Op ed: Sen. Bernie Sanders mastery of caucus races is raising hopes among his followers that he can someone defeat Hillary Clinton. The fact that he has stumbled in primaries and trails Clinton badly in raw votes, is ignored. “Including caucus results, Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more than 7 million,” according to the Green Papers. Who understands caucuses better than Sanders? The website 538 reports less than 4 percent of voters in states with caucuses turned out. He realizes, that as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a caucus race has no end because it has no beginning. Alice tries several methods to get her animal friends after they went through a storm in rough water. This causes “the Dodo to suggest a Caucus race. The Dodo marks out a course, sets everyone in place, and yells ‘go.’ The animals run around haphazardly until the Dodo declares half an hour later that the race is over. The Dodo says that all of them have won the Caucus race and elects Alice to confer prizes. Alice passes mints to all the animals, leaving herself without a prize. Finding a thimble, she hands it to the Dodo, who in turn presents it back to her as her prize. Alice solemnly accepts the thimble but cannot help feeling that the gesture is absurd.” Sanders idea is just as absurd. Somehow he can grab a hold of “super delegates” and defeat Clinton despite her lead in the popular vote; 538 finds it unlikely that Sanders can catch up let alone overtake Clinton in votes. Perhaps Sanders can emulate George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000. The former vice president got half a million votes more than Bush. Bush had more votes in the Electoral College. That took a Supreme Court intervention to declare a winner. With the court equally divided among conservatives and liberals that solution might not work this time.
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Robert Weller
2016 US election news and other news from the USA
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Worked in journalism, including on the Internet, for more than 40 years. Started as a news editor at the Colorado Daily at the University of Colorado, joined a small Montana newspaper, the Helena Independent-Record, and then United Press International. Archives
November 2016
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