Wisconsin, the Race Going Forward, and Hillary Clinton’s Patience

According to ABC News, Sanders won these demographics in Wisconsin:

  • He won 63 percent of men and 50 percent of women
  • He won liberals by 18 points
  • He won 78 percent of whites under age 45
  • He won 56 percent of nonwhites under age 45

Although you don’t hear this anywhere, he’s been winning a small majority of nonwhites age 29 and under just about everywhere except maybe the Deep South.  He also tends to do better than Clinton with younger women. He’s not so much the white man’s candidate as he is the younger people’s candidate.

You’ll hear over and over that he can’t win, but if you don’t count the superdelegates he’s only 250 delegates behind right now.  (By my count, Clinton has 1280 pledged delegates and Sanders has 1030.)  And that’s a lot, but making up that difference is not impossible, I don’t think, especially with several big states — New York, Pennsylvania, California — yet to be heard from. The most recent McClatchy poll has Sanders slightly ahead of Clinton nationally. But it’s going to be an uphill slog, no question.

Clinton is reacting to this as Clinton does, by going even more negative against Sanders than she was already.

One of her talking points is that Sanders isn’t a real Democrat. Like that matters, at a time when party identification is at a historic low.  Eric Levitz wrote,

It makes sense that Clinton isn’t sure if Sanders is a Democrat. But she needs to do everything in her power to make sure that he is one. Despite his independent label, Sanders has been a member of the Democratic caucus and a reliable vote for the Democrats throughout his time in Congress. He likens his political philosophy to that of Franklin Roosevelt. Ideologically, there is little distinguishing Sanders from Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown: He should feel comfortable in today’s Democratic Party. More critically for Clinton, his supporters should. In Wisconsin last night, Sanders once again notched a double-digit victory on the strength of his support among independents. Clinton needs to keep those left-leaning voters in the Democratic fold.

I hear from Clinton supporters that the PUMAs, or enough of ’em anyway, eventually made peace with Clinton’s loss and voted for Obama in 2008. But Obama didn’t treat the PUMAs the way Clinton treats Sanders supporters. For example, after the recent flap about accepting money from the fossil fuel industry, she said, ““I feel sorry sometimes for the young people who, you know, believe this. They don’t do their own research.” Yes, sneering condescension is a sure way to win people over.

This is from the Washington Times, but I’ve seen the quote elsewhere:

The Hillary Clinton campaign has “lost patience” and will start going after Sen. Bernard Sanders much harder and hoping to destroy his campaign, CNN reported Tuesday night.

In a report after Mrs. Clinton’s latest defeat at the hands of the Vermont socialist, reporter Jeff Zeleny said the Clinton campaign has decided that party unity can come later.

In the meantime, she will go after Mr. Sanders hard on issues such as gun control in the next two weeks before the New York primary, Mr. Zeleny said.

The question is, can Clinton win the nomination without doing it in such a scorched-earth way that it will hurt her chances in November? She needs those Sanders supporters she is alienating. Does she assume they’ll all be struck with amnesia? Some will vote blue no matter who, but a lot probably won’t (especially the independents and young voters) unless Clinton can give them a reason to do so.

Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver warned against such a strategy, noting that their primary has been much less personal than the Republican race.

“Do not destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to be president,” he said on CNN.

If she wins the nomination the Dem Party may never recover.

Is the Hillary Victory Fund a Fraud?

UPDATED: Please read this more recent post on the Hillary Victory Fund, which I believe clarifies the issues quite a bit.

 

Awhile back I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising apparatus, the Hillary Victory Fund, that is (allegedly) raising money for down-ticket candidates. She is frequently lauded for this altruistic effort, in news and social media, and last week Rachel Maddow asked Bernie Sanders when he might start fundraising like that, too. However, as I wrote earlier, there is something profoundly, um, fishy about the whole “Victory Fund” apparatus.

Some background, from what I wrote in February:

Executive Summary:  In brief, here’s how it works: The Hillary Victory Fund is a joint fundraising committee for Hillary for America, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic committees of 32 states and Puerto Rico. It was set up in such a way that the Clinton campaign and DNC could ask wealthy backers to give the $356,100 maximum annual contribution twice: once in 2015 and again this year.

The money passes through the state party organizations, which do benefit, but the Clinton campaign gets “kickbacks” that she can use as direct campaign contributions without the strings usually attacked to large contributions. And the DNC, which was in debt late last year, has received nearly $2 million of those dollars so far. This explains why Debbie Wasserman Schultz created a debate schedule that effectively denied national exposure to Clinton challengers.

Now some other folks finally are asking question, too. And it turns out that the money allegedly going to those timeserving down-ticket candidates may be going somewhere else entirely.

Mike the Mad Biologist does a good job of pulling information together. This is from a Washington Post article from February that I missed, somehow.

… the states have yet to see a financial windfall. Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign has been a major beneficiary, getting an infusion of low-dollar contributions through the committee at a time when rival Bernie Sanders’s army of small donors is helping him close in on her financially. The fund is run by Clinton campaign staff, and its treasurer is Clinton’s chief operating officer.

Do tell.

The early, expansive use of a jumbo-size joint fundraising committee shows how the Clinton campaign has worked to maximize donations from wealthy supporters, seizing on rules loosened by the Supreme Court.

Many states were wary of joining the effort, worried that such a partnership would be perceived as an endorsement of Clinton and might interfere with their efforts to raise money from home state donors. But campaign officials — including Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns — emphasized that this was a way to strengthen the party at its roots, a message Clinton echoed in the speech she delivered at the Minneapolis meeting to DNC members.

Makes you wonder how many of those superdelegates were bought.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lawrence Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who is now with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “Joint victory funds are not intended to be separate operating committees that just support a single candidate. But they appear to be turning the traditional notion of a joint committee into a Hillary fundraising committee.”

Of the $6.4 million the Hillary Victory Fund spent on operating costs last year, two-thirds went to two Washington, D.C.-area vendors that also work for the Clinton campaign: Bully Pulpit Interactive, which received $1.9 million for online ads, and Chapman Cubine Adams +Hussey, which was paid $2.4 million for direct mail solicitations, Federal Election Commission records show.

The victory fund also sponsors Clinton’s online store, allowing donors who have already given the maximum to her campaign to purchase Hillary lapel pins, caps or car magnets, with their money benefiting the party. It’s similar to the way President Obama’s online shop was run in his 2012 reelection.Aides to Sanders, whose joint fundraising committee with the DNC has not yet been active, said the Hillary Victory Fund appears to be functioning as an arm of Clinton’s campaign.

Meanwhile, on social media, today I ran into a nest of Bernie supporters who wanted to tell the world about Hillary Clinton’s old Travelgate scandal from 1993. What can one say, but argh.

Now Margot Kidder (that Margot Kidder? I think yes) writes in Counterpunch that some screwy things are going on with the money at state level.

The Alaska Democratic party, in its end of the year filing with the FEC, said it raised $43,500 from the Hillary Victory Fund with 10,000.00 dollar donations from Clinton friends and billionaires, including hedge fund manage S Donald Sussman, and Hyatt Hotel heir JB Pritzker. ( two of the several $10,000  donors to the Montana State Democratic Party) . But in the same report it said it transferred the same amount of money, $43,500 back to the DNC – .  a technically legal move that effectively obliterates federal limits on donations to the national committee.

It just becomes a way to funnel more to the DNC to support the Clinton Campaign”, said Paul S. Ryan, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Centre, which advocates for campaign finance reform. “It’s effectively Hillary Clinton’s team soliciting Hillary Clinton’s supporters for much bigger checks than they can give to the campaign.”

The same thing happened with the Maine State Democratic Party with many of the same billionaire donors. Maine attracted many of Clinton’s biggest donors. But the contributions didn’t stay in Maine either, or in any of the other state democratic parties to which Hillary Victory Fund donations have been funneled.  In October and November two transfers totaling 39,000 from the Hillary Victory Fund to the Maine Democratic party sat for less than 48 hours before the same amounts were transferred to the DNC in Washington.

What the bleep is going on? Kidder goes on to say that Barack Obama had a similar deal gong on in 2008, but only after he had secured the nomination. Making these arrangements before the nomination makes it a very different thing —

The Democratic spokespeople for the17 states that refused to go along with the Clinton campaign’s plan, even though many of them were as broke as the Montana State Democratic Party was  (Nebraska springs to mind), were clear that it seemed less than democratic to be choosing sides in a primary that hadn’t happened yet.  That the very purpose of a primary was to let the people choose which candidate they wanted to represent them and to not let the party establishment load the dice in their own favour. They made it obvious that they were choosing democracy over kick-backs.

“A joint fundraising committee linking Hillary Clinton to the national Democratic Party and 33 state parties is routing money through those state parties and back into the coffers of the Clinton campaign and all its PACS and Funds … It is a highly unusual arraignment if only because presidential candidates do not normally enter into fundraising agreements with their party’s committees until after they actually win the nomination. And second, Clinton’s fundraising committee is the first since the Supreme Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v FEC decision eliminated aggregate contribution limits and congress increased party contribution limits in the 2014 omnibus budget bill” said Paul Blumenthal, a writer for The Huffington Post.

A loud article in the NYT in March proclaiming that elected officials in 22 states would not support Bernie Sanders conveniently left out that those 22 states had signed agreements with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Hillary Victory Fund.

This stinks out loud, and is worse than I had imagined. Kidder’s piece is quite good and deserves to be read all the way though, btw. It ends with a list of the states involved in the Victory Fund. The superdelegates of those states may require scrutiny.

Clark County Brawl

Yesterday I saw some headlines from dubious sources exclaiming that Sanders had won the Nevada caucus (formerly won by Clinton) because of a “recount.” I couldn’t find anything about this from standard media sources, so I shrugged it off.

However, some kind of shit went down in Nevada yesterday that probably needs attention paid to it.

After encountering a Clinton supporter outraged about Sanders “stealing” Nevada, I thought I’d look into What Actually Happened. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

According to this article, the Nevada Democratic Party has a three-part system for choosing delegates to the national convention. This is not the first year they’d used this three-part process.

The first step is the caucus, which happened in February.  Clinton won the caucus with 52.7 percent of the vote.  This gave Clinton 20 delegates and Sanders 15 delegates. This has not changed, nor has that vote been challenged as far as I know.

What happened yesterday was the second step, county conventions. The counties hold conventions to choose delegates to the state convention, which will be held in May. The state convention allocates 20 more delegates. From the Nevada state website:

On caucus day, Nevadans in each precinct elect delegates to their respective county conventions, but the winner of the caucuses will be the candidate who accrues the most delegates.

Any caucus participant may stand for election as a delegate to the county convention.   Anyone who wants to be elected a national delegate must participate in the precinct caucuses, and each subsequent event –county convention on April 2, 2016, and the state convention on May 14 and 15, 2016.

So, caucus participants are supposed to show up at the count convention to be considered for the national convention. But if they fail to show up, alternates may be chosen. Kathy Gill explains,

Both campaigns had fewer delegates and alternates show up for the event than were elected in February. But Clinton had a greater drop-off than Sanders.

Delegates pledge to attend the next meeting; otherwise, why would anyone vote for them?

So what causes a drop-off? Arm-twisting in February? Maybe. A change of heart since February? Maybe. Getting sick, unexpected need to work, sudden disinterest, family emergency, called out of town? All possible. That’s why there are alternates — when a precinct delegate doesn’t show up, the alternate takes that slot so that the “vote” isn’t lost. …

Both the February and April events were non-binding presidential preference caucuses. Delegates selected in April can change allegiance before the June vote.

Seems to me that if the Clintonistas want to blame somebody, it would be the Clinton caucus delegates who failed to show up.

So, it is possible the state convention could give the state to Sanders, but it hasn’t happened yet. And, apparently, the February caucus was never meant to be the final word on how delegates are to be allocated.

The Clark County convention apparently was a near-riot. Clark County is home to Las Vegas, so it’s the big enchilada in Nevada. I am hearing all kinds of rumors about people being told to show up at the wrong place (so they couldn’t vote) and bus loads of homeless people being given the other candidate’s T-shirts and told how to vote to get a hot meal. Until I get some solid corroboration for those rumors, I am ignoring them.

And reporting on this event has been sparse and sloppy, so even news story “facts” are untrustworthy. I can’t tell from articles if the convention yesterday was all of the counties’ conventions, and they were all held in Clark County (which makes no sense) or if they are really just talking about the Clark County convention.

This is the news story that, apparently set off alarm bells:

Nearly 9,000 delegates were elected on caucus day in late February, but only 3,825 showed up to Saturday’s convention. An additional 915 elected alternates and 604 unelected alternates also turned out to support their favored candidate.

The final delegate count was 2,964 for Sanders and 2,386 for Clinton. That means the Sanders campaign will send 1,613 delegates to the state convention, while the Clinton campaign will send 1,298.

“We pretty much won Nevada,” said Sanders’ state director, Joan Kato, smiling as the results were announced.

What that means is the delegates from Clark County — along with the delegates selected by Nevada’s other counties Saturday — will attend the state convention in May, where they will help select delegates to go to July’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. But, because of the way delegate-selection rules work in Nevada, they will only get to decide the proportion of 12 delegates — five pledged party leaders and elected official delegates and seven at-large delegates — that go to each candidate.

So, Sanders may or may not get enough of those additional 12 delegates to pull ahead of Clinton in Nevada. We won’t know until May. No doubt yesterday went to his advantage, though.

Anyway — part of yesterday’s issue was that the chair of the Clark County credentials committee, Christine Kramar, was removed from her position because of a demand from the Clinton campaign. Kramar is known to be a Sanders supporter, but she insists she was being neutral.  The Clinton campaign accused her of violating rules in a way that hurt the Clinton campaign.

This blog post has a letter allegedly from Clinton lawyers regarding Kramer. The letter says Kramar exposed Clinton “campaign information and data by unilaterally adding a representative of Senator Sanders’ campaign into a chain of email correspondence between [Hillary for America] the Clark County Democratic Party and the Nevada State Democratic Party. ”

Whether these charges are true or not, I do not know.

This video shows Kramer being removed from an “emergency meeting” that allegedly was made up of Clinton supporters.

I understand she also had to be removed from the convention floor later, but that’s not clear. Anyway, Clinton supporters are pointing to Kramer as evidence the vote was rigged, but it appears the real problem was that Clinton delegates were AWOL. And the rules don’t bind convention delegates to the caucus votes.

And, y’know, sometimes people change their minds.