Donald Trump isn't the only candidate facing problems because of the nation's delegate system and individual state rules — those rules are also confounding the Bernie Sanders campaign, which has won state votes, but lost when it comes to the delegate count, his wife, Jane, pointed out Thursday. Promising that matters will change if her husband becomes president.
"I don't know that I would call it a rigged system," Sanders told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "Every state has its own rules. I think it's crazy. We're running a national election, and we should have same-day registration, open primaries and caucuses, and allow the people to vote."
Her husband has been drawing crowds of thousands of people, but she noted in New York, there will be some who won't be able to vote in the primary election because they didn't change their voter registration last October, when "they hadn't even heard of Bernie Sanders."
The deadline rules even caught
Trump's son Eric and daughter Ivanka off guard, as they will not be able to vote for their father because they did not switch their registrations in time.
Such rules, Sanders said Thursday, means the "party is shutting the door" on people who want to vote for her husband, even though "we're bringing more people into the party."
"That seems counterproductive to the long-term goals, but we're very hopeful," she told the program. "What we've done is keep a very positive outlook and [we are] looking forward to changing the system.
"If he is the president and the head of the Democratic Party, we'll be changing the system to make it more democratic."
The Democratic Party also allows for superdelegates, which gives Clinton the lead in pledged support, but Sanders noted that her husband has won eight out of the last nine contests, and she thinks Clinton will fall just short of the delegates she needs to clinch the party's nomination.
"I don't think anybody is going to get the amount of pledged delegates they need when we walk into the convention," said Sanders. "If that happens, then I would expect that people will be looking and saying who's the stronger candidate? And every poll shows that Bernie is the stronger candidate against all the Republicans and that's only going to get better."
Not only that, she said, but the superdelegates "haven't voted yet."
Meanwhile, Trump has continued to rail about the system Wednesday night, telling Fox News' Heather Nauert in an interview backstage in Pittsburgh, that it is time to give the elections back to the voters.
"It's crazy what's going on," said Trump, who could face some issues in the upcoming Pennsylvania election, where some delegates are included on the primary ballot.
"We'll do very well, but I think it's unfair . . . We're very heavily favored to win. The polls are all saying it. But really, you should give it back to the voters. It's very, very unfair."
And in Colorado, the rules were established ahead of time, but Trump said those rules were also changed because he joined the race and "they took it away from the voters. I would have won in Colorado."
However, Trump denied a contention from former Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Gilmore, who said he is at war with the party.
"I'm not at war, but I want to make it really a process where votes count," Trump told Nauert. "Right now in Colorado, they took the voters away. There were riots going on out there. You look at what's happened in Pennsylvania, where they've taken the voters out of it. It's very unfair. I rely on the voters, not politicians."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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