{"id":20090,"date":"2017-11-06T08:08:25","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T15:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=20090"},"modified":"2017-11-06T08:08:25","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T15:08:25","slug":"montana-sanders-backers-believe-claims-of-rigged-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/11\/montana-sanders-backers-believe-claims-of-rigged-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Sanders backers believe claims of ‘rigged’ system"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sanders\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

At a campaign rally at the Montana Pavilion at MetraPark in Billings in May 2016, Bernie Sanders spoke to a crowd of several thousand people.<\/p><\/div>\n

Montana Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders were left scratching their heads after a former national party insider said last week that the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged for Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

In her new book, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile said she found evidence that Clinton\u2019s campaign rigged the party\u2019s nomination process to favor Clinton over Sanders.<\/p>\n

While some in the party passed Brazile\u2019s allegations off as nonsense, others \u2014 primarily Sanders supporters \u2014 believe it\u2019s founded in fact.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m at a loss for words on this one,\u201d said Bill Geer, of Lolo, who served as a Sanders delegate for the Montana Democratic Party during last year\u2019s nominating convention. \u201cI would like to hope it\u2019s not true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geer said he cast his vote as a delegate for Sanders during the convention. But when Sanders didn\u2019t win the party\u2019s nomination, he voted for Clinton, who went on to lose the general election to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s victory, seen as a political upset, left many Democrats angry and frustrated with party leadership, including Montana\u2019s delegates for Sanders. Geer believes the allegations, if true, could come with consequences, though he couldn\u2019t say what those might be.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to hope this isn\u2019t true, but I don\u2019t have a great deal of confidence right now,\u201d Geer said. \u201cI believe in the principles of the Democratic Party, that\u2019s for sure. But those who are representing us in the party, one has to wonder if they hold true to the same principles we hold dear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Brazile alleges that the DNC, the Clinton campaign and Clinton\u2019s joint fundraising committee conspired to \u201ccontrol the party\u2019s finances, strategy and all the money it raised.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Carol Williams, of Missoula, who led the state\u2019s Clinton delegation at the national convention and is a longtime Clinton friend, said Brazile should have been aware of the party\u2019s financial problems when she took the job from former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.<\/p>\n

Williams said it was Clinton \u2014 not Sanders \u2014 who raised money to support the Democratic Party, which was broke at the time. As a result, Clinton had the right to receive the benefits of her own fundraising, Williams said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSanders is no Democrat and had no interest in raising money for the Democrats, and he raised no money for the Democrats,\u201d Williams said. \u201cWe had one candidate in this last election who cared about the party and wanted to raise money to ensure it was supported, and Clinton did. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything wrong with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jennifer Merecki, of Billings, who served as a delegate whip for the Sanders campaign in Montana, said the state\u2019s Clinton delegates treated them as \u201csecond-class citizens\u201d throughout the convention.<\/p>\n

When the state\u2019s Sanders delegates were left out of several events, including the delegates\u2019 breakfast, Merecki said she only considered it rude. But when the Clinton delegates left Sanders delegates out of the second round of voting, she began to see a conspiracy.<\/p>\n

\"Jenn\"<\/a>

Jennifer Merecki<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAs a delegate whip for the Sanders campaign for Montana, we were supposed to alert the camp of any strange happenings \u2014 anything that seemed out of the ordinary,\u201d Merecki said. \u201cWhen I reported that they took a vote without us present, our Sanders contact person said they weren\u2019t surprised. It was happening all over the country, and it must have been a directive from the DNC. They (Sanders\u2019 campaign) had suspicions from the very get-go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andy Boyd, a Sanders delegate from Bozeman, said he also had suspicions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always thought it was true that Clinton rigged the process, but I don\u2019t think it matters anymore,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cWe definitely need to hold the party accountable, but we need to move forward. Sanders has said we need to look past it and build unity. But I\u2019m mad about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roughly 61 percent of registered Democrats in Missoula County voted for Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary compared to 36 percent who voted for Clinton. Sanders also carried the state with 65,000 votes compared to Clinton\u2019s 55,000 votes.<\/p>\n

But during the roll-call vote at the Democratic National Convention, the state\u2019s delegates went to Clinton, including most of the state\u2019s super delegates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason there are super delegates in the party \u2014 according to Schultz \u2014 is to keep any grassroots uprising from gaining a foothold,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cWhen Sanders won Montana, you\u2019d think he\u2019d walk away with more delegates from the state. But with our super delegates and with the statement from Schultz and watching the same results play out in other states, it gave me even more suspicion to not trust the DNC or the Montana Democratic Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

In excerpts released this week by Politico, Brazil said that when she took the helm at the DNC, she decided \u201cto get to the bottom\u201d of whether Clinton\u2019s team had rigged the system, as leaked emails had suggested.<\/p>\n

The national party was broke, she said, and Clinton\u2019s team helped right the ship. But in doing so, it took advantage of the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Hillary\u2019s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party\u2019s debt and put it on a starvation diet,\u201d Brazil wrote. \u201cIt had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anita Green, a Sanders delegate from Missoula, believes that Brazile is telling the truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cI identify as a Democrat and always have identified as a Democrat and I feel as though the Democratic Party let me down,\u201d Green said. \u201cI wish there was more transparency within the Democratic Party. I don\u2019t want to leave it, though I understand why many have. I hope the Democratic Party can be reformed in such a way that we can bring the people we have lost back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy Loewenstein, communications director for the Montana Democratic Party, said the party was focusing on its future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Montana Democratic Party has always been a big tent party with diverse points of view and folks from all backgrounds,\u201d he said. \u201cRight now we are focusing all our energy on winning seats up and down the ballot in 2018.”<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on\u00a0Missoula Current<\/a>, an independent online newspaper, of which\u00a0Martin Kidston is the founding editor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Montana Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders were left scratching their heads after a former national party insider said last week that the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged for Hillary Clinton. In her new book, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile said she found evidence that Clinton\u2019s campaign rigged the party\u2019s nomination process to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":20091,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[3857,4268,6428,6429,1428],"class_list":["post-20090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-bernie-sanders","tag-carol-williams","tag-democratic-national-committee","tag-donna-brazile","tag-hillary-clinton","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20094,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20090\/revisions\/20094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}