Once again, the Democratic party has made history by choosing the very first female presidential nominee of a major political party. Last week, Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination by crossing the threshold of 2,383 delegates. Clinton is now over 2,800 delegates while Senator Sanders trails by nearly 1,000 delegates without a single contest left. Many expected Senator Sanders to drop out of the race on June 7th if he lost California. Hillary ended up winning California by a landslide, but Sanders did not drop out. Democrats and supporters of both campaigns anxiously awaited another week to find out if Sanders would drop out after the D.C. primary. Sanders has vowed to stay in the primary race until every contest was completed in order to give every person in every state and every district the right to vote for who they had devoted their support to. As expected, Clinton won by one of her largest landslide margins in D.C., yet Sanders still did not drop out.
Sanders supporters have claimed for many weeks that the Senator is going to continue the fight all the way to the convention, fight for superdelegates to switch from Clinton to him, and win the nomination at the July convention, but there are a few problems with this idea. For one, there has not been a single superdelegate switch from Clinton to Sanders yet, or any evidence that points to it happening any time soon. In fact, the only super delegates to switch from one candidate to another have switched from Sanders to Clinton.
The main reason this scenario is not going to happen is because Sanders is no longer fighting for the nomination… I will repeat… Bernie Sanders is not fighting anymore to be the nominee for the Democratic party. There are many reasons for this. First, Sanders is not fighting for the nomination because he realizes he has no chance of winning, for he has no argument. Hillary has nearly four million more votes than Sanders, nearly 400 more pledged delegates, and has won 11 more contests. Second, Hillary has the entire DNC behind her now that she has clinched the number of delegates needed. The coordinated campaigns in every state have now joined with Hillary for America, thus Bernie has hardly any ground game. Third, because Bernie knows all of this, his rhetoric has now changed since he lost California. In every campaign speech he has given in the past two weeks he no longer mentions Secretary Clinton in a bad way, but he now vows to work with her to defeat Donald Trump.
Even though he has not dropped out, he is not going to the convention to fight for the nomination, because he knows he cannot win it. But instead, he is going to the convention to fight for the platform. Bernie has stated that “the revolution continues” as in “the fight for our issues continues.” Sanders has created a movement of millions rising up that are fighting for the issues and Sanders wants to continue this movement. Personally, I believe that this will be good for the Democratic party because this does not disenfranchise Sanders supporters, and it still pushes them to get out and vote for the Democrat nominee in November because we will have a platform that their candidate helped build. Bernie has said this week that he looks forward to working with Clinton on fighting for our issues. And this, my friends, is a sign that Bernie Sander is no longer fighting for the Democratic nomination, but is fighting for the Democratic Platform.
