In the war for endorsements in
the Democratic presidential primary, there is a clear trend.
Every major union or
progressive organization that let its members have a vote endorsed Bernie
Sanders.
Meanwhile, all of Hillary
Clinton’s major group endorsements come from organizations where the leaders
decide. And several of those endorsements were accompanied by criticisms from
members about the lack of a democratic process.
It’s perhaps the clearest
example yet of Clinton’s powerful appeal to the Democratic Party’s elite, even
as support for Sanders explodes among the rank and file.
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For example, Clinton got an
endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign this week. That decision was
made not by a vote of HRC’s membership list but instead by a 32-member
executive board that includes Mike Berman, the
president of a lobbying firm that
works for Pfizer, Comcast, and the health insurance lobby. Northrup
Grumman is among its list of major corporate sponsors.
The Sanders campaign blasted
the group as “establishment”
and said that Sanders has a much stronger record on LGBT equality than Clinton.
Outspoken gay activist Michaelangelo Signorile wrote that HRC had clearly
traded its early endorsement for “access
to the White House” for its leaders.
The American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees endorsed Clinton, but “it was an absolute
top-down process,” said Katie Nelson of AFSCME Local Council 28 in Washington
state. “If they wanted to claim this was supported by the membership, they
should have had a membership vote.”
“For either candidate to get
real grassroots support from NEA members, an endorsement ought to be the result
of an extended dialogue with members,” said Anthony Cody, an education blogger
who was a member of the National Education Association for two decades.
“Hillary Clinton has engaged in a few phone calls with NEA leaders, but the
membership has been left out. “
At the American Federation of
Teachers, where the executive council voted to endorse Clinton, membership
polling was done in the summer of 2015 — when many people in the country did
not know who Bernie Sanders even was.
“To rush a nomination like
that before anyone else in labor — before the AFL-CIO — was unnecessary,” said
Jim Miller of AFT Local 1931. “They pretty much ran an inside game with that
nomination process. It wasn’t a rank-and-file game by any stretch of the
imagination.”
The United Food and Commercial
Workers didn’t take a public vote. “I don’t think they reached out to
membership and asked their membership who they were willing to support,”
complained UFCW Local 791 member Richard Poole. The UFCW’s board and its
president then offered a surprising endorsement to Clinton. UFCW’s chief
nemesis is Wal-Mart, a corporation on whose board Clinton sat for six years.
The one major labor union that
did allow for a vote was the Communications Workers of America. CWA followed a
three-month process that included meetings with members, telephone town halls,
and an online polling voting process.
“We conducted an online
membership poll from mid-September to early December,” said CWA spokesperson
Candice Johnson in a statement to The Intercept. “Tens of thousands of members
voted in the poll, with Sanders getting a decisive majority.” Johnson noted
that CWA did not endorse in 2008 because they followed the same process and the
three leading Democratic candidates all received around the same proportion of
votes.
“CWA had a really good model
for how to do this … certainly better than what [SEIU] did,” said Ed Hunt, who
is in SEIU Local 503 in Oregon and objects to his union’s endorsement process,
which was based on non-binding membership polling and town halls followed by an
executive board vote. “For me an ideal process would have been a process where
we talk about the issues and the candidates’ stance on the issues followed by a
vote.”
While all four major
organizations that held membership votes endorsed Sanders, two that did not
hold open membership votes also endorsed him: the American Postal Workers Union
(APWU) and National Nurses United.
Sanders was endorsed by MoveOn
with 78
percent of voters choosing him; in the Democracy for America vote, he won nearly 88 percent;
and 87
percent of Working Families Party voters chose Sanders.
Many of the groups that did
not hold an outright membership vote were not entirely transparent in
disclosing how they endorsed candidates. Several cited membership surveys and
focus groups but did not disclose how these other processes were weighted against
the decisions of executive boards.
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