Why Blaming Bernie and Shunning His Supporters Falls Short

I am sick of talking about 2016. I really am. There are more urgent matters, right now and in the near future, that need our undivided attention, and constantly craning our necks to look behind us tends to distract us. Unfortunately, it is also becoming clearer and clearer to me that there are lessons from 2016 that we’ve still yet to learn, and thus I myself cannot truly leave 2016 in the rearview.

In this specific case, I am referring to the continual, incessant blaming of Bernie Sanders and/or his supporters for Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. The exact shape this blame takes varies. For some, the focus is on any negative thing Bernie said during the primary (which when followed to its natural conclusion really just means “he should have never challenged Hillary at all). Others blame him for promising too much, rendering Hillary’s “pragmatism” dull in comparison (this is just a way to deflect from the fact that some of Hillary’s policies are/were just very vanilla and unexciting). And still others like to claim that it was the Bernie Bros who cost Hillary the general election. This last point is what I’d like to focus on.

On the surface, that may sound reasonable. The divide between Hillary and Bernie feels a lot wider than did the divide between Hillary and Obama in 2008, for example. And in some ways it is — it is the establishment versus the outsiders, liberal versus progressive, etc. But when we actually look at the numbers, this hypothesis simply fails to hold up.

Studies done following the 2016 election estimate that somewhere between 6% and 12% of Sanders supporters voted for Donald Trump. That’s a decent chunk, and I hold ZERO empathy for those people. There were also likely others who defected in other ways — staying home, writing someone in, voting for Jill Stein, etc. Again, I don’t have much respect for those people (at least those in swing states).

But it’s not that simple. This kind of defection happened to Trump too — 12% of Republican primary voters ended up supporting Hillary. Trump still managed to win. In 2008, an estimated 25% of Hillary supporters voted for McCain — Obama still managed to win. It is a simple fact that other candidates faced just as much (or in Obama’s case, twice as much) interparty opposition and still managed to win. The issue, then, lies with the candidate and their campaign. Hillary didn’t do a good enough job energizing voters, and she lost because of it.

(This doesn’t even take into account the fact that many of those 12% were not Democrats in the first place, and were never going to support Hillary or any other mainstream Democrat)

Moving on from that, here is what I really want to focus on, and what I think should be the real takeaway from all this. If diehard Hillary defenders still want to blame Bernie and his supporters for her loss, despite the irrationality of doing so, they are then admitting that we have the ability to sway elections. They are saying that we are what held her back — there’s a lot of power in that.

Despite that power, there doesn’t seem to be much desire to extend a hand, and ensure we are back in the fold in 2020 should a more traditional Democrat (Biden, Harris, Booker, etc.) win the nomination. Indeed, there seems to be active hostility and disgust. Does this mean they don’t care about their candidate winning in 2020?

Think about it — the far left, these Democrats say, were able to decide the 2016 election. There’s no reason to believe the same won’t be true in 2020. And yet they have no desire to try to court our votes? Have they admitted defeat? Are they going to nominate Cory Booker despite the fact that us Bernie Bros are just going to cast protest votes again, handing another election to Donald Trump?

Or is it that, deep down, they understand that it wasn’t our fault, that we don’t have as much sway as they like to think, that there were many, many different reasons for Hillary’s loss? I don’t see any other options — either the Almighty Left holds ultimate power in 2020, and the Democrats are okay with alienating them/us, once again ensuring a Trump win, or they know that it was Hillary herself who is primarily responsible for her loss.

from Handpicked stories about Politics on Medium https://medium.com/@KJ_Jeller/why-blaming-bernie-and-shunning-his-supporters-falls-short-6e5c38ae23d2?source=rss-------8-----------------politics
via Warrington