Steve SchaleThe Bernie Sanders campaign is over. The commanding win by Hillary Clinton should bring an end to the nomination fight.
Going into Tuesday night, her delegate lead was over 200, and her popular vote lead was over 2.4 million. We’ll see how the New York delegates get allocated, but her lead will significantly grow and she will add another 200,000 or more her popular vote lead.
This in a state that Sanders’ top adviser has said was one they needed to win, and one where Sanders himself, as recently as last week said: “We will win a major victory here in New York next Tuesday.”
The facts are no longer disputable:
After Tuesday, Sanders will need to win 59 percent of the remaining delegates to get to the nomination.
And if we look ahead to next week, based simply on the public polling available for next Tuesday’s primaries and assuming Clinton gets no bump from Tuesday’s win, after next Tuesday Sanders will need to win roughly 65 percent of the delegates in the remaining 14 contests. Only two, Guam and Puerto Rico, are caucuses.
To put it in clearer terms, after next Tuesday, she will need to win only about 350 of the remaining 1,000 or so delegates. It is over.
In addition, after next Tuesday, she will almost certainly lead the popular vote by more than 3 million votes. There will also be no viable path for him to win a majority of the popular vote.
For those who point to 2008, let’s compare the race at the same point:
If you go back to the week after Pennsylvania, Barack Obama had a less than 100-delegate lead compared to Clinton’s, which will likely be over 300. And yes, California was earlier last time, but even if you take California out of the 2008 map, she has more than twice the delegate lead that Obama had in 2008.
Or compare the popular vote: fewer than 200,000 votes separated Clinton and Obama at this point in 2008. This election has not been anything like 2008.
There is no longer any viable path for Sanders to be the Democratic nominee for president, and at this point, his staying in the race simply slows the critical organizing efforts that need to begin in battleground states.
Clinton is going to go to the convention with a much larger lead in both pledged delegates and popular vote than Obama in 2008.
For the Sanders people, I get it. His campaign is a remarkable story and his team and his supporters deserve a lot of credit. It isn’t easy when the presidential dream ends. Trust me, I experienced it on a smaller scale last fall. There are real stages of grief when a campaign ends.
But it is over. First, he isn’t going to win 65 percent of the remaining delegates. Secondly, the Democratic superdelegates (a system I support reforming) aren’t going to overturn both the popular vote and the delegate vote to nominate Sanders. Sanders isn’t going to be the nominee and the sooner that everyone comes to grips with this, the better chance Democrats will collectively have of winning in November.
That’s because the Republicans will circle the wagons around their nominee. Sure there will be some holdouts, but in the end, their desire to win the White House will overtake their angst about Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.
Secondly, we still live in a divided country: the days of Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan landslides are behind us. This election will still be decided in seven to nine battleground states, just as it has since the early 90s.
Next, the rhetoric between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns is unnecessarily hostile. As the campaign has gotten more desperate for oxygen, Sanders has increasingly turned the guns of his campaign toward the DNC, other Democrats as well as questioning Clinton’s character. He’s reached the stage where rather than admitting loss, he’s blaming the winner, and absolutely none of this helps Democrats win in November.
Now I get it, campaigns have to do what they have to do to win. But when you are no longer winning, a candidate has to decide whether he or she is going to be a team player or torch the tent — as Trump is doing on the GOP side.
This is the time for Sanders to show how you can win by losing.
And the sooner the better, as Democrats have real work to do.
Let’s just take Florida. Since 1992, no state has been more competitive, and for Republicans, there is no path to the White House without it. As dysfunctional as the GOP looks now, they will get their act together. Don’t believe me? Rick Scott couldn’t win either.
But in some ways, Democrats start out in a tougher spot than eight years ago. Since 2008, the GOP has cut the Democratic voter registration advantage by almost 380,000 voters. Democrats’ 5 percent voter registration advantage in 2008 is 2 percent today. And whether you want to admit it or not, that has translated into Republicans winning races down the ballot.
In addition, while I would argue that many of the voters Democrats have lost were voters they had long ago lost, the Democratic coalition of voters now, while more loyal, are also more infrequent.
Nearly 50 percent is now ethnic minorities, voters who are historically less likely to turn out.
While I have nothing but honest respect for the field generals on the Clinton campaign, the longer the campaign has to organize, the better positioned it will be to turn out Democratic voters at the 2008 and 2012 levels.
I thought it was time for Sanders to end his campaign in March, after he basically ceded Florida.
But I understood why he kept going. Sanders’ campaign has done things, particularly in engaging new grassroots donors, that we may never see again.
But at this point, there is no longer an argument for it continuing. The primary is over. There is no path, and there is no math.
So rather than taking a sledgehammer to each other, let’s go beat Trump.
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Steven Schale is a Florida-based political, communications and government-relations strategist. He can reached at [email protected] Column courtesy of Context Florida.
