Rigged: How The Corporate Democrats Thwarted Progressive Challengers in the 2020 Primaries

Rigged From The Start

With Bernie Sanders’ rise from relatively unknown Senator to the country’s most popular politician thanks to his strong 2016 campaign, many of his supporters had high hopes of his being elected President in 2020 and leading the way to the enactment of his signature reform, Medicare For All, and other major social reforms. It didn’t work out that way. Bernie Sanders failed to replicate his success in the 2016 campaign — in which he won 22 states — only winning nine of the 30 contests that occurred prior to his dropping out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in early April.

What went wrong for the Sanders campaign? What went wrong for the campaigns of other reform-minded candidates such as Tulsi Gabbard (who made opposition to the US war machine the centerpiece of her campaign), Andrew Yang, or Marianne Williamson? In a nutshell, it comes down to this: The Democratic establishment, along with its backers in the corporate media, did not want Bernie Sanders or anyone else on the left of the Democartic Party to win the Democratic nomination, and even without the overwhelming advantage superdelegates provided to establishment candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 (they still exist but are no longer allowed to vote on the first ballot at the convention), they still had plenty of tools available to make sure one or another dependable ally of corporate America came out on top, and they used them all to great effect.

It all began with the constantly changing and inscrutable criteria the DNC set for eligibility for the Democratic Presidential debates — which are the exclusive province of the Democratic Party, a private corporation. For the initial two debates in June and July, candidates had to either poll at least 1% in three approved national or early primary state polls or collect donations from at least 65,000 unique donors. However, although candidate Mike Gravel, a retired Senator who famously read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record during the Vietnam War and took a strongly progressive, anti-war stance, met the 65,000 donor qualification, he was nonetheless excluded from those debates by the DNC, with no explanation, resulting in him dropping out of the campaign after only three months in it. (Gravel’s campaign was intended as a vehicle to raise issues rather than a serious run for the Presidency, but that alone was evidently perceived as a threat by the DNC, given that Gravel’s platform was arguably the most radical of the Democratic candidates’.)

Requirements for candidates to qualify for subsequent debates were raised periodically — for instance, candidates needed to receive 130,000 unique donations AND at least 2% in four or more national or early state polls to qualify for the September and October debates. Though at least at first the requirements seemed reasonable, seemingly completely arbitrary decisions were made by the DNC about which polls to include as “qualifying” polls, as they would include one poll and exclude another poll from the same polling organization, or refuse to include polls sponsored by the highest-circulation newspapers in some of the early states. Gabbard seemed to suffer the worst from this arbitrariness, exceeding 2% in 26 polls prior to the September debate — but being excluded because only two of them were deemed “qualifying” polls.

Perhaps even more egregious was the decision to exclude her from the March 15 debate. Although the polling requirement of at least 10% in four “qualifying” polls was out of her reach, the DNC had also given candidates the opportunity to qualify by receiving at least one delegate in a primary, which Gabbard did by getting enough votes to win two delegates in American Samoa on March 3. Within days, the DNC changed the requirement under which she had qualified, requiring candidates to have received at least 20% of the delegates to qualify. As this would have disqualified all of the candidates besides Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden had they still been in the race, this change was clearly designed specifically to exclude Gabbard — the only remaining candidate besides Biden and Sanders by that time — from the debate, preventing her from having the opportunity to face only Sanders and Biden on what had previously been a very crowded debate stage (with there often having been 8–10 candidates onstage at once in previous debates).

In addition, as in 2016, the electoral process itself was heavily rigged to favor establishment candidates. Iowa, which had appeared to be destined to be an easy win for Sanders, was marred by a chaotic vote counting process in which an app that was supposed to total the votes mysteriously malfunctioned. Even the flagship of the Democratic establishment press, the New York Times, reported that the results were “riddled with inconsistencies and errors,” including mysterious “mistakes” in which votes cast for Bernie Sanders were (until caught by Sanders volunteers) given to candidates who barely even campaigned in Iowa. No results at all were reported on election night, and results trickled out gradually over the next week, with Pete Buttigieg mysteriously leading on “state delegate equivalents” even though Sanders was consistently ahead in the popular vote — though not by nearly as much as pre-primary polling had suggested. Buttigieg and the media declared Buttigieg the “winner” even though it is the popular vote that determines how many delegates are pledged to each candidate for the Democratic Convention. And in what was highly unlikely to be a coincidence, it turned out that the founder of the company that produced the malfunctioning app, Acronym, was married to a high-level official in Pete Buttigieg’s campaign. (In addition, several members of the team that designed the app also worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) In several precincts where the popular vote was close between Sanders and Buttigieg (though in Sanders’ favor), delegates were awarded based on a coin flip, which in many cases appeared to have been rigged to favor Buttigieg. Comedian Jimmy Dore summed Iowa up well: “Apparently the Russians run the Iowa Democratic Party.”

In New Hampshire, the totals for precincts that used electronic voting machines (which are easily hackable) were widely discrepant from exit polling results, granting Pete Buttigieg 12% more votes than the exit polls suggested he had won, while tallies in precincts that used paper ballots matched the exit poll results closely. The final results for New Hampshire, like those for Iowa (which Bernie Sanders also won), were delayed by more than a week, robbing the Sanders campaign of momentum.

In Massachusetts, exit polls suggested that Sanders had won, but the vote totals (on electronic voting machines) gave the state to Biden. The discrepancy between the exit poll results and the voting results was 8.4%, more than double the poll’s margin of error. A large discrepancy also occurred in South Carolina, where Biden’s percentage of the vote was 8.3% higher than the percentage he received in the exit poll, a discrepancy likewise vastly in excess of the exit poll’s margin of error. The story was the same in Missouri, where not only did the discrepancy greatly exceed the exit poll’s margin of error, but for computerized vote totals, Sanders underperformed the exit poll by 11.4%, and Biden overperformed it by 9.3%.

All in all, Sanders underperformed the exit polls in the eight states where exit polls were conducted by 3.6%, whereas Biden overperformed them by 2.9%. A statistical analysis I performed on these data showed that this difference between Biden’s and Sanders’ performance relative to the exit polls was unquestionably statistically significant (p < .001 that it could have happened by chance).

The US Agency for International Development suggests that a discrepancy between exit polling results and voting results substantially in excess of the poll’s margin of error is grounds for suspicion of electoral fraud: “A discrepancy between the aggregated choices reported by voters [exit polls] and the official results may suggest, but not prove, that results have been tampered with.” The Organization of American States has sent election monitoring teams to countries with similarly poll-discrepant election results on hundreds of occasions. But no investigation of the US’s 2020 Democratic primaries is forthcoming, and little or no mention has been made of these irregularities in the corporate media — or, for that matter, by Bernie Sanders or his campaign staff. Instead, the media portrayed the sudden turnaround in Biden’s electoral fortunes as a rejection of Sanders’ policies — once again ignoring exit polling results, which showed strong support for Medicare For All and other reforms Sanders proposed, but questioning of his “electability,” likely because the media questioned his electability (and touted Biden’s).

Another form of electoral rigging in the 2020 primaries was attempts to suppress the vote in areas or among groups likely to be favorable to Bernie Sanders. According to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), there was a “calculated effort to suppress the minority vote during [the March 3 primaries on] Super Tuesday” in 14 states. “Latinos have become the largest minority voting bloc in 2020, and our community is at the heart of the voting base in states like California and Texas. Yet, it is precisely in the largest minority communities around the country — specifically districts where the Latino vote makes the difference — that we are witnessing the biggest barriers for people to vote,” said Domingo Garcia, the organization’s president. Sanders led Biden by substantial margins among Latino voters in both Texas and California. But Latino voters encountered malfunctioning voting machines, closed or relocated polling places, and lines that were several hours long. Unable to stay away from jobs or other responsibilities for hours and hours, many voters left without being able to cast their votes. The same paucity of polling locations and hours-long lines occurred in many parts of the country for college students, who also heavily favored Bernie Sanders. Older voters are much more likely to vote early or by mail than younger voters, so any long delays on election day are likely to tilt election results toward candidates favored by older voters.

Another way that voting may have been rigged was that voter registrations were mysteriously switched to “no party preference” despite the voters having intended to register as Democrats so that they could vote in closed Democratic primaries. As of yet, it is not known for sure whether this was used as a means of discriminating against Sanders voters, but that was demonstrably the case in 2016.

Finally, combining sociopathic willingness to put voters’ lives at risks with the intention of suppressing election day in-person voting, several states (the most significant being Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin) insisted on holding their primaries as scheduled in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Not surprisingly, many voters facing the dilemma of risking their health versus foregoing exercising their voting rights chose the latter option, and in-person voter turnout was down considerably. Not surprisingly, a number of cases of coronavirus have been traced to being at polling places on election day. A poll worker in Illinois died from coronavirus.

In a nutshell, the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, like the 2016 primaries and many, many other US elections, were rigged from start to finish, likely costing Sanders and perhaps other candidates several percentage points in a number of states. The Democratic Party establishment pulled out all the stops to stop him or any other candidate who made any attempt to challenge the neoliberal status quo.The only chance Bernie Sanders or any other reform-minded candidate had to win was to win an outright majority of the vote, so that the superdelegates could not be introduced into the fray. For reasons that will become apparent later, it’s quite likely Sanders would have fallen well short of that goal even without the DNC’s rigging, but in any case it had a significant effect.

Spin Doctors

The media wing of the political establishment did its part to derail challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, too. The corporate media smear campaign against Bernie Sanders was relentless, just as it was last time. He was dehumanized, falsely portrayed as having various unsavory personality characteristics, and even targeted by anti-Semitic attacks. Over and over again, moderators at the Presidential debates as well as TV commentators kept asking him: “How are you going to pay for it?” regarding his Medicare For All health care plan. They never asked how the overwhelming majority of industrialized countries that have some sort of national health insurance system manage to pay for their health insurance — or act like they’re aware that those countries spend half or less what the US does on health care and still manage to provide quality care to all of their citizens. But they kept asking him the same question over and over, no matter how many times he pointed out that countries with universal health insurance had far lower health care costs. And even though Sanders consistently polled the best of any of the candidates against Donald Trump in hypothetical general election matchups, he was portrayed by the media as “unelectable,” whereas Biden and some of the other candidates were portrayed as “electable.”

Primary opponent Elizabeth Warren implied that he was a sexist, suggesting that he had said that a woman couldn’t win the Presidential race during a private meeting in late 2018. The claim was almost universally deemed credible by the mainstream media, despite ample evidence that Sanders encouraged female candidates (including Warren herself in 2015) to run for President, and of course was well aware that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. A moderator of one of the debates even asked Sen. Warren, immediately after Bernie Sanders denied Warren’s allegation, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” It is hard to imagine the media being any more biased against anyone than they were against Bernie — but in reality, they probably were even more biased against Gabbard. They were certainly unable to ignore Sanders the way they did Gabbard, given his near-universal name recognition and powerful fundraising and campaign organization. But smear him they could and did.

Contrast this to the highly favorable treatment given to establishment candidates. Beto O’Rourke had his brief moment as an establishment favorite, characterized as a Kennedyesque figure and earning a cover page and fawning article in Vanity Fair. When Beto didn’t catch on, Pete Buttigieg started receiving highly favorable press. A Northwestern University study found that Buttigieg received by far the most favorable media coverage for a period of several months in mid-2019. Kamala Harris also got quite favorable coverage for a while, following her attack on Joe Biden for his record on racial issues. Following Harris’ slippage in the polls after her record as a not-so-progressive prosecutor was exposed by Tulsi Gabbard in the July debate, Elizabeth Warren became the media darling for a while. And all the while, although he did not typically get the most favorable coverage, Joe Biden got a pass from the corporate media for his halting, meandering, and at times incoherent responses to debate and interview questions. Little coverage was given to the accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching from several women early last year, and the corporate media failed to mention the rape allegation against him by Tara Reade until finally, three weeks after it became public in late March, they decided to smear her and dismiss her claims.

The media smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard was unlike any that I can recall against any other political figure other than perhaps Julian Assange. Gabbard committed a number of “sins” in the eyes of the Democratic political establishment that led to there being a target on her back. In 2016, she bucked the overwhelming tide of Democratic lawmakers who endorsed Hillary Clinton by endorsing and campaigning for Bernie Sanders instead, resigning her DNC vice chair position in the process and prompting Democratic establishment bigwigs to send her a threatening email. In January of 2017, she and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a fellow opponent of the warmongering foreign policy establishment, traveled to Syria to see firsthand the impact of the civil war on the Syrian people. Though they met with a broad spectrum of both ordinary people and politicians, including members of the Syrian opposition, they also met with President Bashar al-Assad (as have several other US politicians). She then committed another “sin” by questioning the Trump administration’s claims about alleged Syrian government gas attacks in 2017 and 2018, which were used as a justification for launching missile attacks against Syria. Her opposition to US foreign policy of backing regime change wars (efforts to militarily overthrow governments) generally became the central theme of her 2019–2020 campaign for President.

The attacks came early and often. Within only a day after announcing that she would run for President in an interview with Van Jones of CNN, despite a 7-year record of consistent support for GLBT rights in Congress, she was accused of being homophobic due to her past as a socially conservative teen and young adult. Despite her meeting with a diverse array of people in Syria, the media obsessively focused on the fact that she had met with Assad, and accused her of being an Assad supporter despite her calling him a “brutal dictator.” Gabbard, who was the first Hindu-American elected to Congress, was accused of belonging to a cult despite being a practitioner of mainstream Hinduism, a claim that the Hindu-American Foundation and Tulsi Gabbard alike characterized as religious bigotry. On the same day as her official campaign announcement, NBC News ran a story claiming that her campaign was being promoted by the Russian government, playing up the fact that Russian news outlets had covered her more than Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden — neither of whom had announced their campaign for President by that time.

Throughout the campaign — including in the same week by the New York Times, CNN, and Hillary Clinton — it was claimed that she was a “Russian asset.” Clinton further claimed that she was being “groomed” by either the Republican Party or the Russian government to run as a third-party candidate — something that, none of these sources noted, would have been a violation of “sore loser” rules that prohibit Democratic Presidential candidates from subsequently running third-party in the same election. Claims that she was either in league with Russia in some way or that she was a closet Republican were frequently repeated both in the corporate media and by grassroots supporters of other Democrats. As she remarked to Joy Behar when Behar attacked her in a similar way on The View (at 2:10 in the linked clip), such claims have nothing to do with who she is. She is a long-time officer in the National Guard as well as a member of Congressional committees; both of those roles require high-level security clearances. And her legislative record may well be the most progressive in all of Congress.

Overall, press coverage of her was both substantially more negative than every other candidate’s and substantially less frequent than coverage of any other candidate who was in the race the majority of the campaign. Gabbard was excluded from a CNN town hall in New Hampshire despite outpolling several other candidates who were invited, including one, Deval Patrick, who was polling at far less than 1%. Altogether, she was invited to appear in only one town hall, whereas other candidates were invited to between four and 11.

Whereas Sanders was exclusively smeared by the corporate media and establishment Democrats, Gabbard was also smeared by independent left-leaning journalists including Branko Marcetic from Jacobin, Anna Kasparian and Emma Vigeland from The Young Turks, Soumya Shankar from The Intercept, Jeet Heer and Ari Paul from The Nation, Michael Brooks, and Abby Martin. (Links are to rebuttal pieces; the original articles or videos can be reached from those links.) This took me by surprise, as despite her socially conservative views during her youth and her joining (as a medic) in the US regime change war in Iraq, she evolved into a strong opponent of US foreign policy and strong progressive on domestic policies by the time she became a Congresswoman representing Hawaii’s 2nd District in 2013. There appear to be a complex assortment of reasons why. One is that some on the left disagree with her anti-interventionist stance on Syria. Another is that they often (generally unwittingly) rely on sources of information with an axe to grind, such as wealthy regime change proponents, Sikh separatists, or anti-Hindu bigots, or have unexamined Hinduphobia of their own. Furthermore, much as more than a few on the left have bought into Russiagate or smears against Julian Assange because they have heard these claims so often in the media, sheer repetition of attacks on Tulsi Gabbard has subtly brainwashed them into otherizing her, of creating in them a visceral “ick” reaction to her. As Goebbels said, and social psychological research confirms, a lie repeated often enough comes to be regarded as true.

Finally, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the attacks came from supporters of Bernie Sanders, who conversely tended to adopt a wholly uncritical attitude toward Sanders. Abby Martin, for instance, in an interview with Michael Brooks that I did a video commentary on, glossed over his often hawkish foreign policy record completely, claiming that he had been consistently progressive throughout his 30 years in Congress and characterizing him as the “organizer in chief” and a proven leader of the American progressive movement (I cover these comments starting at 66:10). Like many fellow Sanders supporters who were harshly critical of Gabbard, she saw Gabbard — who risked her own political career to support Sanders in 2016, and surely would have supported Sanders again had he been in a position to win — as competition rather than a political ally, expressing bewilderment regarding why she was running: “I find it very strange that Tulsi Gabbard is running against Bernie Sanders. That to me is why I dislike her the most. Why is she running against Bernie? Why is Elizabeth Warren running against Bernie? If they cared about defeating Trump, they would not be running against Bernie Sanders.” Did Abby really not understand that Elizabeth Warren was part of the Democratic establishment’s efforts to defeat Sanders? Or that Gabbard’s lane in the Democratic field existed precisely because of Bernie Sanders’ severe shortcomings in foreign policy? As for the claim that he is the “organizer in chief” of progressive politics in America, I’m not sure how campaigning for Hillary Clinton (and now for Joe Biden) exemplifies progressive leadership.

In any case, to summarize, the corporate media have gone to great lengths to smear candidates who challenged the neoliberal status quo, and unfortunately some in the independent media have helped them, at least in the case of Tulsi Gabbard. There have also been considerable efforts by the corporate media to gaslight the public into believing that Bernie Sanders was unelectable, unfortunately with some success, and with the exception of Sanders, candidates who posed challenges to the neoliberal status quo were given far less mainstream media coverage than those who didn’t. Sanders had the name recognition, popular appeal, and organizational and fundraising capacity to potentially present a serious threat to win the nomination; however, ultimately, the Democratic establishment still has a stranglehold on the electoral process and a plethora of dirty tricks with which to thwart efforts to reform it from within.

The Decisive Blow: Barack Obama’s Phone Calls

Despite all these efforts, in the early primaries, Bernie Sanders held the lead, winning primaries in Nevada and New Hampshire, finishing in a dead heat (though under the aforementioned questionable circumstances) in Iowa, and losing only South Carolina. At that point, the Democratic power brokers recognized that their strategy of throwing a kitchen sink’s worth of establishment candidates at Sanders and hoping one of them would catch on had failed, and a decision was made to unite behind the candidate who they deemed the best bet at that point to beat Sanders, Joe Biden. The most decisive role was played by consensus party leader Barack Obama, whose phone calls encouraged Biden’s main competitors other than Sanders (excepting Elizabeth Warren, who stayed in in an apparent — and successful — effort to prevent Sanders from beating Biden in Massachusetts) to rapidly drop out and endorse Biden, who rattled off a quick succession of primary victories as a result of the endorsements, an overwhelmingly pro-Biden media blitz, and the previously discussed election rigging. Eventually, Obama’s persuasive powers convinced Bernie Sanders himself to drop out and endorse Joe Biden. Playing the same sheepdog role he did in 2016 in campaigning enthusiastically for Hillary Clinton following her winning the nomination, Sanders backed Biden with great enthusiasm, holding a joint event with Biden in which he proclaimed him “a very decent man” and committed to fundraising for Biden and barnstorming the country on his behalf. He also essentially bullied those of his supporters who were resistant to supporting Biden, calling anyone who chose to “sit on their hands” and not vote for Biden “irresponsible.” Note the timing of Sanders’ April 13 endorsement of Biden: mere weeks earlier, Tara Reade credibly alleged in an interview with Katie Halper on March 24 that this “very decent man,” Sanders’ “good friend,” had raped her in 1993. Sanders — like every other prominent Democrat — remained silent about the allegation until he was asked about it, in an interview with CBS This Morning on April 16. After an evasive response in which he acknowledged that Reade had the right to make her claims and be heard, but claimed he “[didn’t] know enough about” the allegations to comment on them. Thereafter, Sanders and the vast majority of other prominent Democrats have remained silent about these and other sexual misconduct allegations against Biden, with some even outright calling Tara Reade a liar.

Conclusion: Walk Away From The Graveyard!

As they do every Presidential election, even Democrats from its progressive wing have endorsed Biden and chastised anyone who was considering voting for a third party candidate such as the Greens’ Howie Hawkins. For his part, Sanders has campaigned for Biden more than any other prominent Democrat. Yet again, an effort to challenge the center-right consensus of America’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party has been thwarted, and there is no reason to believe that is going to change for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, the Democratic Party continues to be a graveyard for efforts to dramatically reform American society, and the successes would-be reformers have had have come from independent political action. Change, as Howard Zinn famously said, comes not from who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in.