Super Tuesday Didn't Stop Sanders's True Believers
Mar 2, 2016 12:29 AM EST
By Leonid Bershidsky
East High School in Denver, Colorado, home to 14 precincts for the Democratic caucuses, was a mob scene on Tuesday night. It was hard to judge the turnout, but one of the organizers told me there were about 5,000 people there, and I believed him: Rooms designated for caucusing were overflowing, and several precincts gave up and held their votes in the stairwell or outside the building.
This shows how special this election is -- and how obsolete the U.S. two-party system has become. Throughout the Super Tuesday states, vote organizers reported record or near-record turnouts fueled by several campaigns that are really revolutions, or counter-revolutions, in the making. The people who support them aren’t giving up easily. If Super Tuesday was supposed to be about winnowing, it’s not happening just yet.
By the numbers, Hillary Clinton did well enough to start concentrating on the general election, and Donald Trump did well enough for Clinton to start strategizing about beating him. That, however, would be too simplistic a story.
At East High, the enormous crowd was made up mostly of first-time caucus-goers, as demonstrated by a show of hands in the school’s parking lot before the chaos was organized haphazardly into precincts. I watched one precinct after another vote overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, his supporters cheering loudly when the counts were announced. Sanders was winning in Colorado at the time of this writing. He also carried his home state of Vermont, plus Oklahoma and probably Minnesota, and he was almost tied with Clinton in Massachusetts. There’s no reason for him to drop out of the race.
Clinton has ended up with many more delegates, and the people I talked to at East High said somewhat reluctantly that they would probably back Clinton in the general election if Sanders is not on the ballot. But it’s clear that this demographically and ideologically distinct group of people is not going to melt into the Democratic Party as we knew it. These people are going to be disappointed if Clinton settles for minimal change and doesn’t push any of the ambitious socialist plans that Sanders has espoused. In four years’ time, Sanders probably won’t be back as a candidate, but his people will be back as voters, and Clinton needs to think about engaging them before they turn into more active opponents.
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-02/super-tuesday-didn-t-stop-sanders-s-true-believers
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