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Notes -
IIRC Progressives in 2016 bitterly complained about super-delegates and the potential voter suppression effect they could have when added to tallies of delegates (which'd make it seem like Clinton's lead was insurmountable so why bother?).
Speaking as a left-wing social democrat who voted for Bernie in the primaries twice, those people were dumb.
The percentage of primary voters who ever saw a graphic w/ the superdelegates + Clinton's delegates on a TV screen or in a newspaper article was probably less than 5%, if not even lower.
There was no conspiracy in 2016 or 2020 against Bernie Sanders - he was just bad at appealing to make a majority of Democratic primaries vote for him over either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. This isn't to say those primary voters dislike him, which is something I think people miss.
Yes, there are a small amount of leftist online who think Obama is a neoliberal war criminal and Hillary is terrible, and a small number of 60-year old MSNBC voters who think Bernie Sanders is a sexist who would've lost 40 states, but the median Democratic voter likes Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and if they're aware of them, AOC, Gavin Newsom, and even Joe Manchin.
The only Democratic person of note who is actually disliked by the median Democratic voter is Sinema, because she openly pushed againt things even median Democrat's support, and openly decided to go all-in on being friends with rich Republican's, when she could've been a Mark Warner-style Senator in Arizona for a generation, and hell, maybe even been a VP or POTUS candidate in a decade or two.
Tim Kaine is replaced as head of the DNC with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who helped head Clinton's 2008 campaign, and then Tim Kaine is made Hillary's 2016 VP. The receipts were all leaked by WikiLeaks, which showed that the DNC did everything it could to ensure Hillary's win. (Donna Brazille even passed Hillary some debate questions in advance.) Tulsi Gabbard resigned in protest over it, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz was eventually made to resign over the controversy.
And in 2020, we got something more boring but still slanted: candidates dropping out and favoring Biden against Sanders, what Sh0eonhead called "The Neoliberal Voltron."
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