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Comment by gthtjtkt | Hacker News Reader

WikiLeaks summed it up pretty well:

> By biasing its internal electoral market the DNC selected the less competitive candidate defeating the purpose of running a primary.

Hillary, the DNC, and all their cronies deserved this. I would've voted for any Democrat who won the primary fair and square, but I couldn't bring myself to vote for someone who stole an election (and from one of the most well-liked candidates of all time, no less). Many of my friends felt the same way -- they either stayed home, voted 3rd party, or voted without selecting a presidential candidate.

The fact that they tried to bully/guilt everyone into voting for her didn't help much either.

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How did she steal the election, and how was her opponent, who received nearly 4 million fewer votes, one of the most well-liked candidates of all time? The data does not support your story.

Tough to get more votes when the entire DNC is working against you: http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-proves-primary-was-rig...

That email chain was about how to deal with Sanders attacking the DNC for enforcing pre-agreed-upon rules in the Nevada convention. It had nothing to do with working against Sanders and everything to do with stopping Sanders from attacking the party heads for following the rules. http://www.politifact.com/nevada/statements/2016/may/18/jeff...

I assume you're referencing this one: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5508

But that article I linked is literally full of email chains which show the DNC clearly favoring Clinton. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/dnc-leak-shows...

The DNC played favorites from the beginning, and sanders supporters aren't too thrilled. Let's not forget that the DNC chief resigned over this.

Both of these links are about the same email chain that I already explained above in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12915266. Which email shows the DNC helping Clinton win the primary? They would have every reason to favor the candidate from their own party, but the emails show that they played it fairly.

Moreover, none of the emails show the Clinton campaign influencing the DNC to rig the election, which is what was originally claimed (that she somehow stole the primaries to the tune of a 4 million vote victory).

Yes, they were favoring the candidate from their own party. I already don't trust that they would have been 100% fair.

Also, yes, Clinton did win most of the votes. And as of now it looks like she won the popular vote too. I don't doubt that she's more popular.

But take a look at the states where Sanders did well vs where Clinton did well...

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/national-results-map

Then take a look at which states she lost to Trump...

Just to be clear, you agree that Clinton didn't cheat when she won the popular vote by a landslide (more than 25% more votes than Sanders)? https://www.thenation.com/article/the-democratic-primary-was...

You may believe that the DNC wasn't 100% fair in the primaries, but nothing in their emails suggests they applied their own biases to changing the rules in favor of Clinton, so that belief is not supported by evidence.

There is a secondary issue that maybe Sanders would have performed better in the general election than Clinton did. It's hard to do this kind of counterfactual analysis, but I disagree. Despite the media's horse race story, Clinton was so far ahead in votes and polling that she was never in danger of losing the primaries and so didn't throw the kitchen sink of "scandals" at Sanders. Had the race been closer, you would have seen these "scandals," and you certainly would have seen them had Sanders run against Trump (https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...). More than that though, if progressive icon Russ Feingold couldn't win in Wisconsin, Sanders didn't stand a chance either.

I should clarify, I meant more popular than trump.

Clinton did win most of the votes in the primary but I'm not going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she didn't use her connections to help her campaign. That article by the way came out in June, before the DNC leaks in July.

Yes, I think it is hard to play "what if" history. It's been a few days and I've basically accepted President Trump. It'll help a lot of folks in this country, even if those folks aren't me.

Do you think Donna Brazile gave Bernie those debate questions in advance, too?

No, but if Bernie was in that debate, she probably would have.

Correct me if I'm wrong here...the Brazile debate questions in question are from Democratic primary debates on March 6 and March 13, and Bernie was part of both, right?

You're right; however, Brazile was not the DNC chair at the time she did that (not until July), so she would have been allowed to help one candidate over another without it being the DNC rigging anything. Feeding Clinton questions is still bad but not an indication that the DNC rigged the primary against Sanders.

He is one of the most well-liked candidates of all time, yes. I believe that he would have won an honest primary also.

How did he lose 4 million votes? Most of that can be found in the DNC emails, among other places. There was a huge media campaign smear against him (led by the DNC itself), massive amounts of donations were funneled in ethically questionable manners into the Hillary campaign, stealing money from state tickets. People were hired in a black flag op to discredit his supporters.

I'm sure the list goes further.

However, I do think one of his biggest issues was that he wasn't a member of the team. I saw it first hand at the caucus; members making references to the fact that she was a life-long democrat, as if it was actually important. Republicans certainly got over that quickly.

Still, if the DNC had played fair with Bernie, I think that two million votes flipping isn't so far fetched.

> There was a huge media campaign smear against him (led by the DNC itself)

There is no evidence of the DNC running a smear campaign against Sanders.

> Massive amounts of donations were funneled in ethically questionable manners into the Hillary campaign.

You're presumably referring to the Hillary Victory Fund here. You can see on the donation page (still up: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/donate/go/) that the first $X of contributions goes to the Clinton primary campaign, the next $Y goes to the Clinton general campaign, the next $Z goes to the DNC, and the final money gets distributed to the state committees. The issue wasn't that the money was going into the Clinton campaigns but that it was going to the DNC instead of the state committees. The DNC's excuse was that they were using it to build common campaign infrastructure for use by the state committees.

> People were hired in a black flag op to discredit his supporters.

There is no evidence of a black flag or false flag operation against Sanders.

In summary, there is no evidence that the DNC sabotaged Sanders, yet he still lost by millions of votes, so the claim that he is one of the most well-liked candidates of all time goes against the actual voting data.

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