After Bernie Sanders lost the Nevada caucuses to Hillary Clinton, 47 percent to 53 percent, the New York Times (2/21/16) declared the 2016 primary race all but over:

Senator Bernie Sanders vowed on Sunday to fight on after losing the Nevada caucuses, predicting that he would pull off a historic political upset by this summer’s party convention.

But the often overlooked delegate count in the Democratic primary shows Mr. Sanders slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote.

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate.

At the end of the tenth paragraph, the Times‘ Patrick Healy includes some information relevant to the question of whether Sanders is “slipping significantly behind” Clinton:

A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

In other words, as far as voters are concerned, Sanders and Clinton are exactly tied so far. It’s only when you count the intentions of superdelegates—party insiders who by virtue of their position get to weigh in on the nominee—that Clinton has any sort of delegate lead, insurmountable or otherwise.

There are good reasons to treat the pledged delegate count as the delegate count. For one thing, the unpledged superdelegates can only indicate who they intend to vote for, which is not necessarily who they will actually vote for; they can and in the past have changed their minds. Counting them the same as pledged delegates is a bit like counting delegates from states that haven’t voted yet because voters in those states tell pollsters they intend to vote for one candidate or the other. They may or may not feel differently when the time comes.

Further, it’s doubtful that superdelegates would choose to overturn the will of Democratic voters to pick a nominee that they had rejected in the voting booth; that seems like an ideal strategy for keeping Democrats home on Election Day, not only giving up control of the White House but—perhaps more importantly to superdelegates, many of whom are in Congress—also putting otherwise safe legislative seats in jeopardy. As Daily Kos blogger Tausendberg (8/30/15) put it last year:

If, in 2016, the Democratic base was told that their opinion had been overridden and made irrelevant, the psychological impact would be so catastrophic on Election Day 2016 that we would need to make up new words to describe it.

Finally, one could argue that media outlets should emphasize the delegate count that reflects the will of the people, rather than an alternative count that disguises that will, because election coverage is supposed to be about facilitating democracy, right?

Arguments like these must have been persuasive to the New York Times at some point, because in 2008—the last time there was a contested Democratic primary—the Times did the count the other way, treating the count of pledged delegates chosen by voters as the real count. As the Times‘ Patrick Healy put it in a February 2008 news article (2/7/08), “The Times counts only delegates that have been officially selected and are bound by their preferences.” (That’s the same Patrick Healy who now puts the pledged delegate count at the end of the tenth paragraph.)

This approach affected how the Times covered the 2008 race, as when the paper’s Adam Nagourney (2/14/08) reported after primaries in Virginia, Maryland and DC:

Senator Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday’s primaries leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by more than 100 delegates, a small but significant advantage that Democrats said would be difficult for Mrs. Clinton to make up in the remaining contests in the presidential nomination battle.

Note that Obama’s critical 100-delegate lead was in pledged delegates; that was apparently considered so obvious that it went without saying. The Timesrightly noted that only after voters had had their say would superdelegates’ preferences come into play:

Neither candidate is expected to win the 2,025 pledged delegates needed to claim the nomination by the time the voting ends in June. But Mr. Obama’s campaign began making a case in earnest on Wednesday that if he maintained his edge in delegates won in primaries and caucuses, he would have the strongest claim to the backing of the 796 elected Democrats and party leaders known as superdelegates who are free to vote as they choose and who now stand to determine the outcome.

At that time, whether superdelegates had the right to make a choice independent of what voters wanted was an open question—with Clinton and Obama taking opposite sides:

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the delegates should make their decision based on who they thought would be the stronger candidate and president. Mr. Obama argues that they should follow the will of the Democratic Party as expressed in the primary and caucuses—meaning the candidate with the most delegates from the voting.

Of course, in 2008, it was the Times‘ stated view (1/25/08) that the Democrats had “two powerful main contenders” who “would both help restore America’s global image…. On the major issues, there is no real gulf separating the two.” So while the paper endorsed Clinton over Obama, it was safe to leave the decision in the hands of the voters.

This year, the Times (1/30/16) endorsed Clinton over an opponent who is “a self-described Democratic Socialist,” who “does not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers,” and whose plans “to break up the banks and to start all over on healthcare reform…aren’t realistic.” This time around, then, the favored candidate could use a little help by including her establishment supporters in the count alongside delegates chosen by voters—so you might call attention to the “often overlooked delegate count” to  portray her chances of being beaten as “growing increasingly remote.”

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at@JNaureckas.

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