Wash. Voters Descend on Superdelegate Who Supports Clinton
Washingtonians who support Sen. Bernie Sanders flooded the Facebook account of Rep. Rick Larsen, one of the Democratic party’s roughly 700 superdelegates, with demands that he honor his constituents’s will and abandon his vote for Hillary Clinton.
“Superdelegates,” explained The Guardian’s Trevor Timm in February, are members of Congress, governors, mayors and other party elites “who aren’t elected by anyone during the primary process and are free to vote any way they want at the [nominating] convention.”
Washington overwhelmingly favored Sanders over Clinton by a spread of 72 percent to 21 percent in the Democratic caucus on Mar. 26. The Vermont senator carried every county in the state, and voters in Whatcom County, where Larsen keeps an office, chose Sanders by 81 percent.
Roughly one day after the results came in, the following graphic appeared on the Facebook walls of social media users across the state:
Sanders’ supporters have answered the call in droves. Beneath posts wishing constituents Happy Easter and congratulating the University of Washington’s Huskies basketball team on making it into the Final Four, comments like the following appeared by the thousands:
Some commenters struck a more strident tone, threatening to vote Larsen out of office if he fails to switch his vote.
One user has started a Facebook group aimed at organizing voters to place sustained pressure on Larsen.
Will Larsen listen? Elected officials fear disgruntled voters. And if Sanders’ supporters get Larsen to change his vote, it will stand as another in a long line of this election cycle’s repudiations of the common view that people power is a dead force in American politics.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/wash_voters_descend_on_superdelegate_who_supports_clinton_20160328/
