2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries
Based on Wikipedia: 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries
Six coin flips. That's what it came down to in Iowa on the night of February 1, 2016. In precinct after precinct across the state, when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tied in delegate counts, caucus officials resorted to the most ancient of tiebreakers: a coin toss. All six went Clinton's way. She won Iowa by a quarter of a percentage point—the closest margin in the history of the state's Democratic caucus.
It was a harbinger of the brutal, grinding, unexpectedly competitive primary battle that would unfold over the next five months. A contest that would reshape the Democratic Party, expose deep fissures between its establishment and progressive wings, and ultimately produce the first woman ever nominated for president by a major American political party.
The Inevitable Candidate
Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 race as one of the most formidable frontrunners in the history of presidential primaries. She had spent decades building toward this moment. First Lady from 1993 to 2001. Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Secretary of State under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. A January 2013 poll showed her with astronomical approval ratings.
This was supposed to be a coronation, not a contest.
Political observers had watched Clinton lose the 2008 Democratic primary to a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama—a defeat that seemed to catch her campaign off guard. That loss left scars, but it also left lessons. In 2016, her team would be ready. They had spent years building an operation, cultivating relationships, locking down endorsements from party officials and elected leaders across the country.
When Clinton formally announced her candidacy on April 12, 2015, she was already the presumptive nominee in the eyes of most political observers. The question wasn't whether she would win the nomination. It was whether anyone would bother to challenge her.
The Outsider
Bernie Sanders bothered.
The senator from Vermont was, in many ways, an improbable presidential candidate. He wasn't even technically a Democrat. He had served in Congress since 1991 as an independent, caucusing with Democrats but refusing to join the party. He described himself as a democratic socialist—a label that would have been political poison in almost any previous American election.
Sanders announced his candidacy on May 26, 2015, after weeks of speculation. He was 73 years old, with wild white hair and a Brooklyn accent that had survived decades in rural Vermont. His suits never seemed to fit quite right. He had no super PAC, no billionaire backers, no network of party insiders pulling strings on his behalf.
What he had was a message.
Sanders talked about income inequality, about the concentration of wealth in the hands of "the billionaire class," about a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system. He called for Medicare for All, free public college tuition, and breaking up the big banks. These were ideas that had long existed on the margins of American politics. Sanders dragged them into the mainstream.
His campaign was powered by small donations—an average of $27, his team loved to point out—and by an army of young volunteers who flooded social media with memes and hashtags and viral videos. The conventional wisdom held that such a campaign couldn't compete with Clinton's well-funded machine.
The conventional wisdom was wrong.
The Other Candidates
Clinton and Sanders weren't the only Democrats seeking the nomination, though you might be forgiven for thinking so. The 2016 Democratic primary never developed the crowded, chaotic feel of the Republican contest, which at one point featured seventeen candidates.
Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator who had served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, announced an exploratory committee in November 2014. He was the first major figure to take formal steps toward running. Webb was an unusual Democrat—a decorated Vietnam veteran, a bestselling novelist, a man who seemed uncomfortable with the direction his party had taken. He dropped out before the first votes were cast.
Lincoln Chafee, former governor and senator of Rhode Island, entered the race in June 2015. Chafee had an even more unusual political journey than Webb: he had been a Republican in the Senate, an independent as governor, and only recently became a Democrat. His campaign never gained traction. He withdrew in October 2015.
Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and before that the mayor of Baltimore, seemed like he might be the perfect alternative for voters who found Clinton too establishment and Sanders too radical. He was young, telegenic, and accomplished. He played guitar in an Irish rock band. But O'Malley never caught fire. After finishing a distant third in Iowa with just half a percent of the vote, he suspended his campaign.
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor famous for his work on copyright law and campaign finance reform, made a quixotic bid focused entirely on passing a single piece of legislation: the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. He raised a million dollars through crowdfunding, qualified for the race, and then withdrew when the Democratic National Committee changed its debate rules in ways that excluded him.
The One Who Didn't Run
The most consequential decision of the 2016 Democratic primary may have been made by someone who never entered the race at all.
Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, had become a hero to the party's progressive wing. A former Harvard Law professor who had made her name studying bankruptcy and consumer debt, Warren had helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 financial crisis. Her fiery speeches about Wall Street greed and the struggles of the middle class made her a viral sensation.
Progressive groups begged her to run. MoveOn.org launched a "Run Warren Run" campaign. Activists gathered signatures and raised money. They saw in Warren a candidate who could marry Sanders's progressive message with a more polished political operation.
Warren said no. Again and again, she said no.
The Run Warren Run campaign disbanded in June 2015. Many of its organizers drifted over to the Sanders campaign. One of them was Kurt Ehrenberg, who had been working New Hampshire for the draft movement. He would help Sanders win that state by more than twenty points.
Joe Biden, the sitting vice president, also considered running. Biden had sought the presidency twice before, in 1988 and 2008, both times without success. At 72, this would likely be his last chance. Through the summer and into the fall of 2015, he weighed his options.
On October 21, 2015, Biden stood at a podium in the Rose Garden with his wife Jill and President Obama beside him. His voice was heavy with grief. His son Beau had died of brain cancer just five months earlier, at the age of 46. Biden wasn't ready. He wouldn't run.
Four years later, he would change his mind. In 2020, Biden would win the Democratic nomination and defeat Donald Trump to become the 46th President of the United States. But in 2016, the field belonged to Clinton and Sanders.
Iowa: The Night of Six Coins
The Iowa caucuses, held on February 1, 2016, are a peculiar American tradition. Voters don't cast secret ballots. Instead, they gather in school gymnasiums and church basements and living rooms, physically standing in groups to show their support for different candidates. It's messy and chaotic and deeply democratic in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
Clinton was supposed to win Iowa easily. Polls in the weeks before the caucuses showed her with a comfortable lead. But as the night wore on, something unexpected happened. Precinct after precinct reported results that were startlingly close. Sanders was matching her, county by county, delegate by delegate.
When the final tallies came in, Clinton had won 700.47 state delegate equivalents. Sanders had won 696.92. The margin was 0.25 percentage points—a quarter of a single percent.
Those six coin tosses became the stuff of legend, though their actual impact on the final delegate count was minimal. What mattered more was what the result revealed: Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, the 74-year-old with the rumpled suits and the radical ideas, was a serious contender.
For Clinton, it was an uncomfortable echo of 2008, when she had finished third in Iowa behind Obama and John Edwards. At least this time she had technically won. But the close margin suggested her path to the nomination would be harder than anyone had anticipated.
Martin O'Malley, with just 0.5% of the delegate equivalents, dropped out that night. The race was now a two-person contest.
New Hampshire: The Landslide
Eight days later, Sanders got his revenge.
New Hampshire shares a border with Vermont. Sanders was practically a local candidate. His campaign had worked the state relentlessly, holding rally after rally in small towns and college campuses. Young voters, in particular, flocked to his message.
When the votes were counted, Sanders had won 60.4% to Clinton's 38%. It was a blowout. Sanders became the first Jewish candidate of a major American party to win a presidential primary—a milestone that received surprisingly little attention amid the larger drama of the race.
For Clinton, it was a painful reversal. In 2008, New Hampshire had been her salvation. After losing Iowa to Obama, she had come back to win the Granite State, keeping her campaign alive. This time, there would be no such rescue.
The race moved on to Nevada and South Carolina, states with very different demographics than the overwhelmingly white electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton's campaign was counting on these contests to demonstrate what they believed was Sanders's fundamental weakness: his struggle to connect with Black and Latino voters.
Nevada and South Carolina: The Firewall Holds
Clinton won the Nevada caucuses on February 20 with 52.6% of the vote—a margin similar to her performance in the state eight years earlier. It wasn't overwhelming, but it was enough. Sanders's momentum had been slowed.
A week later, South Carolina delivered a crushing verdict. Clinton won with 73.5% of the vote, carrying 90% of African American voters—a higher share than Barack Obama had won in 2008. The state's large Black electorate, which Clinton had courted assiduously for months, had delivered for her when she needed it most.
This pattern would repeat throughout the primary. In states with large African American populations, particularly in the South, Clinton dominated. Sanders struggled to make inroads with Black voters, despite his long record of supporting civil rights causes. The reasons were complex—Clinton's deep relationships in Black communities, her association with the popular Obama administration, skepticism about whether Sanders's proposals were realistic—but the result was clear.
Super Tuesday: The South Rises for Clinton
March 1, 2016, was the biggest single day of the primary calendar. Eleven states and one territory held contests, with 865 pledged delegates at stake. The day was dominated by southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia—where Clinton's strength with Black voters gave her an enormous advantage.
The results were devastating for Sanders.
Clinton swept every southern state except Oklahoma. In Alabama, she won 77.8% of the vote. In Texas, she took 65.2%. Across the South, she netted a gain of 165 pledged delegates over Sanders.
Sanders had his victories. He won his home state of Vermont with 86.1% of the vote—one of only two times during the entire primary that a candidate won a state or territory by such a margin that their opponent failed to reach the 15% threshold required to receive any delegates. (The other was Clinton's 87% victory in the U.S. Virgin Islands.) He also won Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
But the math was unforgiving. At the end of Super Tuesday, Clinton led Sanders by 197 pledged delegates, 609 to 412. It was a deficit that would prove nearly impossible to overcome.
The Long Slog
The 2016 Democratic primary calendar was different from 2008. That year, twenty-three states had crowded their contests onto February 5, creating a massive Super Tuesday that essentially decided the race. For 2016, the Democratic National Committee had spread things out. There would be several more critical dates—March 15, April 26, June 7—each with its own cluster of states.
This elongated calendar gave Sanders time to fight back. On the weekend after Super Tuesday, he won caucuses in Kansas, Maine, and Nebraska by significant margins. Clinton answered with a landslide victory in Louisiana, limiting Sanders's net delegate gain for the weekend to just four.
The pattern of the race was now established. Sanders would win smaller, whiter, more rural states, particularly those that held caucuses rather than primaries. Clinton would win larger, more diverse states, particularly those in the South and those with significant Black and Latino populations. Neither could deliver a knockout blow, but Clinton's lead in pledged delegates remained stubbornly consistent.
Then came Michigan.
The Michigan Miracle
On March 8, 2016, two states held primaries: Michigan and Mississippi. Clinton was heavily favored to win both. The polls in Michigan showed her ahead by twenty points or more. Her campaign had already begun to look past the state, focusing on the larger contests to come.
Mississippi went as expected. Clinton won by a landslide—her largest margin in any state during the entire primary.
Michigan was a different story.
As returns came in, something remarkable was happening. Sanders was overperforming his polls by historic margins. Counties that had been expected to go for Clinton were breaking for Sanders. When the final votes were counted, Sanders had won 49.8% to Clinton's 48.3%.
It was one of the biggest polling upsets in modern presidential primary history. The polls had been wrong by more than twenty points. Analysts would spend months trying to figure out what had happened. Had pollsters failed to reach young voters? Had the state's open primary, which allowed independents to vote, brought in a surge of Sanders supporters? Had late-deciding voters broken overwhelmingly for Sanders?
Whatever the explanation, the result kept Sanders in the race. His campaign could point to Michigan as proof that the polls were unreliable, that his message was resonating in Rust Belt states hit hard by trade deals and deindustrialization, that the nomination was still within reach.
March 15: The Establishment Strikes Back
A week after Michigan, five large states voted: Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. These were the kinds of big, diverse states that Clinton had been counting on since the beginning of the race.
She swept all five.
Florida, with its large population of older voters and its diverse electorate, gave Clinton a 31-point victory. North Carolina went for her by 14 points. Ohio, despite sharing many characteristics with Michigan, broke for Clinton by 13 points. Illinois, where Sanders hoped his progressive message would resonate in the Chicago area, went for Clinton by less than 2 points. Missouri was the closest, with Clinton winning by just 0.2%.
The March 15 results effectively ended any realistic path Sanders had to the nomination through pledged delegates alone. His deficit was now insurmountable through conventional means. He would need superdelegates—the party officials and elected leaders who could vote for any candidate at the convention—to abandon Clinton and support him instead.
It was a long shot, and everyone knew it.
The Case for Staying In
Why did Sanders continue to campaign for three more months after March 15?
His supporters argued that every vote for Sanders pushed the party leftward, forcing Clinton to adopt more progressive positions on issues like the minimum wage, college affordability, and Wall Street regulation. They pointed to Sanders's success with young voters as evidence that his ideas represented the future of the Democratic Party, even if his candidacy couldn't overcome Clinton's lead among older voters and voters of color.
Critics argued that Sanders's continued campaign was damaging Clinton's chances in the general election, giving ammunition to Republicans and deepening divisions within the party. They accused Sanders of refusing to accept political reality, of letting his supporters believe he had a path to victory when he didn't.
The truth, as usual, was somewhere in between. Sanders had tapped into genuine frustration with the direction of the Democratic Party and the American economy. His young supporters weren't going to simply disappear when he dropped out. Their anger at a political system they saw as rigged against them would persist, with consequences that would reshape American politics for years to come.
April and May: The Grind Continues
Sanders won Wisconsin on April 5, along with caucuses in Wyoming. But his momentum stalled on April 19, when New York held its primary. Clinton, who had served as the state's senator for eight years, won by 16 points. It was a bitter defeat for Sanders, who had been born and raised in Brooklyn before moving to Vermont as a young man.
A week later, on April 26, five northeastern states voted: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Clinton swept four of them, losing only Rhode Island. Sanders laid off a majority of his campaign staff. The end was near.
California and the Final Push
Sanders made one last stand in California, which held its primary on June 7 along with New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota. California, with its massive population and its reputation as the most progressive state in the union, seemed like fertile ground for Sanders's message.
Clinton won California by 7 points.
The day before the California primary, on June 6, the Associated Press and NBC News declared Clinton the presumptive nominee. By their count, she had secured enough delegates—including superdelegates who had committed to supporting her—to clinch the nomination. It was a historic moment: Hillary Rodham Clinton had become the first woman ever to be the presumptive presidential nominee of a major American political party.
Sanders was furious about the timing of the announcement, arguing that it had suppressed turnout in California and other states voting on June 7. His supporters saw it as more evidence of a system rigged against them.
The Emails
On July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic National Convention was scheduled to begin in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks released a trove of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.
The emails were damaging. They showed DNC officials mocking Sanders and discussing ways to undermine his campaign. They revealed what Sanders supporters had long suspected: the party establishment had put its thumb on the scale for Clinton.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC, resigned. Other implicated officials followed. Sanders supporters, who had already been skeptical of the party establishment, felt vindicated in their belief that the primary had been unfair.
The controversy over the emails would echo through the general election and beyond. American intelligence agencies later concluded that the hack had been carried out by Russian operatives, part of a broader effort to interfere in the 2016 election and damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
Whether the DNC's preference for Clinton actually affected the outcome of the primary remains debated. Clinton won over three million more popular votes than Sanders. She won 359 more pledged delegates. Her victories came disproportionately in large, diverse states, while Sanders's came in smaller, whiter ones. Superdelegates broke heavily for Clinton, but she would have won the nomination even without them.
But the perception of unfairness mattered as much as the reality. The email leak poisoned the well, making it harder to unite the party for the general election.
The Convention and Beyond
Sanders endorsed Clinton on July 12 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—the state where he had won his biggest victory five months earlier. It was an awkward, somewhat grudging endorsement. Sanders urged his supporters to back Clinton, but his heart didn't seem to be in it.
At the convention in Philadelphia, Sanders gave a speech asking his delegates to support Clinton. Many of them booed. The divisions in the party were raw and visible.
Clinton officially became the Democratic nominee on July 26, 2016. The next day, the convention nominated Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, as her running mate. Clinton and Kaine would go on to lose the general election to Donald Trump and Mike Pence, in one of the most stunning upsets in American political history.
The Legacy
The 2016 Democratic primary left deep marks on American politics. Bernie Sanders's campaign proved that explicitly progressive ideas—Medicare for All, free college, aggressive action on climate change—could attract massive popular support. His small-dollar fundraising model, built on millions of individual contributions, became the template for a new generation of progressive candidates.
The controversy over the DNC emails led to reforms in the party's primary process. A "unity commission" was formed to recommend changes, resulting in reduced power for superdelegates in future primaries.
Hillary Clinton's nomination was a genuine breakthrough—the first woman to receive a major party's presidential nomination in American history. But her loss in November meant that breakthrough came with an asterisk. It would be four more years before a woman, Kamala Harris, was elected to national office, as Vice President in 2020.
Many Sanders supporters never fully came around to Clinton. Some voted for third-party candidates. Some stayed home. Some, according to exit polls, even voted for Donald Trump. Whether their defection cost Clinton the election—she lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by fewer than 80,000 votes combined—is a question that will be debated for decades.
What's certain is that the 2016 Democratic primary exposed a party at war with itself. The tension between the establishment and the progressive wing, between pragmatism and idealism, between older voters who remembered the political wilderness of the 1980s and younger voters who had never known a world without Barack Obama—these tensions didn't disappear when the primary ended. They merely went underground, waiting to resurface.
They're still waiting.