Donna Brazile, the DNC party chair from July 2016 to February 2017 released
a rather interesting article.In summary, the previous DNC chair was grossly incompetent. Some of you may remember hearing about how Obama's campaign had a large staff of competent analyists working for them? Apparently, none of those people were let go after the election. They were kept on the DNC payroll for at least the 3 and a half years between the 2016 and 2012 election, possibly even since 2008 (the article doesn't mention). As a result, the DNC's operating costs doubled, to as much as 4 million a month. The previous chairperson also did very little planning or monitoring of the party's operations.
As a result, the party signed a deal with the devil with Hillary, just not the one that we thought. Hillary used a loophole to launder money in which her PAC would get past individual donation limits by gathering money separately 51 times from the same person, once for Hillary and once each for congressional officials in each state. The 50x donations were simply sent to the party, rather than Hillary. No, the deal was that Hillary would gain control of the democratic party prior to being nominated, rather than after. Inevitable candidate indeed. Donna found this out late into the election, as it seems only a few higher ups in the DNC were even aware of this and the rest weren't actively sabotaging things. She only found out because of a written contract between the DNC and Hillary, which stipulates all the above (and isn't illegal, because campaign finance is bullshit). After finding out she says she called Bernie, told him he was basically fucked, and then told him that her alternative to the Hillary deal was the democratic party going bankrupt.
We've talked a lot about the schism within the republican party, the 2016 primary corruption scandal is the first evidence of the schism within the democratic party. In the short term the fault line will be income inequality and in the long-term the dividing line will be income inequality versus the "socially liberal, economically conservative" crowd. I'm uneasy that conservatives are going to use this as part of the larger Benghazi/email narrative that I don't agree with, but there's no defending this. The DNC sucks, Hillary sucks. I don't regret voting for her but I wish we got Bernie and I wish he was younger.