Flogging the 2016 Corpse: An Examination of a Failure To Reexamine Clinton-Sanders

Maybe 2016 will just never end at all. Maybe years, even decades, after this writer is dead and gone, people will still be taking to social media in a froth and looking to digitally decapitate one another over what did or didn't happen in that election cycle. Maybe it will even go generational, a legend passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. It isn't just that the subject never dies; it's that the sound and fury over it never even dims. The various narratives about it have been adopted by those in various factions as a part of their very identity. The election seems to have gotten at some pretty fundamental divides among Americans, and it's a wound far too many work very hard to keep perpetually open, a thing not only disputed on an emotional level that has proven itself immune to facts and to reason but has become virtually an emotion unto itself, so distinct we could probably even name it. We are happy. We are sad. We are 2016.

All of that probably makes what I'm going to do here a pointless exercise, and if, after reading it, you're inclined to sardonically chuckle or even roll your eyes at what, right after writing it, I'm about to do, go right ahead--I no doubt have it coming. But I recently came across--or, rather, had shoved in my face by some Clinton cultists who clearly thought it was a thoroughly convincing document--a 2016-themed essay that I don't remember seeing before. I had some time on my hands and I thought I'd respond to it (which maybe buttresses that whole "devil's workshop" thing). It's a 2019 article from a law professor, Anthony Gaughan, "Was the Democratic Nomination Rigged? A Reexamination of the Clinton-Sanders Presidential Race." In answer to his own question, Gaughan argues that it wasn't. Or, rather, spends 50 pages saying it wasn't, without making any real case for that conclusion, which his article strongly suggests was determined prior to any examination of the evidence.

"[T]he overwhelming weight of evidence makes clear the 2016 Democratic nomination process was not rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. A close examination of both the nomination rules and the popular vote demonstrates conclusively that the race was conducted in a fair manner and the outcome reflected the will of a large majority of Democratic voters... Contrary to popular impression... Clinton won the nomination fairly."

That predetermined conclusion and Gaughan's insistence on sticking to it, no matter the facts, whole-hog hamstrings his ability to explain what happened in 2016.

(Explanatory aside: Gaughan's essay appeared in the University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 29, issue #3, and that pdf file of it I'm using reproduced the pagination of the original issue, but when referring to it, I'm just going to use the pagination of the pdf file itself.)

To what elements of the primary process did Bernie Sanders and his supporters object and why? What did his supporters contend constitute the "rigging" of that process? While it may seem obvious to most thoughtful readers that if one is going to confront such objections, one must forthrightly address them, Gaughan--spoiler alert--never really does so. For the extensive show he makes of taking Sanders' objections to the cleaners, he, in fact, rarely ever even mentions any of them. He has his built-in conclusion, so he can't. Rather, he moves from subject to subject and tries to dismiss the problems Sanders and his supporters had with each without ever acknowledging what they said were the problems with it. In not a single instance does he take one of their concrete stated objections to how the primary was run and convincingly refute it. He constructs a narrative of dodges, misrepresentations, fictions intended to obfuscate, rather than clarify, and peppers his piece with cheap political hits that have little or nothing to do with its alleged subject and bespeak a partisan-dictated lack of seriousness. Lots of tired, recycled-into-infinity Clinton cult talking-points. Well before he gets around to parroting the cult's line about how Bernie Sanders "was not even a member of the Democratic party" (pg. 13), even moderately seasoned political observers will know exactly what they're dealing with. Gaughan isn't happy or sad; Gaughan is 2016.

This aversion to the objections to 2016 also leaves Gaughan incapable of explaining why so many people came to believe the primary had been tilted in Clinton's favor, something else her purports to examine.

Gaughan understand the significance of his title question:

"The controversy over the 2016 race raised fundamental questions about the health of the nation's democratic institutions. For American voters, no decision is more consequential than the selection of the president... Thus, the question of whether the Democratic Party's senior leadership subverted the nomination process bears directly on the integrity of the presidential election system. Do ordinary voters choose the party nominee, or do elites secretly control the process?"

But even in outlining this, he's both drawing a false dichotomy and cheekily throwing in that "secretly" to make the complainants sound like conspiracists. In the U.S. system, elites openly control the process. Party elites, not "ordinary voters," make the rules for nomination fights, elites in state government manage primaries, wealthy elites fund and elevate the candidates they prefer the public to hear and to support (and work to bump off the campaigns of those who don't go along with their interests), the corporate press reports--or misreports--on the race and so on. Small-d democratic controls over these things are indirect, minimal or non-existent. When it comes to the efforts by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and their allies to tilt the 2016 Democratic primary process in Clinton's favor and against her opponents, there was certainly plenty of secret skullduggery that only emerged later, but a lot of the things about which Sanders and his supporters objected were done openly. Many were elements of the process that had been hanging around for many years--relics of a bygone era that long ago outlived any usefulness they ever had but continue forward because they haven't been reexamined in far too long.

For this article, it seems to make sense to put the objections of the Sanders contingent in some kind of order, as Gaughan would have done if he'd been serious, reconstruct how he deals with them--and, more often than not, how he fails to deal with them---and show where he's deficient.


DEM ELITE BIAS & ITS DISCONTENTS

Democratic party elites in congress and in the party apparatus strongly preferred Clinton. That's the basic context for everything that happened, but Gaughan doesn't get around to discussing it in any detail until--no kidding--page 30. He forthrightly concedes, "there is no question the DNC leadership clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders," but he then he goes right off the cliff, attempting to assign to this phenomenon exculpatory motives not at all in evidence. "The DNC viewed Clinton as a far stronger general election candidate than Sanders, citing his poor management skills and undisciplined and disorganized campaign." This echoed his earlier characterization (from pg. 21) of the hacked DNC emails released during the campaign by Wikileaks, which, he said, "revealed that the DNC leadership overwhelmingly preferred Clinton because they viewed Sanders as a weak general election candidate."

That "because" is strictly Gaughan's own invention and doesn't reflect anything from the actual emails. The only "evidence" in them he cites for it:

"For example, in a May 2016 email to a colleague, a senior DNC communications official scornfully observed that 'Bernie never ever had his act together' and 'his campaign was a mess.'"

That refers to an email from DNC National Secretary Mark Paustenbach (21 May, 2016), and nowhere in that email does Paustenbach say he opposes Sanders because he thinks Sanders would be "a weak general election candidate"--sentiment that never seems to have been expressed by anyone in the DNC emails. Rather, this was one of several emails in which DNC officials were inappropriately kicking around potential strategies to use against Sanders. Paustenbach suggests creating a "narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess." This seems directed at criticism of DNC favoritism toward Clinton and opposition to Sanders: "It's not a DNC conspiracy," Paustenbach writes. composing his tale, "it's because they [the Sanders campaign] never had their act together."

Having inserted his entirely unsupported "because," Gaughan proceeds to build on it, trying to wave away the larger matter.

"Although the leaked DNC emails understandably angered Sanders and his supporters, there was nothing unusual or remarkable in the fact that Democratic Party leaders had a preferred candidate in 2016. The principal mission of national political party organizations is to win presidential elections. Accordingly, it is normal and expected for the party leaders to assess the strength of the primary field and identify early in the process which primary candidate offers the best chance of winning the general election... Thus, when DNC leaders identified Clinton as the strongest general election candidate, they were not doing something out of the ordinary."

A few things: The DNC was chaired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Hillary Clinton loyalist who had been a national co-chair of Clinton's 2008 campaign--a major conflict of interest that would be a constant problem during the primaries. The Wikileaks emails show close collaboration between the DNC and Team Clinton going back at least as far as 2014. Many months before there was even any primary field to "assess," the DNC was consulting with and getting Clinton's approval for the hiring of personnel and consultants for the upcoming election. A DNC memo from 26 May, 2015--only a few weeks after Bernie Sanders had entered the race--reads, "our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]." Already settled as their "eventual nominee." One of three strategies it outlines is to try to counter a specific Clinton weakness--her corruption. "Use specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC."

Gaughan mentions that memo (pg. 23) in the context of a lawsuit brought against the DNC by some Sanders supporters. "The plaintiffs saw the memo as a smoking gun that proved the DNC's bias in favor of Clinton eight months before the Iowa caucuses," without acknowledging that it is that very thing,[1] and instead of considering the implications of this--or discussing it at all, other than to note its existence and use in that lawsuit[2]--Gaughan pivots to a completely irrelevant discussion of how Donald Trump used allegations of a "rigged" election against Hillary Clinton in the general--something he does repeatedly in his piece (and to which I'll return later). Since his predetermined conclusion is that the primaries were entirely fair, he can't point out that if these issues didn't exist, Trump couldn't have exploited them. According to his conclusion, they don't exist, and that conclusion doesn't allow him to acknowledge that the issue with DNC "bias" isn't that those in the org had a warmer spot in their hearts for Clinton but that they took concrete actions to support her and work against her opponents. The memo speaks for itself on the latter. The Huffington Post detailed how those DNC consultants hired in collaboration with Clinton went on to side with her and repeatedly--openly--attack Sanders during the primaries, and how the DNC's messaging, under their guidance, reflected the Clinton's campaign's themes and ignored those of the other campaigns. With regard to what the DNC did for Clinton, that only scratches the surface.

In summary, Gaughan's irrelevant--and imaginary--motivations for the bias of DNC officials aside, the DNC was committed to and--more importantly but not acknowledged by Gaughan--acting as an arm of the Clinton campaign right from the beginning. Against Gaughan's efforts to brush this off as some kind of nothing-out-of-the-ordinary, standard, even "expected" thing, one can cite the DNC itself. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz professed her own neutrality throughout the process, though this was often accompanied by comments that inadvertently clarified that "neutrality" as an Orwellian farce. From April 2015:

"Secretary Clinton, I think is arguably one of the most qualified people... who have ever run for president. I was proud to support her in 2008. Of course as DNC chair, I will neutrally manage our primary nomination contest, assuming we have one... Secretary Clinton's candidacy is another step of progress for women and for my daughters. As the mom of two little girls, a 15-year old and an 11-year old, and my mom who told me in America a little girl can get elected president, and can be anything she wants to be, this is something that I'm very proud to be able to point to when she announces her candidacy--but I say that neutrally, because I will be neutral during the primary. But Secretary Clinton's a very special, a special leader and a special woman."

Well, as long as she's being neutral, right? On CNN in May 2016, DWS asserted that "the Democratic National Committee remains neutral in this primary, based on our rules," then proceeded to falsely attack Bernie Sanders and his campaign for allegedly refusing to condemn violence and intimidation at the Nevada state Dem convention, though only 15 seconds earlier, CNN's Wolf Blitzer had shown her a video of Sanders' campaign manager doing precisely that. DWS, in fact, attacked Sanders repeatedly during the primaries, while continuing to profess her neutrality. Right after corrupt South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn endorsed Hillary Clinton in Feb. 2016, DWS appeared on CNN to gush over this development.

"Clyburn is one of the most significant historic civil rights leaders, and really the conscious of the Democratic Caucus and the Congress... [H]is endorsement, his opinion, certainly is very significant in South Carolina, but significant all across the country."

"And as the chair of the DNC," CNN's Blitzer chimed in with perhaps a bit of cheek, "you’re remaining neutral right?"

"Our requirement is for the DNC Chair and all of our officers to remain neutral and that’s all of us are remaining neutral through the primary," DWS replied.

In May 2016, Bernie Sanders, tired of DWS's antics, endorsed her primary opponent in her congressional race in Florida. In a statement (perhaps dictated through clenched teeth?), DWS declared

"Even though Senator Sanders has endorsed my opponent I remain, as I have been from the beginning, neutral in the Presidential Democratic primary."

Those sorts of comments weren't just offered to give seasoned political observers a good laugh. DWS and the other officers of the org are actually required, by the DNC's bylaws, to be neutral in these primaries. Article V, section 6 dictates:

"In the conduct and management of the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination process, the Chairperson [of the DNC] shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process."

...a requirement entirely ignored in 2016.[3] And though he quotes part of this same directive, Gaughan then entirely ignores it as well.

For the things Gaughan tries to portray as perfectly normal and no big deal, four top DNC officials, including the chairwoman, were eventually forced out in disgrace, and the party issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders. Guaghan mentions the apology and DWS getting the boot; he allows these things to have no impact on his conclusions.


UNSUPER SUPERDELEGATES & THEIR DISCONTENTS

"[S]enior Democrats," Gaughan writes, didn't "conceal their strong preference for Clinton in the nomination process," and he proceeds to go through the large number of senators, congressmen and Dem-aligned interest groups who endorsed Clinton during the campaign. "By any measure, therefore," he concludes, "the Russian-hacked DNC emails simply reinforced a point that was already abundantly clear: Democratic leaders overwhelmingly preferred Clinton over Sanders."

All true. But also a problem, in a number of ways.

While political endorsements are some of the basic meat-and-potatoes of politics, the Democratic party had the superdelegate system, which weaponizes them, by conferring on many of those endorsers--whom no voter chose to be a given this power--the same voting power in the nomination process as vast numbers of actual voters. Collectively, the superdelegates, in fact, have the same voting power as several million voters. By the DNC's rules, the superdelegates are free to overrule the votes of those voters if they so choose. And in 2016, nearly all of them lined up behind Clinton, they often did so choose.

Further, while superdelegates don't vote until the Democratic convention and are free to change their minds at any point before that, the corporate press, in 2016, ubiquitously began the practice of including superdelegate pledges in their day-to-day accounts of the race, making Clinton, who had lined up vast numbers of superdelegates, look unbeatable months before a single vote had even been cast. All of this worked to suppress the Sanders vote (and that of the other Dem campaigns) and to Bandwagon Effect Clinton's.

By the Nevada caucus, only the 3rd contest of the primary season, some press outlets were already declaring the race virtually over based on this misuse of superdelegate pledges.[4] This continued throughout the primaries (this writer covered it at the time), and ended in one final farce when, in June, the press spent the day immediately prior to six states voting in the 2nd-biggest voting-day on that year's Dem calendar declaring Hillary Clinton had already won the nomination, based on pledges by superdelegates who wouldn't vote until the convention at the end of July.

This use of the supers was journalistic malpractice; the press had never covered a contested Democratic presidential race in this way. But the superdelegate system could only be misused because the anti-democratic institution existed.[5]

Gaughan writes (pages 31 and 32) that the bias of party leaders didn't matter in 2016 because party leaders have little influence and are marginalized in modern campaigns, but by 13 Nov., 2015--that is, 2 1/2 months before the first contest of the primary season--NPR reported that, because of superdelegate pledges up to then, Clinton already had 15% of the delegates needed to win the nomination. Meaning that, long before a single vote had been cast, Sanders, to get the nomination, would need to win enough actual votes from actual voters to take over 65% of the actual delegates in the primary contests, unless some of those supers changed their minds. Seems like some influence, right? Hilariously, Gaughan tries to use New Hampshire as his example on this.

"For example, before the New Hampshire primary, the Washington Post observed that 'the entire political establishment of New Hampshire publicly lined up behind Hillary Clinton.' Nevertheless, Sanders won New Hampshire by twenty-two points."

That was, up until then, the largest margin in the history of that contest, and what Gaughan doesn't tell his readers is that those party leaders were so ineffectual that they turned a 22-point Sanders massacre of a win into a tie; most of New Hampshire's superdelegates lined up behind Clinton and the candidates left the state with 15 delegates each.[6] This was reported across the press, which declined to treat it as a headline-worthy scandal indicating a fundamentally corrupt process. The message in those reports was the same as the in-your-face message in all those accounts of the race that used superdelegate pledges: if you're a Sanders supporter, don't even bother to vote.

To see this sort of thing happen once during a primary process would be a major blow to public perception of its fairness, but this was happening regularly in 2016. Sanders narrowly defeated Clinton in Michigan--a major upset in a state she was expected to win--but the superdelegates made it a 76-67 delegate victory for Hillary Clinton. Sanders defeated Clinton in Wyoming by over 11 points, but she walked away with 11 delegates to Sanders' 7. Sanders took Clinton by 11 points in Rhode Island; he got 13 delegates to her 20. Sanders took Indiana by 5 points; the supers gave it to Clinton, 46-44. Clinton won only 35.8% of the vote in West Virginia but was awarded 51.4% of the delegates. In Montana, it was a 7+-point win for Sanders; Clinton got 15 delegates to his 12. And so on.

Bernie Sanders denounced the superdelegate system as anti-democratic. His supporters maintained that the misuse of superdelegate pledges by the press was working against Sanders throughout the primaries and undermining faith in the process. None are particularly controversial positions.

Instead of addressing these objections when he's supposed to be refuting them, Gaughan just tries to make them go away.

He persistently tries to minimize the superdelegates' significance. In describing the creation of the superdelegate system in the early '80s, he writes that party bosses "sought to temper mildly the democratizing effects of McGovern-Fraser by reasserting a small niche for themselves in the nomination process" (pg. 9). He uses, in a footnote, a quote from others to recount the positive spin party bosses tried to put on their anti-democratic power-grab--that it would "improve the odds that the party's most effective candidate for the general election would be nominated"--without examining the implications of this--that voters are queering the odds with their choices and need correcting--and he never questions why party bosses should have that "small niche"--a Good Ol' Boys Club that favors connected insiders. That "sought to temper" line is the full extent of his discussion of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the supers, Sanders' major complaint against them. He insists (pg. 10) that "superdelegates have never represented more than a small fraction of the total number of delegates to the presidential convention." A few lines later, he notes that in 2008, the supers represented "only" 19% of convention delegates--nearly 1 in every 5. "Small fraction," see? He points out that the superdelegates have always "ultimately sided with the candidate who had accumulated the most pledged delegates, thus honoring the electorate's will" (pg. 32).

Gaughan also says a lot of things like this, from page 4:

"Lost in the controversy over Clinton's superdelegate support was the single most important fact of the nomination race: Clinton defeated Sanders by over 3 million votes."

From pages 34-35:

"Clinton's decisive victory in the popular vote gave her 359 more pledged delegates than Sanders, which meant she would have won the nomination even if the party had completely eliminated superdelegates from the nomination process."

In a footnote on page 35, he quotes William Mayer:

"In light of the controversy over the role of the superdelegates, it is important to emphasize that Clinton did not win the 2016 Democratic nomination because of them. Had there been no superdelegate provision in the Democratic Party rules, Clinton would still have won a solid majority of the convention delegates."

He never has anything to say about superdelegates softening Clinton's losses or even turning Sanders' victories into Clinton wins and the corrosive impact this had on public perception of the process, but he does say things like this (pages 37-38):

"[A]mending the Democratic Party's nomination rules to suit Sanders would not have changed the race's outcome. For example, if every superdelegate from a state won by Sanders supported him at the nominating convention, Clinton would still have led Sanders by a margin of 2,721 delegates to 2,019.243. Likewise, eliminating superdelegates entirely would still have seen Clinton ahead of Sanders by a margin of 2,205 pledged delegates to 1,846. The simple fact is Sanders lost the race because Democratic voters preferred Clinton."

But the criticism Sanders' supporters have leveled is that the press misuse of the superdelegates, enabled by the mechanics of the superdelegate system, suppressed Sanders' vote and boosted Clinton's--the way they were used impacted the outcome. Through these passages, Gaughan--following, it should be said, a tired Clinton cult trope--is outlining alternative scenarios wherein the superdelegate system didn't exist and thus couldn't be misused in this way and asserting that Clinton would still have won, but that conclusion is entirely untestable without the aid of time-travel. While it stands to reason that the effect of the press misuse of superdelegates was probably substantial, the extent to which it affected the race has, so far as this writer knows, never even been studied. What this means here is that there aren't even any estimates on which Gaughan (or William Mayer) could base these assertions. Instead, his numbers for these "alternatives" come from the race as it was run, the race in which every press outlet was telling its audience, day after day, hour after hour, that Sanders' cause was hopeless, that Clinton was unstoppable.

Something else I find worthy of mention: Gaughan writes that "Clinton ultimately clinched the nomination in June 2016 when her pledged delegate and superdelegate total reached the required number of 2,382." But missing here is any mention of the fact that this "clinched" was just a pronouncement by the press based on the pledges of superdelegates who wouldn't actually vote for nearly 2 more months. Anyone who checks Gaughan's footnote on this will see it leads to a Politico story declaring Clinton the winner that was written on 6 June, the day before California, the Dakotas, New Mexico, New Jersey and Montana were to vote, but he, so concerned with dispelling notions of an unfair process, doesn't have anything to say about that.

So--again--for all Gaughan writes about this, he never even addresses the actual objections he's pretending to debunk. And he can't. There's no way a democratic party can justify the superdelegate system, and Gaughan, in trying to minimize their significance, makes the case for their elimination. If they're so unimportant, it won't hurt to get rid of them; if, additionally, they cause so much controversy, ending them is a no-brainer.


POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM & ITS DISCONTENTS

When dealing with their election complaints, Gaughan is unwilling to extend to Sanders or his supporters any good faith, even when any reasonable observer would concede they had a legitimate point. As he tells it, it's all just opportunism-driven lies.

He writes (pg. 18) that Sanders' "New Hampshire victory... inspired the Sanders campaign to court the superdelegates, the great majority of whom had already committed to Clinton," but that

"as Clinton's primary victories accumulated and her lead became insurmountable, Sanders stopped attempting to win superdelegates to his side. Instead, he began to allege that the Democratic nomination process did not give him a fair chance to win."

Fact-check: Sanders never "stopped attempting to win superdelegates to his side." He, in fact, continued to pitch his case to them that he was a stronger general election candidate until the end of the primary season. From 4 June, 2016, ten days before the last contest: "[A]dvisers say [Sanders] intends to [further] ramp up his courtship of the party's superdelegates, a process that is already underway." Gaughan returns to this on page 45:

"In the case of Bernie Sanders, political opportunism clearly motivated his claims of a 'rigged system.' Originally, he had no objection to superdelegates. In fact, on the heels of his victory in the New Hampshire primary in February 2016, he publicly appealed for the superdelegates to support his campaign. He even described superdelegates in favorable terms, explaining that the main point of superdelegates is 'to make sure that we do not have a Republican in the White House.'

"Only when Clinton began to pull away in the nomination race did Sanders attack the 'rigged system' of superdelegates. Instead of accepting the reality that he lost the race because Democratic voters preferred Clinton, Sanders changed the focus of public debate to a false narrative about election fraud."

That last is just a straight lie: nothing Sanders said about the supers was "a false narrative about election fraud." It was, just as Sanders said repeatedly, about a system stacked against insurgent grassroots candidates like himself, and nothing about it could even be mistakenly construed as "election fraud." The claim that Sanders initially didn't object to superdelegates and was even favorably disposed toward them doesn't fare much better. It's based on a single interview Sanders gave with CBS News' FACE THE NATION on 14 Feb., 2016. The actual interview doesn't at all support Gaughan's characterization of Sanders' remarks. Host John Dickerson asked,

"When you did well in New Hampshire and the delegate counts came out, it showed that you'd picked up some delegates in New Hampshire. But because Hillary Clinton has so many of those superdelegates, the numbers look quite tilted in her favor. What's your overall feeling about super delegates and their role in the nominating process?"

Sanders replied, "Well, look, John, we are taking on the establishment, the Democratic establishment in virtually every state that we're running in. And most of the establishment, in fact, is with Hillary Clinton." Opposition to the party establishment had been one of Sanders' persistent themes in that campaign; running as a Dem, Sanders is stuck with that system but there's no way to spin that into the ringing endorsement of that system that Gaughan described. Sanders went on to say

"I think if we continue to do well around the country, and if superdelegates whose main interest in life is to make sure that we do not have a Republican in the White House, if they understand that I am the candidate, and I believe that I am, who is best suited to defeat the Republican nominee, I think they will start coming over to us."

Just a matter-of-fact, politically diplomatic assessment of where things stood and where he'd prefer they go.

The same day as that interview, Politico reported that Sanders' supporters were revolting against superdelegates, in reaction to how they were being used to undermine Sanders. As the latter continued, this became a bigger issue and Sanders had more to say about it. Crass political opportunism, or a legitimate gripe that became more prominent because it became a larger problem? There's no question that Sanders was disadvantaged by the superdelegate system. From there, it's just a question of whether or not that system is a good idea.

History, so far, has sided with Sanders on that one. In an AP-NORC poll from May 2016, only 25% of Democrats thought superdelegates were a good idea. The Democratic Unity Reform Commission, formed to, among other things, revamp the nomination process didn't entirely eliminate superdelegates--the Clintonite party bosses wouldn't allow that--but it recognized the problem with them and neutered them, precluding anything like 2016 from happening again. That sort of takes the wind out of everything Gaughan writes on that particular subject, so he just doesn't mention it.


DEBATES, GATES & THEIR DISCONTENTS

Candidate debates are sort of the soul of liberal democracy, a way for the pubic to see how the players stack up against one another, and the 2016 primary debate schedule was one of the ways Clinton and the DNC sought to manipulate the primary process. The initial schedule concocted by the DNC started very late--over 2 months after the Republicans and 6 months after the first debate in the previous contested Dem primary. Only half a dozen were scheduled; most were penciled in for nights when few would ever see them.

By now, I suppose it won't come as a surprise to anyone that this is yet another issue Gaughan both grossly misrepresents and sidesteps.

Gaughan describes Sanders' objections to the primary schedule as just more base opportunism, something undertaken only "after Clinton's primary victories accumulated and her lead became insurmountable."

"For example, during an April 2016 interview on NBC's Meet The Press program, Sanders complained that the party had been unfair to him by scheduling three of the first four presidential debates on weekends when fewer people watch television."

Sanders was correct. Gaughan's narrative about Sanders is not.

The background: The DNC began hashing out the debate schedule in the Spring of 2015. This was supposed to be done in negotiation with the Democratic campaigns; in practice, DNC chair DWS just did whatever Clinton said, with what appears to be no real input from anyone else. Martin O'Malley wanted many debates, starting early. Bernie Sanders suggested an incredibly ambitious debate schedule, starting early, being many and aimed at not only revitalizing the Democratic party but liberal democracy itself. The hacked Democratic emails gave us a look at what, on the other hand, Clinton wanted, which was just to protect Hillary Clinton. In April 2015, Charlie Baker, the Clinton campaign's chief administrative officer, wrote three other top Clinton officials outlining discussions with the DNC over the Clinton's wishes to, among other things, "limit the number of debates," to "start the debates as late as possible," to "create a schedule that would allow the later debates to be cancelled if the race is for practical purposes over" and, in general, to ensure a format that limits the exposure of both Clinton and her opponents.

The DNC gave the Clinton campaign essentially everything it wanted; the wishes of the other campaigns were completely ignored. The org announced there would be 6 debates, then dragged its feet for months about announcing their dates. When the dates were unveiled, three of the four earliest events were scheduled on weekends--the low-point of television viewership. The one Iowa debate before the state's caucus was scheduled to play opposite the Iowa/Minnesota game--a college football rivalry that goes back over a century. One was scheduled for the weekend before Christmas. The last 2 debates weren't given dates, at first--these were the ones Clinton hoped could be canceled later--but they were to take place on Univision and PBS, instead of a major network. As the cherry on top, the DNC initiated a new rule that candidates were barred from taking part in any unsanctioned debates, ending the vigorous debate line-up of previous contested Dem primaries.

Contrary to Gaughan, Sanders' complaints about the schedule weren't some late, opportunistic twist; he began objecting to it immediately after it was announced (and did so throughout the campaign).[7] Sanders' Democratic rival Martin O'Malley forcefully condemned it. It, in fact, became a significant controversy. Simon Rosenberg, who had worked for the DNC and multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, authored a Time piece that noted, among other things, that the DNC, by insisting on this schedule, was willfully throwing away a fortune in free advertising and significantly advantaging the Republicans--actively harming the Democratic party and its prospects in order to aid Clinton:

"[T]he Republican Party has scheduled ten debates before the end of March of 2016. Most of these debates are in primetime during the week, and each is with a major commercial television news outlet. The first Fox debate proved these debates have the potential to reach tens of millions of people directly, without the candidates or parties spending a dime--a holy grail of political campaign strategy.

"The Democrats, on the other, hand have only six debates scheduled in this period and only one in weekday primetime so far. Two of those are with PBS and Univision, limited television networks with smaller reach. Left unchecked, the superior RNC schedule could easily reach 50 to 100 million more eyeballs than the current Democratic schedule--meaning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of lost opportunities to persuade, engage and excite the audiences all Democrats will need to win in 2016. But the cost is so far beyond dollars and minds: the debate schedule could affect who wins the Presidency, the Senate and scores of other races across the country."[8]

Fuel was added to the fire when DNC chair DWS repeatedly lied about how this awful debate schedule was created. She claimed she consulted with the DNC's officers on the matter; that came as news to the DNC's officers. She claimed to have consulted former DNC chairs; three of the four former chairs denied it (the 4th wouldn't comment). Calls for more debates spread for weeks, with even some Democratic insiders and Establishment figures getting in on the action. The louder the din, the more DWS dug in, refusing to budge on the schedule. In a bit of cynical political theater of a kind that would repeat throughout the primary season, Hillary Clinton, in response to the controversy, suggested, as described by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, that "she's open to more debates but won't say whether she actively wants more of them." The DNC enacted exactly the election schedule Clinton dictated (a fact not known in any detail until the later Wikileaks revelations), DWS took the heat for it and Clinton--the party actually responsible--was able to skate with minimal political damage. And the schedule she wanted.

And if you can believe it, Gaughan doesn't cover--or even mention--any of this. From page 39:

"Sanders's complaints over the number of debates exaggerated the extent to which it disadvantaged him. There were nine DNC sanctioned debates during the 2016 nomination race, which prompted criticism from Sanders because he wanted more opportunities to debate Clinton."

It's just a late, opportunistic complaint by Sanders, you see? Gaughan, who never mentions there were originally only 6 debates scheduled, also leaves on the cutting-room floor how there came to be 9: in Jan. 2016--three months before Gaughan says Sanders began complaining about the debate schedule--Hillary Clinton was finally arm-twisted into agreeing to more. Gaughan repeats the DNC's disingenuous 2015 claims about the debate schedule:

"But the DNC only sanctioned six debates in 2004, the year John Kerry won the nomination, and in 2008, the year Barack Obama won the nomination. In 2004 and 2008, there were far more unsanctioned debates (i.e., debates administered by the media rather than by the DNC) but Clinton had no obligation to agree to more debates. As Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight observed before the 2016 primaries began: 'Clinton is the strongest nonincumbent front-runner in the modern era. She has less incentive to put herself out there and make a potentially fatal mistake.'"

Clinton loyalist Enten's inanity is self-refuting; if Clinton was so terribly strong, she wouldn't be so terrified of debates and going to such lengths to try to limit them. It certainly makes no case that Clinton had no obligation to debate her opponents--something voters want and expect (and, if one is feeling all liberal democracy-y, deserve). Between the sanctioned and unsanctioned events, there were 16 debates in 2004; in 2008, there were over 20. Gaughan never even tells his readers about the DNC rule-change, an official change of policy that severely limited the number of debates voters would see (and had become accustomed to seeing) in order to benefit Clinton.

Gaughan briefly argues that "the debates did not give Sanders a boost at the ballot box. Quite the reverse in fact." And then he rattles off contests Sanders lost after debates were held. But that doesn't make any case at all for how the primaries would have played out if there had been a vigorous debate schedule that had started earlier--that thing everyone but Clinton was requesting--or if these other issues discussed in this article hadn't been issues. In 2015, the corporate press carried out the "Bernie Blackout," covering Sanders as little as possible and, when forced to cover him, doing so in a dismissive or otherwise negative way. That's a bit beyond the immediate scope of this article (though not beyond the scope of Gaughan's, something to which I'll return later). For those interested, there are several contemporaneous articles with more details. For here, it's enough to note that this delayed efforts by Sanders, who began the race as an unknown nationally, to build his campaign. Debates were a way to momentarily break through that blackout. This first Dem debate in Oct. 2015 saw a significant surge of interest in Sanders,[9] though the blackout continued into the early weeks of 2016 before beginning to dissipate. Had that happened earlier, more often and not on dates engineered by Clinton and the DNC to suppress viewership (as all of the next 3 debates that were held would be), Sanders chances would have been significantly better. Even after the blackout blotted out most of the first 8 months of his campaign, Sanders had, by the end of the primary season, amassed a whopping 13-point net favorability advantage over Clinton among Democrats, but it happened too late in the process to save his candidacy.[10]

To note the obvious, that all parties involved believed a better debate schedule would help Sanders is almost certainly why it was quashed.

At any rate, that's Gaughan take on the objections to the debate schedule, another heavily-redacted, egregiously misleading dodge.


A SIDEBAR SORT OF THING:
DONALD TRUMP & HIS DISCONTENTS

Sanders complained about the debate schedule and I've just covered the schedule's very real deficiencies, its shady origins, that they could have had a major impact on the election, etc.--all a matter of public record, all events that played out in real time and that observers can evaluate. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton and his explanation for this was that he finished 2nd in the popular vote only because millions of illegal immigrants illegally voted for Clinton, an assertion that wasn't based on anything in the real world at all and was just a spiteful lie he pulled straight out of his own asshole on the spot.

In Gaughan's article, those complaints--Sanders' and Trump's--are exactly the same thing.[11]

Gaughan is writing about the fairness of the Democratic primary. Trump is completely irrelevant to this, but Gaughan just can't stop bringing him up. Not in any way that is relevant but just as a means of trying to equate those who complained about how the Dem primary was run with Trump, to tar them with Trump's opportunistic, fact-free, crackpot conspiracist raving. He's already at this by page 4:

"[A]n unfounded belief in rampant election fraud has become a prominent feature of the American political psyche. A 2017 poll found that only 32% of Americans believed Clinton won the nomination fairly... Moreover, nearly half of Republicans and 23% of Democrats accept as true the president's false allegation that millions cast illegal ballots in the 2016 election... [S]purious claims of election fraud have found a receptive audience on both sides of the political aisle.'"

If one begins with the conclusion that there wasn't any issue with the fairness of the primaries, how could Sanders' issues with them not be exactly the same as Trump's "rigged election" claims? Page 44:

"If there was no truth to the allegations of a 'rigged' nomination, why did the Sanders and Trump campaigns embrace the idea?"

Here's a juxtaposition: Gaughan writes (pg. 29) that while many Americans have come to believe the 2016 primaries were "rigged,"

"the facts tell a very different story. Contrary to the allegations of President Trump, the 2016 Democratic nomination was not rigged in Hillary Clinton's favor. It was conducted  in an honest and fair manner that gave Bernie Sanders every opportunity to win the nomination. Public distrust of the 2016 nominating process is thus completely unfounded."

The idea that there were problems with the primaries is something Gaughan has simply steeled himself against ever even entertaining. As noted earlier, Gaughan refuses to extend any good faith to Sanders or his supporters in this matter, regardless of the facts. When he points out that Trump's "irresponsible claims of fraud in the general election have been definitively debunked by scholars, courts, and election officials," one can't help but reflect on the very poor job Gaughan has done in addressing--mostly refusing to address--Sanders' objections to efforts to tilt the primaries. Gaughan spends page after page trying to equate Sanders and Trump, decrying Trump's exploitation of the issue, insisting "Sanders's 'rigged system' claims played directly into Donald Trump's hands" and so on, but--seemingly without so much as a hint of self-awareness--Gaughan's own approach to Sanders' complaints is to simply ignore them, wave them away, mislead, lie and offer the equivalent of a cry of "FAKE NEWS!!!"


SECRET TAKEOVERS, MONEY LAUNDERING & THEIR DISCONTENTS

When a candidate in a contested primary in which there's no incumbent secures his party's nomination for president, the party apparatus comes under his control. It has become a practice to, at that point, establish joint fundraising orgs, which raise money that is then distributed to the candidate, the party and the state parties for use in downballot races--using the high national profile of the presidential nominee in a general election campaign as a party-building, party-strengthening exercise.

In 2016, there was a contested primary and no incumbent but the DNC was in the tank for Hillary Clinton, so all of this was turned on its head. The DNC entered into a joint fundraising agreement with Clinton in August 2015, six months before the first primary contest, and--nearly a year before the Democratic convention would ratify the party presidential nominee--gave Clinton operational control of the DNC. The latter was kept secret for nearly 2 years.

The Hillary Victory Fund, the fundraising org created by this arrangement, allowed Clinton to solicit from her wealthy donors as much as $350,000--many, many times the legal limits on donations to individual candidates or party orgs--on the premise that the money was to be divided between HVF's participants. When contributions came in, the first $2,700--the legal donation limit to an individual campaign--was to go to the Clinton campaign, the next $33,400--the legal donation limit for a party committee--was to go to the DNC and the rest was to be distributed to the participating state parties, of which there were initially 32.

Clinton immediately turned HVF into a money-laundering operation for her own benefit. Politico reported, on 2 May, 2016, that only a microfraction of the $61 million raised by HVF had been allowed to stay with the state parties. The Clinton campaign tightly controlled all money from HVF and the way their scam worked was that they would transfer funds to a state party, then almost immediately transfer those same funds from the state party to the DNC. On paper, the latter goes down as money from a state party org to the national party org--a transaction on which there is no limit. The funds are thus laundered clean of their original sources and the legal limits that apply to those sources, the DNC--under Clinton's control and operating as an arm of her campaign--gets the money and the state parties are left with virtually nothing. "As of March 31, reported Politico, "only eight state parties... had received more from the victory fund than was transferred from their accounts to the DNC." HVF itself was spending millions on Clinton campaign expenses, including salary for employees, "overhead" and ads of extremely dubious legality[12] "that mostly look indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads."

Weeks before Politico published its story, the Sanders campaign had written to DWS to complain about some of these improper activities, describing them as "serious apparent violations." If anything, this significantly understated the matter but at the time, the Clinton campaign attacked Sanders for it:

"'The Sanders campaign's false attacks have gotten out of hand,' Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement. 'It is shameful that Senator Sanders has resorted to irresponsible and misleading attacks just to raise money for himself. Instead of trying to convince the next generation of progressives that the Democratic Party is corrupt, Senator Sanders should stick to the issues and think about what he can do to help the Party he is seeking to lead.'"

Mook's attack on Sanders' alleged venality came only 2 days after Hillary Clinton held a mega-dollar fundraiser for the Hillary Victory Fund that raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars on the premise that it would go to the state Dem parties but that Clinton later transferred back to the DNC for her own use. When Politico published its first story on this, the state parties had been allowed to keep only 0.8% of the funds raised. By the time Politico followed up nearly 2 months later, that was down to 0.56%, and the hacked Democratic emails had revealed that the DNC had been trying to cover up details of the HVF.

By this point, it should come as no shock that Gaughan's treatment of these issues is disgraceful. "In November 2017," Gaughan writes (pg. 3), "former DNC Chair Donna Brazile revealed the existence of a fundraising agreement between the Clinton campaign and the national party that pre-dated the primary campaign." Gaughan is being slippery with his wording. The existence of a fundraising agreement and an org created by it was always public record. What Brazile revealed was the previously-unknown secret agreement that gave Clinton control of the DNC.

Gaughan parrots false and misleading claims made by Team Clinton in the wake of Brazile going public. From page 4:

"[T]he joint fundraising agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign only involved the general election, not the primary campaign, and the DNC entered into a similar agreement with the Sanders campaign."

...which is, in the first case, entirely false and in the second grotesquely misleading. The agreement in question was signed in Aug. 2015 and, per its terms, went into effect on 1 Sept., long before voting began, then was to be reviewed on 31 March, 2016--less than 2 months into primary voting, nearly 3 months before that voting would end and more than 5 months before Labor Day weekend, the traditional kick-off of the general election campaign--at which point it could either be terminated or renewed. The full timeframe in which the agreement was active was the primary season, and it gave Clinton immediate control of the DNC so tight that the org couldn't so much as issue a press release without first getting her approval. The claim that the agreement only involved the general election is based on some meaningless dicta tacked on at the end of the document for CYA purposes--exactly the purposes to which Team Clinton and later Gaughan put them. Gaughan repeats his "similar agreement" nonsense on page 26:

"Lost amid the ensuing uproar was the fact that the DNC had also entered into similar joint fundraising agreements with the Sanders and O'Malley campaigns."

Sanders and O'Malley did sign joint fundraising agreements with the DNC, but as the org was actively working to defeat their campaigns, neither ever did much with it. And--more importantly--no "similar" agreements was ever offered to them (doing so, in fact, would have violated the agreement with the Clinton campaign). When Team Clinton floated that particular fairy-tale, post-Brazile, Team Sanders released to the press the text of what he'd been offered, which, as ABC News reported, did not "include any language about coordinating on strategic decisions over hiring or budget, unlike a fundraising memo between the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC." After misleading his readers on this, Gaughan sort of acknowledges this, but he buries it in a footnote that quotes another writer as saying Sanders' agreement "did not specify as much immediate control from the campaign as the one Hillary signed with the DNC." In reality, it didn't give Sanders any "control", "immediate" or otherwise.

As with so many others, Gaughan just tries to brush the issue aside (pg. 26)

"The joint fundraising agreement simply reflected the DNC's presumption that Clinton would be the nominee, as the polling data overwhelmingly indicated would be the case."

...and that makes all of this ok, apparently. Everyone in the know about that at the DNC and in the Clinton campaign, of course, knew it was political dynamite. In stark contrast to Gaughan's latest Nothing To See Here, Folks-ism stands the fact that, even after so much that was written and said about that race, the agreement was kept a closely-guarded secret until Brazile's revelation, over 2 years after the agreement was struck and a year after the 2016 general election.

If anyone has been held in suspense on the point, no, Gaughan never even mentions the money-laundering, a fundamentally corrupt operation that gave Clinton an extra leg up on the insurgent Sanders campaign. Like nearly everything else here, it's all just sent down a Memory Hole with an indifferent wave. Nor does Gaughan ever wrestle with the implications of Clinton's secret control of the DNC on all of the rest of this. He's waved all of it away too, and doesn't think he has to.


CONCLUSIONS & THEIR DISCONTENTS

Would Sanders have defeated Clinton in a more equitable contest (even given how slippery the word "equitable" can be regarding politics)? It's entirely possible that if these institutions hadn't put their thumbs on the scale for Clinton, Clinton may have won anyway. We'll never know, because that contest was never allowed to happen. Refusing to acknowledge anything Dem elites did to tilt the primary process then denying they did anything to tilt the process is a silly exercise, something one would expect from a child. It isn't Gaughan's only trick--he also distorts, lies, misrepresents all manner of details--but it is his major one. Gaugan set for himself the task of debunking claims of a "rigged" primary, but refused to engage with the reasons people came to think it was "rigged," beyond just very forcefully insisting any such beliefs were wrong, meanwhile banging out an essay that runs for 50 pages and never really touches, much less resolves, the question with which it purports to be centrally concerned. This may seem like rather strange behavior, but it correctly identifies the genre of his piece: a filibuster. It's superficial, unserious, has all the other problems identified here and many more because it's simply an effort to talk an issue to death.

Gaughan's article was written by someone who began with his conclusion firmly fixed, then tried to craft a narrative that suited it, and it's aimed at people who shared that same predetermined conclusion, like the pair of Clinton cultists who threw it at me and insisted it "debunked" the claims of efforts to manipulate the primaries. The piece signal-flares that audience; a lot of it is just repeating Clinton cult tropes that, by 2019 when Gaughan was writing, we'd all seen--and seen debunked--a million times.

Its length and copious notes are meant to make it look formidable and well-researched but, being just a filibuster, long portions of it are eaten up by things that have little or nothing to do with its alleged subject. When discussing superdelegates, Gaughan spends page after page recounting nearly 50 years of history leading into 2016, almost none of it relevant to his topic. He goes on and on about Donald Trump, whom Gaughan sees as a means of smearing those objecting to the 2016 Democratic primaries but who has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2016 Democratic primaries or any of the objections Sanders and his supporters made to it. Since he'd ruled out writing about those objections, one supposes he had to write about something. A filibusterer gonna filibuster.

These days, Gaughan writes, "it is more important than ever to separate fact from fiction. If we fail to correct the historical record, we risk permitting the baseless perception of election fraud to overshadow the reality of fair elections," language that is trying way too hard. As I've shown, Gaughan's piece isn't particularly interested in separating fact from fiction when the former paints his own political favorites in a bad light. And while he warns that belief in a tilted process can "corrode public confidence in America's democratic institutions," reasonable readers are going to draw very little confidence in those institutions from his efforts to defend what happened. People don't want "democratic institutions" that behave in the bad ways Gaughan tries to normalize, apologize for and cover up.

Observers of the 2016 Democratic primaries saw the "neutral" DNC repeatedly intervening in the campaign to boost Clinton and harm Sanders. They saw heavily-connected interest groups like Planned Parenthood, the Human Right Campaign, and numerous labor unions, for whose issues Bernie Sanders had been a far stronger and more consistent advocate than had Hillary Clinton, turn around and endorse Clinton anyway. They saw the corporate press try to ignore Sanders to death throughout 2015 and early 2016. They saw Dem party insiders amplify Clinton's victories, attenuate her losses and erase Sanders' wins over and over again. They saw play out everything I've described here and much more, and Anthony Gaughan is appalled that so many of them could come to the conclusion that the deck was stacked against Sanders and in favor of Clinton, when the only real question is, why doesn't everyone accept that it was?

--j.

---

 [1] The characterization of the memo as a "smoking gun" is, however, a little strange. While there's no question it forthrightly shows the DNC was in the tank for Clinton, the rest of the emails did as well, showing close collaboration between the DNC and Clinton camp starting before that memo and running throughout the primary process.

 [2] Gaughan's sparse treatment of it is particularly odd given that he entitled the section in which it appears, "The Superdelegate and DNC Memo Controversy."

 [3] When, after the primaries, a group of Sanders supporters filed a lawsuit against the DNC for its lack of impartiality and evenhandedness, the DNC's lawyers argued in court that the org and its officials weren't bound by the org's own bylaws.

 [4] Under the headline "Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb," the New York Times reported that Sanders was

"slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote."

Ten paragraphs into the story, the Times noted that, in reality, Sanders and Clinton were "tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each"--that is, tied in the number of delegates each had actually earned from actual voters. Media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting spotlighted this, along with the fact that the Times hadn't used superdelegates in this way in coverage of previous presidential contests, and the Times was actually shamed into dropping the practice. The rest of the press , however, continued it.

 [5] To be clear, that this was journalistic malpractice and, in particular, that this was "misuse" of the superdelegates are matters of interpretation but they're interpretations I share. The first part is easy; that the supers wouldn't vote until the convention and could, at any time, change their minds is, alone, sufficient to make it completely inappropriate to include them in the ongoing accounts of the race in the manner they were used in 2016. "Misuse" is a little trickier. If one believes voters, rather than some Good Ol' Boys Club, should decide the outcome of such things, one can argue the responsible course for journalists is to remain silent on where the supers stand. On the other side of the coin, the Democratic party has decided to allow that Good Ol' Boys Club to have a prominent position in its nomination process, and one could argue that journalists, in including the supers, are just reporting the facts about where things stand (and, conversely, that those who don't include the supers--and they were never included in races prior to 2016 the way they were in 2016--are even lying to their audience). And there's the matter of how the superdelegates were reported too. If every story that included them in the count raked the Democrats over the coals for having this system, that would certainly be appropriate. Much of the fury over how they were used in 2016 was that they were just included matter-of-factly, as if that's just where the race stood--as if Clinton had earned that huge advantage, rather than just being gifted it by a group of insiders whom no voters had empowered to bestow such a gift.

 [6] The only reason New Hampshire didn't finish as a tie is that, later, one of the superdelegates who was uncommitted at the time of the primary went to Sanders, but even that just gave him a bare 16 to 15 delegate win in the state.

 [7] For example, on 18 Dec., 2015, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said the campaign's success to date has "caused the Democratic National Committee to place its thumb on the scales in support of Hillary Clinton's campaign. You see that fact evidenced in their decision to bury he Democratic debates on weekends during nationally televised football games. It's more or less an open secret."

 [8] Rosenberg proved prescient on this. In Feb. 2016, I wrote an article assessing Clinton's candidacy and compiled the Democratic and Republican debate ratings up to that point. The highest-rated Repub debate had drawn 24 million viewers while the best the Dems had managed was 15.3 million. The lowest-rated Republican debate still drew 11.1 million--more than 5 of the 6 Dem debates up until then. The debate at the bottom of the Democratic pile had only 4.5 million viewers. The numbers:

Democratic debate ratings:
13 Oct. 2015 - 15.3 million viewers
14 Nov., 2015 - 8.5 million viewers
19 Dec., 2015 - 7.8 million viewers
17 Jan., 2016  - 10.2 million viewers
4 Feb., 2016 - 4.5 million viewers
11 Feb., 2016 - 8.03 million viewers

Republican debates:
6 Aug., 2015 - 24 million viewers
16 Sept., 2015 - 23 million viewers
28 Oct., 2015 - 14 million viewers
10 Nov., 2015 - 13.5 million viewers
15 Dec., 2015 - 18.2 million viewers
14 Jan., 2016 - 11.1 million viewers
28 Jan., 2016 - 12.5 million viewers
6 Feb., 2016 - 13.2 million viewers
13 Feb., 2016 - 11.62 million viewers
25 Feb., 2016 - 14.5 million viewers

 [9] Sanders was declared the winner by all of the media focus groups assembled to judge the debate. "According to Google," reported Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, "Sanders was the most-searched candidate for almost the entire debate. After the debate was over, he was the most-searched candidate in all 50 states." People becoming interested, looking for info on him. Within 4 hours of the debate, $1.3 million new donations came in to Sanders' campaign.

[10] Perhaps this is a gratuitous note after already providing a link to Sanders' memo on this above but what Sanders wanted to do with the debates schedule extends far beyond just self-interest. Sanders has made a major project for many years--and for many years since--of trying to, as I said earlier, revitalize the Dem party and American liberal democracy. He wanted to use them to encourage turnout and participation, wanted to organize inter-party debates, Dem candidates against Repub candidates (there had been one such experiment 8 years earlier) and to try to reach voters who have come to be ignored by the party (another of his long-running themes):

"I also think it is important for us to debate not only in the early states but also in many states which currently do not have much Democratic presidential campaign activity. While a number of these non-target states have not in the past had much organized campaign presence, I believe it is critical for the Democratic Party and progressive forces in America to engage voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. By expanding the scope geographically of debates beyond the early calendar states we can begin to awaken activism at the grassroots level in those states and signal to Democrats and progressives in places like Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and Wyoming that their states are not forgotten by the Democratic Party."

How different this would have been.

[11] And Gaughan presents Sanders as the same as Trump--as an opportunist, a liar, someone spreading false claims of fraud that are toxic and that corrode America's democratic institutions.

[12] HVF was financing ads urging people to "Stop Trump" or to support Clinton. Politico notes that

"While joint fundraising committees are allowed to pay for ads as part of their fundraising efforts, they are forbidden from funding campaign advertising urging voters to vote for or against specific candidates. Those types of ads qualify as electioneering expenses that are supposed to be paid for directly by the campaign or by party committees."

Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin told Politico "the 'Stop Trump' ads aren’t urging readers to vote against Trump." Presumably with a straight face.