Fuck you, you ignorant piece of shit. I have been an active Socialist since my teen years. Take your fucking horseshit and shove it up your goddamn ass. “Racists and sexists” like Ilhan Omar and AOC endorsed Bernie. Fuck you. I hope you die a painful death from cancer.
QFT. Thank you for saying it more eloquently than I could.
SANDERS split the progressive vote? You must be thinking of Elizabeth Warren. Go fuck yourself, you pedophiliac shit-eating maggot.
TBF, though, after Sanders lost the primary to Biden then they worked hard to increase turnout and support for Biden.
I think the key issue here is not whom should progressives initially vote for and/or endorse in the primary, but what progressives should do after their preferred candidate loses the primary.
Go fuck yourself, asshole.
Before this thread I’d never realized what a pompous asshole you are.
I recall in 2016 that some people blamed progressives for Clinton’s loss, but I’ve never seen any actual data that progressives unable to hold their nose were responsible for Clinton’s loss.
That’s because there is no such data. It’s the equivalent of the Nazis’ line that "The German Army didn’t lose World War I, we were betrayed by traitors!
Not sure if you’re being deliberately dishonest or just really stupid here, but Trump got 12 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Turnout was up on both sides. Biden got 16 million more votes than Clinton did, so it did end up benefiting Democrats. But clearly it’s not the case that all of “the MAGATs showed up to vote for their Messiah” in 2016.
Notably, Black voter turnout increased from 56% to 59% between the two elections, providing Biden an essential boost. Yet you never see threads blaming Blacks who didn’t vote for Clinton for Trump’s victory or decrying Blacks for not being reliable voters.
Discourse is making me edit this post to include my response to Kimstu:
Yes, and after Sanders lost the primary to Biden, he also worked hard to increase turnout and support for Biden. Just like he had done for Clinton in 2016. So I’m not sure what your point is here. Obviously progressives should vote Democratic, even if their preferred candidate loses the primary.
Yet there is this completely unsupported myth that large numbers of progressives refused to vote for Clinton out of ideological purity.
[Moderating]
Wishing death on another poster is a violation of the board rules. Do not do this again.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
And I wasn’t even addressing you!
Kinda sounds like this thread is driving a dental probe into a freshly drilled hole and twisting . . . don’t worry we’ll get the clove oil for ya.
Yeah, I’ve had a really shitty day and probably should have turned the computer off some time ago. The people I am swearing at here are not actually responsible for my day being shitty.
“We can’t figure out why people don’t like Bernie supporters!”
I provide this and Miller’s unapologetic assholishness as exhibits A and B.
ETA: My apologies. Didn’t read to the end.
At the risk of sounding like I’m junior-modding, I think a good portion of you all need to put the Chill Pill Store on speed dial.
Technically, I should be why people don’t like Warren supporters.
Voter turnout in itself isn’t data to support the hypothesis though, without “stands to reason” arguments. One could just as easily argue that many moderate conservatives stayed home without further data.
It may not be proof (and I didn’t claim it was) but it is data.
The percentages of voters I cited are objective numbers. So some large group of voters didn’t show up on Election Day. I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that Trump supporters and Clinton supporters showed up to vote for Trump and Clinton. Which leaves the issue of what Sanders supporters did on Election Day.
Putting data aside, we have anecdotes. We have seen plenty of Sanders supporters defending the idea of not voting for Clinton and explaining why it was Clinton’s fault. It’s reasonable to assume that a substantial percentage of the people who are defending the idea of not having voted for Clinton are the same people who didn’t vote for Clinton. And, by doing so, helped Trump get elected, even if they don’t wish to accept the responsibility for that.
I can’t say I hate Hillary but I do wish she hadn’t run. I voted for her and she really should have won- but for James Comey announcing an investigation into emails with 10 days to go. By all accounts, Hillary was smart and hard working but lost to a guy who was neither. You can be smart, you can work hard, you can want it really badly, but you’re not going to get elected unless people like you. Fairly or unfairly, people just didn’t like her. That plus over 20 years of constant lies about her from the right wing media meant she just couldn’t survive a late October surprise.
I think Sanders would not have won. Sure, Republicans say that all Democrats are socialists but here’s a guy who openly admits to being a democratic socialist. It doesn’t make him a bad person, but to a huge chunk of the population it’s a deal breaker. Sanders has his place, he’s good at telling us what we should strive to do. But there’s a world of difference between what should be done and what can be done and I think he would have let the perfect be the enemy of the good and not gotten anything done.
Had Biden not been grieving over his son in 2016 and ran, he would have won easily. This would have saved us all from the agony of the previous administration and made the survival of democracy more certain.
To sum up, I don’t hate either Hillary or Sanders but either one would have needed a lot of work and some good luck (or at least the absence of the October surprise that killed her chances) to win against DJT.
Vote totals for 2016 in round numbers
Clinton 66 million
Trump 62 million
Eligible nonvoters 92 million
Votes received by Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries: 13 million
The math isn’t really adding up for your theory. Even if every single Sanders supporter had sat out the general election, they would still have only accounted for about 15% of the people who could have voted for Clinton but chose to not vote. Conversely, if only 20% of the general election nonvoters had voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries, he would have won the nomination.
So what do you do when the data don’t support your theory?
Ah.
We have seen plenty of Sanders supporters defending the idea of not voting for Clinton and explaining why it was Clinton’s fault.
In this thread, I remember exactly one person taking that position. I spent way too much time on this board during the 2016 election season and I don’t think there were a half dozen people taking that position. Depending on who you follow, you may have seen a lot of people making that case on social media, but a large percentage of them were Russian trolls.
I’m not denying that such people exist. It’s true that if 100% of Sanders supporters had voted for Clinton, instead of ~80%, that would have put her over the top. But it was such a close election that the same statement could be made of literally hundreds of other groups of voters. There’s no particular reason to single this group out as THE reason she lost.
And it’s not like this was a problem unique to Clinton; certainly not everyone who voted in the Republican primary that summer voted for Trump in the fall. Anecdotal evidence for that assertion isn’t hard to find.
More to the point, you can’t assume that every Sanders voter who didn’t vote for Clinton made a conscious ideology-based decision not to do so. In most cases, they would have voted for Clinton but just didn’t get around to it because it wasn’t convenient for them that day; if Sanders had been the nominee, they probably would have made the effort. Enthusiasm matters.
This attitude, that voting is something you might or might not do depending on what else you have going on that day, is completely alien to the sort of person who posts in this forum, but it’s widespread in the general population. Most people just don’t pay much attention to this stuff. The bulk of any candidate’s support is always going to come from poorly-informed voters; only a small percentage are going to be the sort of ideologues who might consider casting a third party protest vote.
You could argue that Sanders’ strategy was flawed in that he drew much of his support from demographics that aren’t reliable voters. But that just means they aren’t reliable voters in general, not that they were “Clinton haters”. Clinton’s problem wasn’t the small group of progressives in whom she inspired hatred, it was the large group of voters of all stripes in whom she inspired apathy.
I can’t believe I’m wasting my entire afternoon posting in this thread, but I want to rise in defense of Clinton on one point. I don’t buy the common argument that she blundered by not spending more time in the Midwestern swing States.
In general, there is absolutely no evidence of a correlation between how a candidate does in a particular State and how much time they spend campaigning in that State.
And in this particular case, Clinton was deeply unpopular with the white working class voters who provided the crucial swing votes in those States. It may well have been a conscious decision on her campaign’s part to keep her out of sight and concentrate on attacking Trump.
Is it reasonable to assume that a substantial percentage of the people who advocate for freedom of speech in emotionally challenging situations are Nazis?
You cannot assume that “substantial” numbers of people who do not accept at face value that “Bernie bros” cost Clinton the election probably didn’t vote for Clinton. Particularly if you cannot accurately describe the size of either group.