The Clinton campaign must be worried about California. There’s no other reason for the AP to have prematurely declared an end to the Democratic primary.
The AP bizarrely decided to retabulate the votes of superdelegates in order to call the race. But the reality is that superdelegates don’t actually vote until the Convention on July 25th, and they should not be counted until they actually vote. Moreover, if one did want to count superdelegates as part of the grand total, then media organizations could have called the race for Clinton long ago. But they didn’t, because that would have been a disservice to the democratic process. It remains a disservice to the Democratic process today—just one day before the biggest primary vote.
Millions of voters still have yet to make their voices heard in the Democratic primary. They include voters in Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and New Jersey. But above all they include all the voters in California, America’s largest and arguably most diverse and progressive state.
The Sanders and Clinton campaigns have been fighting tooth and nail for California, and for good reason. It has a huge batch of pledged delegates to allocate--and as California goes, so goes the nation eventually. Even only symbolically, a Sanders win in California would send shockwaves throughout the Democratic establishment as to the future of the party and the role of Democratic Socialism within it.
At a practical level, California's terrible top-two "jungle" primary means that a high turnout is crucial to the success of Democrats downballot. In California’s Dem-majority 24th district where I live, turnout among the overwhelmingly Sanders-supporting college students at UC Santa Barbara could make the difference between whether a Democrat even advances into the November general election or whether we will be forced to choose between two Republicans. Calling the race for Clinton in advance of the primary doesn’t just hurt Democrats at the hyperlocal level: it might actually mean fewer Democrats in Congress after November, too.
There is also a very large number of “independent” voters in California who will have the opportunity to cast their votes in a Democratic primary—many of them for the very first time. Sanders’ message is bringing people into the democratic party in record numbers, and there is no reason to cut that short . It is in the interest of the Democratic Party to make sure that we recognize and embrace these voters and their concerns, rather than cast them aside.
Ultimately, the winner of the Democratic primary needs 2,383 delegates. Hillary Clinton has 1812. Bernie Sanders has 1521. 813 are still available.
Let’s give the people a chance to vote. There’s no good reason to prematurely count superdelegate preferences a month early and artificially depress turnout the day before the primary vote.
