Sanders Could Lose A Third Of His Delegates, Making For A Messy Convention
538Sanders stands to lose a significant number of delegates headed into the convention. According to the DNC’s 2020 delegate selection rules, any candidate who is no longer running loses the statewide delegates2 they have won and those delegates are then reallocated to candidates still in the race. (That has not necessarily been how the DNC has interpreted this rule previously, but it is how the DNC has signaled that it will use it in 2020.) Second, if Sanders fails to clear the 25 percent delegate threshold required to secure representatives on convention committees, it’ll be harder to integrate his policies into the official DNC platform.
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Howard is a personal friend, so this is straight from him, not speculation. Tradition has it that the Party Chairman is one with great responsibilities, and considerable influence--WHEN that party does NOT hold the White House. When the Party DOES hold the White House, the President is the Party Chairman, and does not want or need a strong Party chair with whom to have potential conflicts. The Party chair thus traditionally steps down after having wrested the White House from the opposition, usually with a proud "my work is done here," which Howard dutifully did. It was his decision, not Obama's.
He would have stayed on had Obama asked him, but there was a nasty biting fly in that ointment in the name of Rahm Emmanuel. He despised Howard after their famous 2006 screaming match about whether to pursue the (as of then) untested 50 state strategy as opposed to the traditional stick-to-your-base strategy that Emmanuel as DCCC head advocated. As DNC chair, Howard held the upper hand. He not only stuck to his position, but turned out to have been wildly successful with it. I'm not sure which irked Rahm more, but when Obama named him WH chief of staff (Chicago blood being, apparently, thicker than Obama's usual common sense for once), Howard's fate as an eternal outsider to the Obama Administration was sealed. If there is ANYONE who should have been HHS Secretary, it was Howard. I asked him in early February, 2009, what he would do if Rahm managed to shut him out completely. He immediately answered that he would nominally join some firm for name recognition (for them) and some steady income (for him), and then spend the rest of his time "raising hell for causes I care about," which he has done ever since. In February of 2009, we met up in Geneva, Switzerland--close to home for me, but off his usual path. He was on his way back from Davos--not as a politico or economics guru, but as an environmental activist, which he was even in his Burlington days. It is another story altogether, but his environmental activism once brought him into a very sharp and bitter conflict with the mayor of Burlington--who, at the time, was one Bernard Sanders. They didn't speak for four years after that.
A few years later, he was involved in a march from Bangkok to the Burmese border to bring attention to the human trafficking going on with Burmese girls, via Thailand, being sold into human slavery. I never see ANYONE giving him credit for this kind of activity, and Howard was never one to toot his own horn. Because of his nominal employer, I occasionally see on this board mentions of "Howard Dean, the corporate sellout." I know that nothing could be further from the truth, but then, any post with the words "corporate" or "corporatist" is one I usually ignore anyway. With his record, Howard certainly doesn't need me to defend him.
Here in my adopted home town of Düsseldorf: Mayor Thomas Geisel (SPD), Howard, and me, on a VERY rare visit to Düsseldorf:
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When we meet up these days, it's usually in New York or Washington.
