When Hillary Clinton won five states on March 15, giving her a strong lead for her party’s presidential nomination, accolades poured in from Democrats across the country. One call, however, never came through.
Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver didn’t phone Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin until 1:30 a.m. to connect the candidates, hours after Clinton had addressed her supporters at the West Palm Beach convention center and retired for the night. The call went straight to voicemail.
At his own rally in Phoenix, where he delivered an impassioned hourlong call to arms, Sanders never mentioned Clinton or acknowledged her big wins that night.
“Are you ready for a political revolution!” Sanders bellowed.
While it's easy to make too much of the complicated etiquette of election-night phone calls, such personal gestures often matter quite a bit when it comes to uniting a party after a bruising campaign.
On March 22, Sanders did not call Clinton after she won the Arizona primary, a race that was called two hours before the caucuses in Idaho or Utah — states Sanders won — and was the only primary that day that the candidates had contested.
It didn’t go unnoticed. “I think there is a much meaner culture in the Sanders campaign than people realize,” said Clinton donor Eleni Kounalakis, a former ambassador to Hungary, who said her family was bullied by Sanders supporters while volunteering for Clinton in Nevada.
“The Berners are very aggressive, and that kind of culture has to be validated to some degree from the top,” she said. “My feeling is he doesn’t address these people at the end of the night because if he sends a message of graciousness to his people, that’s going to take the fire out of the aggressive approach.”