Sen. Bernie Sanders mastery of caucus races is raising hopes
among his followers that he can someone defeat Hillary Clinton.
The fact that he has stumbled in primaries and trails
Clinton badly in raw votes, is ignored.
“Including caucus results,
Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more
than 7 million,” according to the Green Papers.
Who understands caucuses better
than Sanders. The website 538 reports less than 4 percent of voters in states
with caucuses turned out.
He realizes, that as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,
a caucus race has no end because it has no beginning.
Alice tries several methods to get her animal friends after
they went through a storm in rough water.
This causes “the Dodo to suggest a Caucus
race. The Dodo marks out a course, sets everyone in place, and yells ‘go.’ The
animals run around haphazardly until the Dodo declares half an hour later that
the race is over. The Dodo says that all of them have won the Caucus race and
elects Alice to confer prizes. Alice passes mints to all the animals, leaving
herself without a prize. Finding a thimble, she hands it to the Dodo, who in
turn presents it back to her as her prize. Alice solemnly accepts the thimble
but cannot help feeling that the gesture is absurd.”
Sanders idea is just as absurd. Somehow he can grab ahold of
“super delegates” and defeat Clinton despite her lead in the popular vote.
538 finds it unlikely that Sanders can catch up let alone
overtake Clinton in votes.
Perhaps Sanders can emulate George W. Bush’s victory over Al
Gore in 2000. The former vice president got half a million votes more than
Bush. Bush had more votes in the electoral college.
That took a Supreme Court intervention to declare a winner.
With the court equally divided among conservatives and
liberals that solution might not work this time.
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