Get the popcorn, the system is rigged against Bernie.
California Democrats narrowly selected longtime party insider Eric Bauman to be the leader of the largest state Democratic Party, angering and frustrating supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders who threw their support behind an insurgent challenger.
Delegates to the state party convention selected Bauman for party chair on Saturday. He defeated Kimberly Ellis, who refused to concede citing unspecified concerns with the vote count and, after speaking with a lawyer, declared “this race is not over.”
The hotly contested race reflected the deep divisions within the Democratic Party, which despite a universal commitment to fighting President Donald Trump has not fully healed from last year’s contentious presidential primary between Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
In the three-day California Democratic Party convention, Democrats drawn to Sanders’ condemnation of money in politics pushed the party to reject Wall Street.
Bauman, looking to unify the fractured party he now leads, offered words of conciliation to the so-called “Berniecrats” who supported Ellis.
“There is no denying that there is a problem when so many of our hardworking activists feel that they are not welcome within our Party and that they have been slighted and shut out of the process,” Bauman said in a statement.
For many Sanders supporters, emotions are still raw following what they feel was an unfair nomination contest and Saturday’s California election felt like a repeat.
“Things are going to get tough for the Democratic Party, and if they don’t want the Republicans to win then they need to work with us,” said Bryan Hash, an Ellis and Sanders supporter from Southern California.
Bauman defeated Ellis by a mere 62 votes out of nearly 3,000 cast – a razor-thin margin for a candidate who lined up support from most of the state’s elected Democrats and, until recently, was widely expected to win with minimal opposition.
Ellis and Bauman both endorsed Clinton’s presidential bid and were largely aligned in their approaches to public policy. But Ellis adopted a Sanders-inspired message determined to minimize the influence of money in politics. Her supporters were outraged that Bauman’s political consulting firm accepted money from pharmaceutical companies to work against a Sanders-backed initiative aimed at limiting government spending on medications.