DAILY BEAST: ….“We democratized democracy,” Jackson said when explaining that in his 1984 campaign, he got 21 percent of the popular vote, but only eight percent of the delegates. The Democratic nomination process had a “winner take all” rule system of awarding every state delegate to the winner of that state, no matter how small the margin of victory. Considering that Hillary Clinton won Texas, California, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania in 2008, had the winner take all distribution still existed, she would have gotten the nomination.
Due to the disparity in popular vote and delegation, Jackson lobbied hard, internally within the Democratic Party, for proportionality. He got it, and in 1988, he won 13 states, and had 1300 delegates, taking on the role of frontrunner after his win in Michigan and coming close to securing the nomination. He poured the foundation for the concrete road Obama would ride to victory twenty years later…
“I don’t belabor it with bitterness,” Jackson said when I asked about the Democratic Party’s lack of gratitude for his voter registration. “But what is objectively clear, it was one of Dr. King’s pet peeves that there were so many unregistered black voters. So, we brought on that new black vote in America, and it led to the regaining of the Senate, and laid the groundwork for Clinton in ’92. We fundamentally changed the registration population, but more importantly, the activist population.”… (more)
