Superdelegates supporting Hilary Clinton are getting angry, abusive phone calls and emails from Bernie Sanders’ backers demanding they switch sides.
The pressure is intense, say Clinton superdelgates from states won by Sanders. Superdelegates are not “pledged” to the state victor and can vote whichever way they want.
That’s leading to a torrent of unpleasantness.
Maine Democratic National Committee member Maggie Allen began screening her calls after the state’s March 5 caucuses.
“It got really bad,” Allen, a Clinton supporter, told the Washington Examiner. “I got drunken calls saying I was a bitch. I was basically being called an elitist, unfair, an undemocratic person.”
She receives 25 calls or more emails or voice messages like this a day.
As an unpledged delegate, Allen is one of the hundreds of wildcard votes that could decide who gets the Democratic nomination. She supports Clinton, but her state went for Sanders by nearly 30 points. And the Vermont socialist senator’s backers are unhappy with Allen’s choice of Clinton.
Having fallen far behind Clinton in the delegate count, the Sanders campaign is trying to sway superdelegates to switch. But they’re going way too far, Clinton superdelegates claim.
Idaho superdelegate Carolyn Boyce has been involved in the state’s politics since the 1980s, and is the only one of Idaho’s four superdelegates to back Clinton. Sanders won the Idaho caucus with 78 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 22 percent. After the caucus, one Sanders supporter started a petition online demanding Boyce switch her convention vote from Clinton to Sanders.
“It is appalling that you have chosen to disregard the results of the recent caucus,” Boyce said reading from a recent email she received. “I can only surmise that you are receiving monetary compensation. Furthermore, I’d like to thank you from making a sham of our democracy.”
Other superdelegates told stories of harassment in Alaska, Utah, Colorado, Maine, Idaho and Arizona. As the Vermont senator has won a string of statewide victories lately, it has intensified Sanders supporters’ anger at his his 469-31 deficit among superdelegates (although Clinton leads him among pledged delegates awarded by the primaries and caucuses too).
Eighty-five-year-old Carolyn Warner has been friends with the Clintons since 1979, “long before you were born,” she said with a laugh from her Mississippi hotel room. The Arizona superdelegate says her personal secretary has collected hundreds of “not hostile, but overly passionate” emails from Sanders supporters, but she’s “too old to be pushed around like that.”
“I have friends around the country that are being tormented, not violently, but verbally assaulted and I know Bernie Sanders would not countenance that,” Warner said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t make some sort of statement to his supporters to stop this because I think he is a gentlemen and a person of integrity. This is like something Trump would do.”
Sanders supporters have also been blamed for some of the disruptions at Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s rallies. These aren’t the first complaints about harassment by enraged Sanders devotees. When MoveOn.org, a progressive organization that endorsed Sanders, mobilized thousands of supporters to protest outside a Trump rally in Chicago last month, the protests turned so violent that the police arrived on scene and the event was cancelled.
“Multiple petitions, lots of emails, telephone calls you name it. Clearly somebody is leading an effort on the ground,” uncommitted Maine superdelegate Phil Bartlett told the Examiner. He added that even though he has yet to commit to any candidate he receives so many “oftentimes frustrated or hostile calls” from Sanders supporters every day he doesn’t have time to respond to them.
When asked about the hostilities towards Clinton-leaning superdelegates, a high-level Sanders campaign staffer replied that they are “not encouraging that type of behavior at all” and that “this isn’t even something we on the sly think is great.”
“But a lot of people on campaigns do things that have nothing to do with us,” he added.
In an effort to calm down supporters, the Sanders campaign removed the link from their website that allowed supporters to organize their own public events having to do with or targeting superdelegates. Instead the campaign is encouraging Sanders fans to work on competing for pledged delegates and zero in on the remaining states.
But Sanders himself has complained publicly about the superdelegates from states he’s won. During an appearance on “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” Thursday he said, “Superdelegates should listen to the will of their people” and that if his campaign has “60, 70, 80 percent of the vote in a state, you know what? I think super delegates should vote for us.”
Sanders’ senior campaign staff is encouraging his few committed superdelegates to reach out to those who are undecided or Clinton supporters who could be convinced to change sides. But Pete Gertonson, an Idaho superdelegate committed to Sanders, says the slew of harassment his Clinton-leaning colleagues receive only weaken the pitch.
“I was going to reach other delegates until I saw this this morning, but if I were to call them now it’s not going to work,” Gertonson told the Examiner. “I know that if they’re getting this kind of hate they won’t listen to me.”
