The talks reveal rising anxiety over the Vermont senator's momentum on the eve of voting
DES MOINES, Iowa — A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention.
Sanders is surging and Joe Biden has maintained his lead nationally, but at least three other candidates are widely seen as viable. The cluster raises the specter of a convention requiring a second ballot. “There’s talk about somehow trying to change this rule at this convention — just casual conversation, and I have participated in it some,” said Don Fowler, a former DNC chairman from South Carolina who opposed the DNC’s decision in 2018 to strip superdelegates of much of their power in the presidential nominating process. “But I want to be clear that I would not be a party to any effort to do that in the 2020 convention … It’s bad sportsmanship.
The decision to relegate superdelegates — now called “automatic delegates” — to the second ballot in a contested convention consumed the DNC for nearly two years after the 2016 election. Superdelegates overwhelmingly sided with Hillary Clinton, infuriating Sanders’ supporters. He added, “We haven’t had the first vote in the primary yet. Let’s see how the panic sets in as this thing progresses.”
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