
Both Hillary and Bernie are very experienced politicians as demonstrated by their long careers in public office within the Democrat party. So one must assume that they both know the party rules especially as related to the supperdelegates; which is an unelected delegate who is free to support any candidate for the presidential nomination at the party’s national convention. Most often they vote for the candidate that the DNC wish to be nominated. For 2016 there are approximately 712 supperdelegates out of the 4,763 delegates to the Democrat convention to be held in Philadelphia between July 25 and 28, 2016. At this point Hillary has 431 Bernie has 15 and O’Malley has 2. There are 264 uncommitted supperdelegates at this time.
There have been two Democrat primaries so far Iowa where Hillary got 23 and Bernie got 21and New Hampshire where Hillary got 9 and Bernie got 15; however in New Hampshire there are 8 super delegates which are apparently all for Hillary so she gets 17 not 9. So, we can see that Bernie has little to no chance of every beating Hillary even if he would get more than 50% of the popular vote. The estimated count for both categories, when this was written is Hillary 463 and Bernie 51 an impossible lead for Bernie to overcome even with 48 states still to vote.
The question right now is, why would Bernie be running and not complaining that he can’t win because the deck is stacked against him?
In a discussion I had with my wife over this issue we decided that it was because Bernie was helping Hillary in several ways the first was to help her with the debates and get her use to some of the questions that will come up and get her into the debate mode. The second reason could be that Bernie is far left which makes Hillary look more centrist which will help in the general election. We think the last reason is that Hillary has not appealed to the young college age kids and so Bernie’s job is to bring them into the party with promises like free college; in other words get them into the progressive movement since they are very discouraged over the results of the last 7 years of Obama.
They may play this out all the way to their convention where it will look close but not really and Bernie with withdraw at the appropriate time. Whether this will actually work is doubtful but they have a hard road to go with Hillary since she is just hot well liked and has zero charisma.