There are two ways of looking at Bernie Sanders's pledge that he will concede the race if Joe Biden ends up with more delegates than him prior to the convention, even if it's only a plurality. One, he knows he's going to lose and he doesn't want a repeat of the same circus that damaged Hillary Clinton's nomination four years ago; or two, he thinks he's going to edge out Biden for a plurality and he's hoping Biden will be stupid enough to go along with him. Based on past performance, I'm going with the latter.
Let's be very clear, here. The reason the DNC changed the nominating rules for 2020 was because of Bernie and his surrogates. I'll explain.
Let's set the wayback machine to 2016. There were a total of 4765 delegates available that year, of which 714 were super delegates. To win the nomination, a candidate had to secure at least 2,383 total delegates before the convention. Hillary won 2,220 pledged delegates and, with the help of 591 super delegates, had a combined total of 2,811 delegates, more than enough to win the nomination. The Sanders campaign was infuriated. They insisted that it was wrong for super delegates to push a particular candidate over the top BEFORE the convention, despite the fact that since their inception in 1984, that's precisely what they'd been doing.
The DNC agreed and made the following change. Starting in 2020, the only delegates that count towards the nominating process are pledged, and there a 3,979 of them. To win the nomination, a candidate must secure a minimum of 1,991 pledged delegates on the first ballot. The 771 super delegates are prohibited from getting involved.
Now here's where things get dicey. If no one wins the nomination on the first ballot, we then proceed to a second ballot, where - and I hope you're sitting down for this one - ALL of the pledged delegates become free agents, meaning they can go to whomever they want. To add insult to possible injury, the super delegates are now free to declare for any candidate they choose. In other words, a brokered convention. With the addition of the super delegates, the total number of delegates now needed to secure the nomination goes up to 2,375.5. Let's just round it up and say 2,376.
Prior to Biden's huge wins in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, Bernie was the favorite to come out on top with a plurality - but NOT a majority - of delegates before the convention. Now, according to Nate Silver's 538 projections, Biden is the clear favorite to win an outright majority of delegates, meaning Sanders's offer was nice but ultimately superfluous. Biden will be the nominee without Bernie's largess. Now of course anything can happen; we are after all talking about Joe Biden, a man who sometimes forgets what state he's in while giving a speech. Just yesterday, he referred to Bernie Bros as Bernie Brothers. So I wouldn't go betting the kids tuition on him winning this thing just yet.
But it does beg the question what is Bernie up to? Altruism isn't exactly his forte. First he lobbies for a rule change because he felt he was screwed out of something he didn't deserve in the first place; now he's dangling an offer he knows he can't deliver on because it violates the very rule he fought to have enacted. It's as if he truly believes the rules - even the ones he likes - don't apply to him.
If I'm Biden, I ignore the "offer" and proceed on the assumption that this is still anyone's nomination to win or lose. If Bernie does indeed retake the delegate lead but doesn't secure a majority before we get to Milwaukee, there will be a contested convention. And if that happens, he will have no one else to blame but himself.
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