Democrat, though he served in the Reagan administration). Nor could Chafee, who had become a Democrat a few years earlier.

Nor could the former Goldwater Girl have reasonably expected such an agreement.

You see, the DNC Charter requires the DNC to be neutral among the contenders for the nomination. That's why none of the contenders, regardless of party history or affiliation, could have reasonably expected such an agreement. It was a gross violation of the DNC's own rules. Formal rules aside, it was also a gross violation of every standard of fairness.

Second, the reason I mentioned Sanders is that, among the dust thrown up by the Distraction Faction to try to maintain the fiction that there's nothing to see here, one item that keeps getting mentioned is that Sanders also had a fundraising agreement. The distraction here is that it's disingenuous in the extreme to compare the two agreements. Only one of them gave the favored campaign such complete control over the supposedly neutral party machinery.

Third, if this agreement was amply justifiable on the basis that, of the four candidates being screwed over, one of them wasn't a Democrat, then why was this noble and righteous arrangement kept secret? The obvious answer is that, although BERNIE ISN'T A DEMOCRAT is considered to be a really really important point in some quarters, the DNC knew that this obsession over formal party identification wasn't universal. In the Democratic primaries, some 13 million people voted for Bernie. That number exceeds Obama's popular-vote margin in each of his two victories. At the time of the secret agreement, the DNC didn't know how many people would vote for each of Clinton's opponents (I personally thought O'Malley would do much better than Bernie, shows what I know), but they could reasonably foresee that there would be a lot of voters who would prefer a different nominee. The DNC officials wanted Clinton to be nominated but they also wanted all those other candidates' supporters to vote for her in November. That's why they kept the deal secret -- because they knew how unfair it was and that many people would react negatively.

For my part, if I had known about it in November, I still would have voted for Clinton -- but I would have been even less enthusiastic about my decision than I actually was.