The Bernie Sanders campaign is looking to lure some of Senator Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates away as the race for Democrat nominee for president hobbles forward.
The Los Angeles Times reports, “Sanders advisors are targeting these party leaders and elected officials who have outsized influence in deciding who gets to be the Democratic nominee, and whom Hillary Clinton moved swiftly and aggressively to lock down early in the race. Each one of their votes at the convention in July is weighted as heavily as those of thousands of voters.”
For the Democratic Party, some animals are more equal than others. Although, I bet there are plenty of GOP VIPs wishing they had a superdelegate system in place for 2016.
The situation is grim for Sanders on the superdelegate front: Clinton has 469 superdelegates, while Sanders has a mere 29.
The Sanders campaign figures that if they can catch up with the “regular delegate” count, they will have some leverage to persuade the supers to switch over.
On a CNN Sunday show, Sanders said he expected the supers to “begin to look at the reality, and that is, in poll after poll, we are beating Donald Trump by much larger margins than is Secretary Clinton.”
“I think the momentum is with us,” Sanders said. “A lot of these superdelegates may rethink their position with Hillary Clinton. A lot have not yet declared. And then you have got superdelegates who are in states where we win by 40 or 50 points. I think their own constituents are going to say to them, ‘Hey, why don’t you support the people of our state, vote for Sanders?’”
The Hillary campaign is not worried about Bernie’s plan.
“We are going to get to the point where, at the end of April, there just is not enough real estate for him to overtake the commanding lead that we’ve built up,” Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said.
Tad Devine, a Sanders strategist, said, “We don’t have 300 superdelegates waiting to go to Bernie tomorrow.” But he thinks a continued strong showing might lead the supers to reconsider.
“She has emerged as a weak front-runner,” Devine said.
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