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Clinton and Cruz Win Iowa Caucus 2016
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Bernie Sanders has a legion of followers who are sometimes stereotyped as young white males with a certain know-it-all attitude. They are known as the "Berniebots" or more commonly the "Berniebros."
From Time
The archetype is simple: a young, male supporter of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who questions Clinton supporters on a spectrum that ranges from simply tone-deaf to outright misogynistic.
He’s the smug-seeming young Sanders supporter who asked Clinton at a CNN town hall why young voters aren’t enthusiastic about her candidacy, then suggested it was because she’s dishonest. He’s the guy who floods Internet comment boards accusing Clinton supporters of voting with their “vaginas.” He’s the idealistic young liberal who replies to any critique of Sanders on social media with a flood of crass terms and vitriol.
The Iowa Caucus was a close race for the Democrats. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton split the vote right down the middle with Hillary winning by just a few points. Democrats should have been thrilled to have two strong candidates who excited voters - we are all on the same side, after all. But some of Bernie's supporters - male and female - chose to go negative about Hillary's victory, taking it out on other Dems, trolling their Twitter and Facebook accounts, while insinuating that Hillary had somehow cheated them out of an "easy" win.
The Bernie-Bros-and-Gals were helped along by the media, namely MSNBC who had a hyper Steve Kornackie's talking about how crazy the Iowa Caucus process is without fully understanding it. Kornacki made it sound as if the election was being decided by "coin tosses" because that is the way ties were broken in some precincts, and that has probably been done for 100 years in Iowa. But the Bernie-bro meme quickly became that "Hillary stole the election with lucky coin tosses," diminishing the achievement of being the first woman to ever win the Iowa Caucus, and setting off purity troll-mania among the Bernie supporters.
This is how the #IowaCaucus works. A tie is solved tossing a coin @HillaryClinton wins pic.twitter.com/yZDTUKFJXQ
— Fernando Peinado (@FernandoPeinado) February 2, 2016
Coin Tosses Did Not Decide The Iowa Democratic Caucus: After media -- I'm looking at you, Steve Kornacki ... https://t.co/W4mqB68WFi #LVN
— LiberalValuesNetwork (@lordxmen2k) February 3, 2016
Kornacki later apologized, but too late.
I messed up the coin toss story on-air: The delegates at stake were county delegates -- not the state delegate equivalents on screen.
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) February 2, 2016
Ok time to clean out my mentions... No, friends. Coin tosses did NOT decide the outcome in the Iowa Caucuses. https://t.co/jOKhEds2NW
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) February 2, 2016
And Hillary Clinton is neither a caucus thief nor an accidental victor. Winning Iowa, even narrowly, was a legit boost to her campaign.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) February 2, 2016
#IowaCaucusresults #CoinTossGate So, THIS is how it's going to be... @impetrio1 @BlackAndRight pic.twitter.com/ZgUD4Ingjx
— BlackandBlondeMedia (@BlackandBlondeM) February 2, 2016
Let's talk about how Hilary won 2 precincts by only a coin-toss. This was absolutely a win tonight for #Bernie. #IowaCaucus #FeelTheBern
— Cødy |-/ (@CodyHasPowers) February 2, 2016
We should do a coin toss to see if @HillaryClinton goes to jail. #CaucusForBernie #IowaTODAY #FeelTheBern
— Eric Zissou (@ericzissou) February 2, 2016
Bob Cesca wrote on Addicting Info:
Accusing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party of election fraud is a mistake.
My Facebook feed is rapidly filling up with Sanders supporters who are accusing various precinct officials as well as both the Clinton campaign and the Iowa Democratic Party of rigging the vote against Bernie. With the 30-to-21 delegate split clearly showing a Clinton victory, it was pretty damn close to a tie, and Sanders supporters should be proud of achieving second place with a wafer-thin margin. Scouring Iowa precincts for fraud just looks like sour grapes. Plus, attacking the Democratic Party itself won’t help Sanders with acquiring the necessary party endorsements to win the nomination — superdelegates matter, and Sanders lags far behind on this front with a margin of 465 party endorsements for Clinton and just two for Bernie. By the way, the C-SPAN video being circulated with the headline “Clinton Voter Fraud in Polk County, Iowa Caucus” was user-generated, and likely comes from a Sanders supporter — not C-SPAN itself.
From Delia Warner on Daily Kos
You know nothing about how a caucus works because you didn’t take the time to educate yourselves and you treat our good Democratic Party caucus chairs who have been working elections honorably since before you were born with disrespect and suspicion as if they are there to “rig” the caucus.
Then when it’s all over, you take to the web and start making accusations of voter fraud and demanding recounts. You pretend that flipping a coin to decide something at the caucus is some nefarious Clinton scheme to rob Bernie Sanders because again you never took the time to educate yourselves so you would know that the coin toss is nothing new or nefarious. Then you are silent when it turns out that the real beneficiary of the evil coin toss was Bernie Sanders.
From Wired:
The coin flip rule has been part of the Democratic Iowa caucus process for years. The only thing about it that’s changed is our ability to document it.
As we’ve reported before, the last Democratic caucus that was actually contested was back in 2008, when smartphone use was much less widespread and Twitter had barely hit the mainstream. Before this year’s caucus, we predicted that the existence of this technology would give Americans a window into the process they’ve rarely seen before. If the coin flip mini-drama is any indication, we were right.
. . . each delegate awarded last night, while still important, still represents a fraction of one state delegate—the people who actually choose the nominee at the Democratic Convention. County delegates, in other words, don’t carry as much weight. That’s why when the results come in, they’re reported not as county delegates, but as state delegate equivalents. Last night, Clinton beat Sanders by nearly four state delegate equivalents. And what that means is the outcome of the race wouldn’t have changed if the coins flips had flopped in Sanders’ favor.
