Where this was said
Presidential Pardon, Tulsi Gabbard & Democratic Party Insider Politics
At 10:10 · chapter starts 1:55
The conversation begins mid-thought, with Kiriakou mentioning he has applied for a presidential pardon and is meeting with Tulsi Gabbard later in the week. Theo and Kiriakou riff on Gabbard's authenticity and the Democratic Party's historic hostility to genuinely independent figures. Kiriakou explains the superdelegate system — created after McGovern's 49-state 1972 loss — as a mechanism giving roughly 1,500 party officeholders the power to override popular primary results. He walks through how this same machinery was used against Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and how Debbie Wasserman Schultz giving Hillary Clinton debate questions in 2016 confirmed that 'the fix was in' against Bernie Sanders. Both men reflect on how the sense that American democracy might actually deliver for ordinary people has been replaced by a creeping uncertainty.
George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee, lost 49 out of 50 states in the general election, a catastrophic defeat that led the DNC to create the superdelegate system.
After George McGovern won the 1972 Democratic nomination through popular support and then lost 49 states, the DNC created the superdelegate system — roughly 1,500 automatic delegates drawn from party officeholders. The result: states where Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave her every delegate anyway.
The Democratic superdelegate system creates roughly 1,500 automatic convention delegates from officeholders, allowing party insiders to override the popular vote in primaries.
