DNC Seeks to Avoid 2016 Repeat, But Some Fear It’s Gone Too Far
DNC Seeks to Avoid 2016 Repeat But Some Fear It’s Gone Too Far
(Bloomberg) -- Bernie Sanders railed against a “rigged” Democratic primary during the 2016 election, but as he campaigns this year, his team has no complaints.
That’s because the Democratic National Committee has taken pains to fix the problems that some said plagued the last nominating process. There have been broad changes to the party’s rules on debates and superdelegates, reforms to make its operations more transparent and responsive to the grassroots and continuing efforts by DNC Chairman Tom Perez and his staff to be neutral.
“The process has been fair,” said Jeff Weaver, a longtime top aide to Sanders who served on the DNC committee that spent the two years after the election working to improve the primaries for 2020. “It has not been designed to disadvantage someone, which is not something you could say last time.”
Still, there are concerns from some that the party overcorrected and has become so devoted to transparency and rigid about rules that it’s unable to adapt to new concerns from candidates, voters and party insiders.
One worry is that with a field of more than 20 candidates, the DNC has been too inclusive of unconventional contenders such as Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang, while some current and former Democratic officials, including John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, were stymied by the debate rules and forced to abandon their campaigns.
‘To a Fault’
“I think they’re being almost neutral to a fault now and saying we don’t do anything that would tip our scale in any direction,” said Christine Pelosi, a DNC member from California whose mother is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that “if there’s a problem with the rules, is that we’re actually trying to be more inclusive.”
Perez suggested he has no choice but to be firm on rules and impartial on disputes. “We’ve got the largest field ever,” he said in an interview. “All but one aren’t going to make it to the mountaintop. We’ve got to make sure that their supporters feel like they got a fair shake.”
Clinton, Schultz
In the 2016 election, Sanders and other critics saw the DNC as siding with Hillary Clinton on every decision, from setting a sparse debate schedule to its decision to block access to voter files after a data breach. Those suspicions peaked when DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to step down on the eve of the party convention after publication of hacked emails from her staff that showed the DNC tilted in favor of Clinton months before she won the nomination.
At the DNC summer meeting over the weekend in San Francisco, its final big gathering before the Iowa caucuses, members publicly and privately acknowledged that Perez and his staff have made big strides toward strengthening the institution.
The DNC chair said his job has two parts: building infrastructure to help Democrats win elections at all levels of government and building trust in the committee. “The search for trust is a timeless journey and I think we’ve made real progress,” he said.
Perez’s handling of the primary is only one piece of the process that’s changed since 2016.
Overhauling Rules
The DNC’s rules overhaul was run by the Unity Reform Commission, which was created at the end of the 2016 primary season to examine a range of concerns about the nominating process, including the role of superdelegates, some state Democratic parties’ use of caucuses instead of primaries, and efforts to make the party’s operations more transparent and responsive to the grassroots. The Clinton and Sanders campaigns each appointed members to the panel, as did Perez after he was elected chairman in February 2017.
Clinton’s campaign used its whip counts to bolster its argument that she was the inevitable nominee. During the DNC’s summer meeting four years ago, her team said she already had the support of more than 440 superdelegates -- mostly party elders -- giving her commitments from more than one-fifth of the total delegates needed to win the nomination five months before the Iowa caucuses. Though the superdelegates could have left her at any point before the party’s convention 11 months later, but Clinton’s lead conveyed a clear message to Sanders and to Vice President Joe Biden, who hadn’t yet announced that he wasn’t running in 2016.
To prevent a candidate from claiming a similar advantage this time, superdelegates will only get to vote if the candidate selection process moves on to a second ballot – something that hasn’t happened since 1952. Though Biden leads by double digits in most polls and has a small edge on California Senator Kamala Harris in collecting public endorsements from members of Congress and other superdelegates, he’ll head into Iowa caucus day on even footing with every other candidate in the race.
The new rules for debates caused the greatest tension at the weekend meeting. Earlier this year, as the presidential field was still forming, the DNC put forward a plan for a dozen primary debates and soon thereafter set rules for the first few that allowed candidates to qualify through polling or by attracting tens of thousands of individual donors.
At the meeting, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet ripped into the DNC for setting debate participation criteria that reward “celebrity candidates with millions of Twitter followers, billionaires who buy their way onto the debate stage, and candidates who have been running for president for years.”
Bennet said the new rules create an incentive for candidates to spend heavily on social media ads to attract contributions from at least 130,000 individual donors to qualify for the September and October debate stages. Contenders must also get support of at least 2% in at least four polls. Bennet hasn’t achieved either metric and has not reached 2% in a single poll that the DNC is considering.
Perez isn’t sympathetic to complaints from candidates who may fail to qualify for future debates. “With all due respect, the notion that we created burdens for candidates – no, we gave opportunities to candidates and we will continue to give opportunities to candidates,” he said. “Then it’s up to them to take advantage to those opportunities.”
Throughout the meeting, protesters for the Sunrise Movement filled the halls of the hotel where the meetings were held to demand a debate focused on climate change.
The DNC considered a measure to schedule a climate debate amid pressure from activists and with the support of several dozen DNC members, Perez opposed the move, determined not to appear as though he was favoring candidates who have been more vocal about wanting a climate debate over others. “It’s really important not to change the rules in the middle of the process,” he said.
Pelosi said she understands that Perez feels he must abide by his promise not to change the rules mid-primary, but nonetheless sees his inflexibility on the climate debate as problematic.
“When a majority of your members are telling you that they want more substance or that they want the DNC to advocate for more substance in debates, you can also let your members speak as well,” she said. The DNC ultimately voted 222 to 137 against adding a climate debate.
Sunrise spokesperson Sofie Karasek assailed the DNC as “downright irresponsible,” accusing Perez of failing to understand that “climate change is an emergency.”
Michael Steele, who led the Republican National Committee during the 2012 campaign, said he doesn’t envy Perez’s position.
“Inside the RNC, we’ve had chairmen who were just so sycophantic to certain members to the exclusion of others,” he said. “The Democrats have the reverse problem in that everybody has a say in what the outcome should be, and yet no one knows what the outcome will be.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jennifer Epstein in San Francisco at jepstein32@bloomberg.net;Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net;Tyler Pager in Washington at tpager1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley
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