No matter how you measure it, Bernie Sanders isn’t winning the Democratic primary [View all]

[Iamaartist]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/11/no-matter-how-you-measure-it-bernie-sanders-isnt-winning-the-democratic-primary/

When you walk into Hillary Clinton’s national campaign headquarters in downtown Brooklyn, the first thing you see is an unsubtle reminder of the state of the race. There on the wall facing the reception desk is a huge chart, with every single pledged delegate and the state in which each was won indicated. There it is, in a series of filled-in blue and pink boxes: Why Clinton will almost certainly be her party’s nominee.

The delegate count is the only tally that matters in determining who will win each party’s nominating contest. It’s always been that way, but over time the selection of those delegates became more democratic. Right now the nomination process exists as a sort of demi-democratic process in which elections were retrofit to work with the internal decision-making processes of each party. So there are still vestiges of weirdness: caucuses, unpledged delegates and superdelegates and the conventions themselves. These are not the way purely democratic elections work.

Which is why some people are skeptical. The New York Times had an article over the weekend detailing the extent to which people think the process is at odds with democracy. It included this paragraph:

Backers of Sen. Bernie Sanders, bewildered at why he keeps winning states but cannot seem to cut into Hillary Clinton’s delegate count because of her overwhelming lead with “superdelegates,” have used Reddit and Twitter to start an aggressive pressure campaign to flip votes.

There's a lot that’s wrong with that understanding and that paragraph that’s worth exploring — which has ripples on the Republican side of the contest,