— by Michael Riordan —

A curious event occurred last week here in Washington state: Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by a margin of about 52 to 48 percent in the primary, after losing to him by a whopping margin of nearly 73 to 27 percent during the March caucuses. The primary was however just a “beauty contest” because the caucuses had already determined the number of delegates for each candidate. Bernie received the lion’s share, 74 versus 27 for Hillary.

But despite the fact that this was a supposedly non-binding preference poll, nearly 792,000 still voted in the Democratic primary versus only about 230,000 in the corresponding March 26 caucuses. Which do you think was more representative of the Washington electorate?

The fact that the results of the two approaches are so radically different demands that we take a closer look at the Democratic primary process in this state. We can’t blindly dismiss the primary as a meaningless beauty contest.

Had the party previously decided that its primary — not the caucuses — would determine the number of delegates awarded each candidate, and do so proportionately to their respective vote counts, the results would have been far different: 52 for Hillary and 49 for Bernie. That’s a net shift of 25 delegates.

Of course, one could argue that the turnout would have been different had the primary been binding, but that argument should be applied equally to both Bernie and Hillary supporters. So it cannot explain the great difference between the two results.

This comparison between the two approaches, the only one I know of nationally, can explain what to me had previously been puzzling. While Clinton has been winning state primaries handily by an average of more than 56 percent of the total votes, Sanders has been trouncing her in the caucuses by nearly 2-to-1 margins. One can easily conclude, especially after the Washington primary, that Sanders has been winning caucus states because his fervent supporters — both Democrats and independents — turn out for these caucuses in much greater numbers than do those who prefer Clinton. While not representative of the full electorate, such disparate turnouts can dramatically skew the results.

Do the results of the caucuses in fact represent the majority Democratic Party opinion in these states? As in Washington, I think, the answer in most cases is a resounding “No!” When members can vote in a primary, they predominantly choose Clinton, by margins averaging 56 to 42 percent. But those who can make it to the caucuses overwhelmingly favor Sanders.

Thus one can reasonably continue the above exercise to other caucus states and conservatively redistribute their total of 517 delegates essentially equally — say 259 delegates for Sanders versus 258 for Clinton, instead of the actual result of 334 to 183. That’s a net shift of 75 delegates in all, including the 25 shift in Washington, leading to 1,844 pledged delegates for Clinton and 1,470 for Sanders, according to the current New York Times tabulation.

But guess what? When you include the 541 superdelegates who have so far announced their preference for Clinton, her total delegate count reaches 2,585 — two more than needed to win the Democratic nomination! We wouldn’t need to await the June 7 primaries to learn the inevitable result.

What this exercise clearly tells us is that Washington should abandon its undemocratic caucus process in future primary elections. This year it permitted a dedicated minority of the Democratic Party to capture the electoral process and send a state delegation to the Philadelphia convention that is unrepresentative of statewide Party preferences.

That will probably not change the eventual nomination, but this exercise should tell discouraged Sanders supporters that the system is not always rigged against them. In some cases, as I have demonstrated here, it is actually rigged in their favor. They may rail against the undemocratic inclusion of superdelegates, but in Washington some of them — including Senators Cantwell and Murray and Governor Inslee, all Clinton supporters — will help to correct the imbalance introduced by the caucus process.

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