Another Talking Point Bites the Dust

I've got a new piece up at BNR on how Bernie Sanders' last talking point and excuse for not winning—closed primaries—has been discredited:

The latest talking point Bernie Sanders, his staff, and his surrogates have been peddling to try to explain why he's lost, to try to claim the system is rigged, and to try to delegitimize Hillary Clinton's victory, is that closed primaries are undemocratic—and that if Independent voters had been allowed to participate, he would have won.

Vox crunched the numbers and it turns out that, while Bernie's fortunes would have been slightly better had Independents been able to participate in the small number of closed primaries so far, he "would have won 41 more delegates than he currently has. Clinton is currently leading Sanders by 293 delegates (without even counting the superdelegates)."

Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight compares the Republican Primary rules with the Democratic Primary rules, and finds that Hillary's pledged delegate lead would triple under the GOP rules: "The Democrats' delegate allocation rules are more 'fair' than the GOP's rules in the sense that vote shares are translated into delegate shares more faithfully and uniformly… If the Democrats used Republican allocation, Clinton would have wrapped up the nomination long, long ago."

I had much more to say (I know you're shocked), so click through to read the whole thing!