Joe Biden bashed Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign for claiming that the 2020 Democratic nomination should be given to whichever candidate has the plurality of delegates, even if it’s not a majority.
The former vice president has maintained that he would pursue a contested convention if none of the Democratic candidates have a majority of the delegates prior to the Democratic National Convention in July. He argued that the rules had been set and noted that Sanders felt the same way in 2016 when he trailed Hillary Clinton.
“I mean look, the rules have been set,” Biden told State of the Union on Sunday. “I find a lot of folks in Bernie’s operation are now saying that whoever goes in with the most delegates — even if they’re not close or they’re a distance from the 1,900-plus that we need — that they should be declared the winner. I wonder where that view was when he was challenging Hillary after she went in with a commanding lead.”
He continued, “Look, you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. And I’m not at all certain that — I’m not a pundit, and I don’t know if we will win with Bernie ahead. I hope that’s not the case, and I hope that I’m ahead, but we will see. But I think, you know, you play by the rules.”
Sanders has denied that he changed his outlook on the convention rules since 2016. During an interview on ABC’s This Week the same morning, the Vermont senator told host George Stephanopoulos that he only said there should be a contested convention in 2016 before the final votes from California were settled.
California, the state with the most delegates, changed its primary to take place on Super Tuesday after years of holding one of the final contests of the primary season.
.@GStephanopoulos presses Sanders on his refusal to say in 2016 that candidate with most pledged delegates at convention should be nominee—a position he now holds.
Sanders says after Clinton won the pledged delegates he “conceded” and backed her campaign. https://t.co/wGwD0uWZ3e pic.twitter.com/BvSqDxlShq
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) March 1, 2020
A contested convention is currently the most likely scenario, according to the 2020 forecasting models from FiveThirtyEight. There is a 58% chance that a contested convention occurs following Biden’s commanding win in South Carolina on Saturday. The next most-likely option is that Sanders wins a majority of the delegates, which presented a 31% chance. The models showed Biden with an 11% chance of winning a majority of the delegates.
