Interesting article up on Buzzfeed describing how Clinton volunteers are being instructed to give up votes to keep O’Malley supporters from joining with Bernie in the caucus.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president is instructing its Iowa caucus leaders to — in certain cases — throw support to former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, with the goal blocking her main opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, from securing additional delegates.
They aren’t denying it either.
A precinct captain, Jerome Lehtola, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the campaign has trained precinct captains to release supporters to O’Malley if the move can make him “viable” without hurting Clinton. A Clinton aide said the campaign has trained more than 4,000 volunteer precinct captains to handle a host of different scenarios, including ones where caucus-goers are released to or recruited from another camp.
There’s even a Clinton campaign app for that.
The software, which Lehtola showed BuzzFeed News on his iPhone, allows them to enter the complete number of attendees at a given caucus, and then to divvy them up by candidate. The app shows how many supporters each candidate needs to reach their thresholds. Precinct captains can then calculate easily whether, say, Clinton can — without cost to her own delegate count — boost O’Malley to a viability. And they’ve been trained, Lehtola said, in that maneuver.
The article reports that this was an issue back in 2008 when Obama and Richardson had an agreement over the use of this tactic and guess who complained?
At the time, outraged Clinton aides called reporters to denounce the deal.
Something Clinton denounced in 2008 she is now actively engaged in. Where have I heard this before? I thought the way it was supposed to work is that you try to convince O’Malley supports to join your group in the caucus to boost your numbers not use tricks to keep the other candidate’s numbers down. This sounds underhanded to me but I guess anything for a win, Right?