Day one of the Democratic convention was dominated by disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters. The protested in the city; they chanted and booed inside the arena. And so even though 90 percent of Sanders voters now say they’re supporting Hillary Clinton, the Sanders vanguard was still fighting.
It’s instructive to compare what happened in Philadelphia yesterday with what happened at the Denver convention in 2008. The contrast illustrates that it didn’t have to be this way.
It’s easy to forget how bitter the 2008 nominating contest was. In part, it was because Barack Obama mounted an insurgency by co-opting the establishment Hillary Clinton had thought was loyal to her. In part, it was because Democrats worship identity politics, and the race pitted two groups against one another to see who ranked higher on the pyramid of grievances. But the biggest reason it was so contentious was this: Hillary Clinton won almost 300,000 more votes that Barack Obama. And even with the 2000 election still fresh in memory, the Democratic party decided to give Obama the nomination anyway.
And despite that, the 2008 convention was entirely free of drama or concerns that Clinton supporters would protest or wreck the proceedings.
That’s because Clinton never questioned the legitimacy of the process. She was always careful to keep her complaints, about superdelegates or the machinations of the party, within very strict limits. Her stated rationale for continuing her campaign past the point that Obama had clinched the nomination was always that she wanted to let every voter have their say. She embarrassed Obama by exposing how ambivalent many Democratic primary voters were about him, but she never questioned his legitimacy or raised expectations that she would somehow overturn the results.
And whatever her private feelings about Barack Obama—I’m convinced that no one in America voted for John McCain more gleefully—publicly, she was a good soldier. Go look at her concession speech from June 2008. It’s famous for the “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling, but it’s a full-throated endorsement of Obama, start to finish. Ditto her convention speech.
In short, she established clear boundaries for her supporters. And they behaved accordingly, coming home both for the convention and the election.
Sanders conducted himself differently during the waning days of his 2016 campaign. Despite the fact that Clinton was the clear winner—not just in delegates but with more than 3.5 million more votes—Sanders questioned the legitimacy of the results. He called the party’s nominating system “absurd” and a “rigged system.” He urged the media not to call the election after Clinton clinched the nomination and promised his supporters that “it will be a contested convention.”
The result is that during the first day in Philadelphia, even Elizabeth Warren was heckled throughout her keynote address by Sanders supporters chanting “We trusted you.” Even when Sanders himself stood at the podium Monday night and exhorted the crowd by saying they needed to guarantee a Hillary Clinton presidency, exclaiming, “I am going to do all that I can to make that happen”—he was greeted by a chorus of boos and stone-faced despair from his supporters on the floor.
This is what it looks like when a political leader loses control of his movement.
But it’s important to understand that in this case, the outbreak isn’t the result of dialectical forces but of choices made by the principal.
