The American left appears to believe democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders would be winning the race for the Democratic party’s nomination if not for the sinister machinations of the elite. The party is more liberal than former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the thinking goes, and she represents an era in US politics no longer recognizable today.

That’s wrong, but being wrong is unlikely to make a difference. I fear the American left doesn’t believe in facts so much as a populist stories that are counterproductive to real progress.



Elections are rigged, wrote the estimable DD Guttenplan, The Nation’s editor at large, but “with each primary victory – and each close call – Sanders shows us our own strength.”

The Democratic elite’s dismissal of Sanders reflects a contempt for democratic ideals, said the brilliant Jedediah Purdy in Dissent. According to him, the nomination process has been “a microcosm of the impatience that a certain kind of elite feels for the Sanders campaign”. It is, he said, a “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension toward democracy”.

Sanders is the future of the Democratic party, wrote Jeet Heer in the New Republic. “Changes in the ideological orientation of the party’s base explain also why Hillary Clinton is struggling despite her political talents and many advantages.” Sanders has crafted an identity that’s “fresher than Clinton’s and better-suited to the moment”.

All this might be convincing if not for the fact that Clinton is winning the popular vote.

I’m aware this is blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to leftist voices on social media. But it’s true. Clinton is winning more votes than Sanders. The difference is not attributable to her institutional advantage among “superdelegates”, who are elite party members free to support any candidate they wish – it’s down to her popular appeal.

As of March 22, after votes were cast in Arizona, Utah and Idaho, Clinton has earned 1,223 pledged delegates to the convention while Sanders earned 946, a 277-point margin of deficit.



Clinton has won delegates in the fairest way possible. Party rules dictate that delegates are allocated according to the share of the win. This is a break from the past. Primaries used to run on a winner-takes-all system (sometimes called the “unit rule”), in which the candidate who got a majority (or plurality) of votes took all the delegates. The second-place candidate got nothing while the first-place candidate got the votes of the second-place candidate.

In 2016, the candidate in second place gets a percentage of the delegates she earned while the winner does not get delegates she did not earn. This is the case with every primary and caucus in every state. It’s hard to imagine a more meritocratic and thus progressive system.

Clinton earned her delegates with a coalition representative of the demographic changes taking place in the United States. While it is true that Sanders attracted more young voters, and people who normally don’t vote, this alone cannot substantiate the claim that his coalition is the future of the Democratic party. Indeed, if that were the case, then the party’s future is whiter, more affluent and upwardly-mobile than the multiracial coalition it seeks to serve.

Clinton has overwhelmingly won more votes than Sanders among racial minorities and low-income voters. Not only is Clinton winning the popular vote, she is doing so in the fairest way possible: with a coalition of voters that’s as diverse as the United States.



Sanders response to this fact should give American leftists reason to pause. He is looking to the political press to give the impression that winning in caucus states like Utah and Idaho means the people are on his side. If the people appear to be on his side, the thinking goes, then the Democratic party’s “superdelegates” should back him.



In other words, the democratic socialist candidate hopes to create the illusion of winning in order to sway the very same Democratic elites that his coalition ideologically despises.



As Tad Devine, a Sanders strategist, said: “People will look at different measures: How many votes did you get? How many delegates did you win? How many states did you win? But it’s really about momentum.”

Yes, it is about momentum. Just ask Hillary Clinton.