(Yahoo! News)
Jennifer Epstein, Sahil Kapur and Tyler Pager August 26, 2019
Bernie Sanders railed against a “rigged” Democratic primary during the 2016 election, but as he campaigns this year, his team has no complaints.
That’s because the Democratic National Committee has taken pains to fix the problems that some said plagued the last nominating process. There have been broad changes to the party’s rules on debates and super delegates, reforms to make its operations more transparent and responsive to the grassroots and continuing efforts by DNC Chairman Tom Perez and his staff to be neutral.
“The process has been fair,” said Jeff Weaver, a longtime top aide to Sanders who served on the DNC committee that spent the two years after the election working to improve the primaries for 2020. “It has not been designed to disadvantage someone, which is not something you could say last time.”
Still, there are concerns from some that the party over corrected and has become so devoted to transparency and rigid about rules that it’s unable to adapt to new concerns from candidates, voters and party insiders.
One worry is that with a field of more than 20 candidates, the DNC has been too inclusive of unconventional contenders such as Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang, while some current and former Democratic officials, including John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, were stymied by the debate rules and forced to abandon their campaigns.
‘To a Fault’
“I think they’re being almost neutral to a fault now and saying we don’t do anything that would tip our scale in any direction,” said Christine Pelosi, a DNC member from California whose mother is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that “if there’s a problem with the rules, is that we’re actually trying to be more inclusive.”
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