This week’s Washington primary results proved inconvenient for the prevailing narrative that the Democrats’ nominating process has given unfair advantage to Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year, Bernie Sanders won the Washington caucuses by nearly 50 percentage points, such a resounding win that his fans — with winking tacit approval from the candidate himself— harassed Washington superdelegates to switch their support to reflect the caucus results. Those superdelegates resisted this bullying, and as in other states the discrepancy between Bernie’s crushing caucus wins and his lack of superdelegate support fueled claims that the system is rigged against him. Nevermind that even if superdelegates were allocated proportionally based on results, Hillary would still win: superdelegate conspiracies provide a convenient scapegoat in Bernieland.

This week, however, Washington followed-up its caucus with a non-binding primary vote. Over three times more Washingtonians participated in the primary than had caucused. That comparatively large primary turnout is unsurprising; caucuses tend to disenfranchise voters — the infirm elderly, those who have obligations at the specific caucus time, and indeed anyone who thinks democracy should take place in a private voting booth, not in a public forum of bullying and peer pressure. Hillary won the Washington primary comfortably, a surprising outcome given her humiliating caucus loss there earlier.

This win vindicates the faith Washington’s superdelegates have in Hillary; it turns out Washington voters do prefer her. The same is true in Nebraska, where she lost the caucus but won a primary vote with well over two times as many participants. Nonetheless, both states will send more Bernie delegates to the Democrats’ convention, because in those states the disenfranchising, undemocratic caucus results are the official results.

To the extent that this delegate process is rigged, it is clearly rigged to Bernie’s favor. So why do he and his die-hards keep disrespecting Hillary’s voting majority by claiming otherwise?

Keep in mind: this “rigged” system is the same system that nominated Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — most of whom Bernie backed as a superdelegate himself— without uproar. The only difference is that the system can now produce winning female and nonwhite candidates due to the electorate’s increasing diversity.

Predictably, now that the White House keys are held by women, ethnic minorities, and other historically disadvantaged groups, their voting choices are discredited by others who feel their privileged being displaced. That discrediting process predictably involves newly invented rules, new complaints about old rules, newly discovered standards, and revision of old standards.

Voters never encountered endless news cycles about birth certificates, foundation donors, not voting on SCOTUS nominees, and paid speeches until uppity Obama and ambitious Hillary came along thinking they, too, could be President.

Bush administration officials deleted at least 22 million emails, including the private emails they used for official business. This week’s overhyped State Department audit report revealed that both Bush administration Secretaries of State used private email — one of whom did so exclusively and deleted them all. Yet nearly all headlines on that report focused only on Hillary’s email practices.

And by long-established precedent, major Presidential candidates have released several years of tax returns. Hillary has released 33 years of returns for her political enemies to parse and rip apart. This year — when the betting markets favor Hillary as the next Oval Office occupant — her rich, male opponents are in no rush to release their returns and under scant media pressure to do so.

Every minority voter in American understands intrinsically that neither Obama nor Hillary could refuse to release their tax returns without facing a constant torrent of criticism and outrage. That understanding — that solidarity — is why Hillary has the minority vote on lock. The underprivileged can hear the dog-whistle in the sudden claims of a “rigged” system, claims meant to minimize the political preferences of a coalition of women, Afro-Americans, gays, Latinos, Asian-Americans, the disabled, and brave, secure white male progressives viewed as traitors by bigoted, insecure knuckledraggers.

There is direct correlation between the unprecedented disrespect of Hillary’s vote total and the fact women and minorities fill the gap between her 13 million votes and the smaller totals of her opponents. Whenever women and minorities compete and win, especially in a zero-sum game against a person accustomed to privilege, bigots inevitably lie that the winner benefited from unfair advantages. The lies Bernie and Trump tell about Hillary’s electoral success are the same lies told for decades about minority groups’ increasing socioeconomic power.

Bernie’s and Trump’s ongoing, dishonest, media-enabled attempts to undermine Hillary voters include trying to engineer an unprecedented pre-convention debate to embarrass her; dog-whistling claims that she only won due to a “rigged” system that is actually rigged in Bernie’s favor; whining that the DNC tried to hide Bernie from voters despite 21 combined debates and candidate forums; trying to paint her as the candidate of corrupt big money despite Bernie outspending her several times over; allowing Bernie to lie about his Super PAC support and Trump to lie about self-funding his campaign, again while portraying Hillary as bought; insisting that a groundbreaking attorney-activist, Senator, and top diplomat offers nothing but the so-called woman card; and pretending, suddenly, to care about speeches and emails. These are all part of an obvious and concerted strategy deployed to delegitimize a voting coalition unapologetically inclusive of women and minorities.

Double-standards that dismiss the underprivileged as undeserving of success has been the good ole boy network’s modus operandi for decades, and its rage will only intensify after Hillary is elected. Just ask her husband Bill and her former boss Barack. As only the two-term Presidents to never win a majority of white or male votes, they know all about the political costs of electoral inclusion.