By Chris Satullo

May I just say…

This is whacko.

I just read the umpty-umpth article telling me that Bernie Sanders, who is not even a Democrat, is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.

Those articles are full of verbs such as surged, cemented, soared, and adjectives such as decisive and sweeping.

Let’s review our story so far:

Sanders essentially tied Pete Buttigieg in the chaos-ridden Iowa caucuses.  He won New Hampshire, the nation’s 42d largest state, by a millimeter. So, OK, he did win Nevada’s arcane primary big. 

Even with that triumph in the land of neon and desert, Sanders’ trove of convention delegates now stands at 45, a whopping 2.3 percent (rounding up generously) of the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the nomination on a first ballot in Milwaukee in July.

All told, with those three states on the books, only 155 of the 3,979 (3.9 percent) total pledged delegates have been decided.

Declaring a winner after that small a percentage of the contest would be like stopping the  Super Bowl 2.4 minutes into the first quarter, or calling Game 7 between the Nationals and the Astros after 2 outs in the top of the first inning.

What’s more, putting that much weight on these three lightly populated states – whose largest city, Las Vegas, is much smaller than four of New York City’s boroughs and just a bit bigger than Northeast Philadelphia – makes about as much sense as the lyrics to I Am the Walrus or Kanye West’s latest rant.

This coming week, Democratic voters in 14 states (including California, Texas and Virginia,  not to mention American Samoa) will have their Super Tuesday say.  Overall, 1,357 delegates will be chosen than day, nine times as many as have been picked so far.

Could we just wait and see what happens then before anointing a front-runner? Or how about this: Just let the whole process play out while curbing our penchant for hyperbolic proclamations about who’s won, before they’ve actually won?

Sure, the word front-runner, inits narrow sense, merely denotes the person who’s in front at a given moment. And, at this moment, Sanders manifestly is that person.   

But, as used by the political media, the word connotes momentum and probability. It is more than a mere word. It has consequences. It can affect, even distort election results. According to studies, news coverage that dwells on the probability of an election outcome can have at least two impacts – depressing turnout and nudging some people to vote for the person they are being told is likely to win.

It’s remarkable to me – given how much time my tribe (journalists) spends in odd-numbered years going to conferences and talking on panels about all the things we did to screw up coverage of the last election – how we then go out the next time and repeat those sins and errors. We even invent new ones.

We cannot seem to curb our unholy rush to declare candidacies dead or elections “over” long before millions upon millions of Americans have even had a chance to vote. (Confession: I’ve done it myself –  cf. columns on Hillary Clinton, 2008.)

The rest of the electorate gets infected by this need for speed.

I talked this week to a University of Pennsylvania student who said she’d been part of a discussion where a facilitator said, “OK, once around the table, say who you’re voting for, Trump or Sanders?” When she demurred, the facilitator pressured her. This angered the student on two counts: a) They call it a secret ballot for a reason. No one should be pressured to reveal their vote b) Who says that’s necessarily the choice?  

We’re two months away from the Pennsylvania primary, my first chance to have any say in this election, and someone is trying to dictate what our general election choice has to be?

I’m with the student in being pissed.

The obsession with speed runs right through election night:

I also recently chatted with a Pennsylvania state representative who was fretting that the state’s new vote-by-mail provisions would overwhelm county election officials. Those folks are already struggling to cope with the new voting machines that are designed to reduce the hacking threat.

“We could have 300,000 mail-in ballots in the city of Philadelphia alone, none of which can be opened or tallied until after the polls close at 8,” he told me. “How in the world are they going to get those mail ballots counted by midnight?”

“Wait,” I replied.  “What’s this obsession with finding out who won by midnight? That’s all for the sake of TV networks, not democracy. Who cares whether it takes a day or two days or three to get the count right?”

He didn’t disagree. He was just operating, like everyone else, inside a bizarre national consensus that doesn’t get challenged often enough.

Isn’t getting the count right way more important than feeding the CNN hologram? That’s partly how we got W. as president in 2000. Once the networks declared him the winner – even though that was premature – the entire Florida thing played out as if Gore were a sore loser trying to pry away Bush’s victory. The truth was: On election night, it was too close to call, no one knew who won and that should have been OK.  Take time to get the count right.

You know, this democracy thing is kind of important and it’s as fragile as it’s ever been. Let the process play out every step of the way, then make sure we get the results right.

Even if that means we journalists need to slow our roll, considerably.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.