Ben Pollara: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and fuzzy math
I am not a big fan of sports metaphors or former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but both can be used to demonstrate the inanity and intellectual dishonesty driving the cries of unfairness coming out of the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Both are pushing similar messages about their respective parties’ nominating and delegate allocation processes, and those messages are either dishonest or demonstrate ignorance of said processes. Or both, I suppose. So to use the sports metaphor, what would be the public response to a losing basketball team complaining that certain shots are worth three points, while others are worth only one or two? That is essentially what the Sanders and Trump camps are saying about the “unfairness” they perceive in the delegate acquisition game. And it’s a game they both signed up for, ostensibly with some, if not intricate, knowledge of the rules. Well, sorry gentlemen. To quote Rummy, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” As a Democrat, I should apologize for lumping Sanders in with The Donald. I’m sorry, Bern. Actually, Trump’s case is in some ways more rational than Sanders’. Trump is likely to enter the Republican convention with a clear plurality of his party’s delegates, but perhaps not the majority required to secure the nomination on the first ballot. He will likewise enter the convention with a substantial lead in actual votes. Sanders is virtually certain to have neither. I recently wrote for FloridaPolitics.com inveighing upon the Republican Party to respect Trump’s advantages going into Cleveland and give him the nomination. My case was a political one, and I still believe it. However, the party’s rules are quite clear and have been so since well before Trump entered the primary. The Sanders case is considerably more head-scratching. Yes, he has won a near-sweep of the most recent round of primary and caucus states, but so what? According to an analysis by fivethirtyeight.com from April 8, he has won only 42 percent of Democrats’ raw votes, nearly 2 million fewer primary votes than Hillary Clinton. Yet, his supporters continue to decry the “undemocratic” process by which their party chooses its nominee. Oh, and speaking of undemocratic, Sanders has received roughly 46 percent of pledged delegates, 4 percent higher than his actual share of the vote. But the Bern Bros aren’t bitching about “earned” delegates, where Clinton is dominating. The gripes are about “super delegates,” who Clinton dominates even more thoroughly. I happen to “feel the Bern” here and believe that media outlets should stop including “super delegates” in their delegate counts. When you remove those “Super Delegates,” you remove the illusory notion that Clinton’s lead is built on the backs of party insiders versus the reality of the lead she has earned through actual votes. It’s a lead that looks much smaller, but is in reality essentially insurmountable. Clinton’s earned delegate lead has been consistently north of 200. In 2008, with a popular vote count that Clinton arguably won by a narrow margin, Barack Obama’s earned delegate margin never exceeded much more than 100. I understand the need to occasionally litigate issues in public opinion that you simply cannot win on the facts and the law, but both of these instances seem particularly ripe with hypocrisy and sour grapes. Trump, on the one hand, has benefited significantly from the complex delegate-allocation scheme that he has decried of late. His substantial lead is built largely on “winner take all” states such as Florida and others that have allocated proportionately in such a way that he has captured all or nearly all of a state’s delegates while receiving only a plurality of the raw vote. On the other hand, Sanders has cried foul on the undemocratic nature of the “superdelegate” system, while he has dominated the arguably undemocratic caucus system — the exceptions, of course, being Iowa and Nevada. In Nevada, however, despite losing the state to Clinton by five points, it appears possible that Sanders may ultimately get more delegates because of his dominance in the state party’s multi-step delegate nomination and allocation process. Huh. I understand that facts and logic don’t dictate the rules of political engagement. To quote the rapper El-P, “I might have been born yesterday, sir; but I’ve been up all night.” I’m fond of saying that hypocrisy and hyperbole are the salt and pepper of the kitchen of political campaigning. All that having been said, Trump and Sanders are still full of crap when it comes to their delegate-related complaints. You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. *** Ben Pollara is a political consultant and a founding partner of LSN Partners, a Miami Beach-based government and public affairs firm. He runs United for Care, the Florida medical marijuana campaign and is a self-described “hyper-partisan” Democrat.
Ben Pollara: A Democrat’s unsolicited advice for the GOP that created Donald Trump
What is more appealing for Democrats like me? Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, or a fractured convention that produces a nominee who received no Republican primary votes, like Paul Ryan? Honestly, both sound pretty good and likely to culminate in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But it’s not up to Democrats like me, and the questions Republicans should be asking themselves have more serious consequences for both their party and our system of governance. Beyond my partisanship, I hold a core belief in the essential function of the two-party system and the imperfect, yet better than the alternatives, manner in which it maintains the values of our republican democracy. Assuming Trump enters Cleveland with a plurality but not majority of delegates, to deny him the nomination would shatter the Republican Party for a decade to come, and with it the two-party system that balances the most extreme tendencies of American political ideology. The media reacted with shock at Trump’s assertion that a brokered convention that denied him the nomination would lead to rioting. Trump has said many outrageous things, many of them without basis in fact. This was not one of them. Just as Vietnam and Civil Rights nearly tore apart the Democratic Party in 1968, denying Trump the nomination through Byzantine delegate rules would succeed in doing the same to the Grand Old Party. The party of Lincoln must come to terms with the reality that it now holds that moniker by historical fact only. The Republican Party has, by virtue of a political strategy to build a winning national coalition post-New Deal, become the party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and yes, Donald Trump. To survive, Republicans must face down that which they have wrought through two generations of “dog whistle” racism and us-vs-them fearmongering that, until recently, served the cynical corporatists and political elites in the party quite well. The Southern Strategy and the rise of fundamentalist religious extremism paved the way for the K Street Project and 20 of 28 years of Republican White House occupancy; the Tea Party and Birtherism gave rise to the Koch-era and hegemony of the legislative branch in D.C. and most state capitols. But the craven decisions that led to these triumphs are causing the Republican Party to collapse under the weight of its own base. What fueled government shutdowns over previously benign issues like raising the debt ceiling and funding Planned Parenthood (and the ultimate ouster of John Boehner as Speaker of the House) is precisely what is fueling Donald Trump’s success. It is willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty of the first degree for Republicans to bemoan the “Make American Great Again” movement and its accompanying rhetoric of angry xenophobia without owning responsibility for creating the environment that spawned it. You reap what you sow. Give Trump the nomination he has earned; you fostered the environment that incubated him. Let Trump fail spectacularly in November. Then look in the mirror and begin to rebuild the Republican Party in the image of Abraham Lincoln, rather than David Duke and his ilk. The alternative is a splintering of the very foundation of our political system and a generation of Democratic hegemony, which may have pundits in the not distant future bemoaning that “Barack Obama wouldn’t have been able to win a single state’s primary in today’s Democratic Party. He was basically a Republican.” Republicans should ask themselves, what is scarier? Four more years of a Democrat in the White House, or a future where that statement is true? • • • Ben Pollara is a political consultant and a founding partner of LSN Partners, a Miami Beach-based government and public affairs firm. He runs United for Care, the Florida medical marijuana campaign and is a self-described “hyper-partisan” Democrat.
