How do you think Sanders supporters will react if he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination?
I have trouble imagining them accepting a loss in any way. And if he wins a majority of the primary delegates but the super delegates end up costing him the nomination. . . I think there might be something close to a riot at the Democratic convention.
Thoughts?
It all depends on the circumstance. If Bernie has a significant lead in delegates, there could be fighting in the seats in Milwaukee. If it’s fairly close and the superdelagate vote gives it to Biden, they’ll be pissed like they were with Hillary but they’ll get over it.
I don’t know. A mix of rage and apathy.
This assumes Sanders wins the majority of delegates, but doesn’t hit the 1990 necessary to win a solid majority.
If it turns out Bloomberg offered huge financial incentives to the democratic party and superdelegates to vote for either himself or someone like Biden (who would have several hundred fewer delegates) as the nominee its going to cause a big fracture within the democratic party. And it should, because it shows how entrenched the power of oligarchy is in our system. You can win more votes but if a moderate republican offers enough bribes and enough one sided ads, you lose the election. That will and should have major negative effects on the party’s standing in the eyes of its voters.
At the end of the day, most Sanders supporters will vote for whoever the nominee is. Four more years of Trump doesn’t help anyone and sitting out the election so Trump can nominate judges for another four years won’t help the left. But they will lose a lot of faith in the democratic party and will start investing much more heavily (financially, voting, volunteering) in pushing for candidates who take on the corporate wing of the party rather than submit to it.
In the long run, bloomberg and the moderate wing of the democrats ignoring their voters will empower the grassroots progressive movement even though the DNC will do it in the hopes of neutralizing them.
I’m sort of with you but I think there will still be a fair amount of pushback unless Biden wins a clear plurality, and even then there might be some saltiness if Warren wins a significant amount of the rest before dropping out, with Bernie backers thinking that he should “naturally” gain hers as a fellow progressive, possibly along with some of Pete’s, but they go to Biden instead or even remain uncommitted.
I predict that if Sanders loses, there will be a fair contingent of them who think that some behind-the-scenes deal was cooked up by the DNC and the superdelegates, rather than just accepting the fact that rules as set up now, love 'em or hate 'em*, were followed. What the hell am I saying, I don’t “predict” it, I know it. 
But in the end, based on the reasonable friends I have who support Sanders, I think most will come over to the chosen nominee.
*ETA: As for me, I think superdelegates are bullshit. Have only (non-super) delegates and require them to vote as allocated during the primaries, with an attendant reduction in the number of delegates you need to get the nomination.
FiveThirtyEight on how there are maybe more “Biden bros” than “Bernie bros” (though the numbers of Bernie bros are understated, because the survey only included over-thirty-year-olds, since it tracks a group
of specific voters over the past eight years):
I think it depends on how it goes down, including what happens in the primaries after Super Tuesday. Here are some of the scenarios and my predictions on the outcome.
Post Super Tuesday we end up with a duel between Sanders and Biden. Sanders goes on to beat Biden by something like 55/45 the rest of the way. Due to the delegates being awarded proportionately Sanders comes up just short, and Biden wins with the superdelegates to put him over the top. This would likely be the worst case scenario, and I could see Bernie himself going rogue after that.
Post Super Tuesday Bloomberg, Warren, and maybe Klobuchar continue on. Sanders continues winning pluralities the rest of the way, but with numbers in the high 30s to low 40s rather than over 50%. He again comes up short. In this scenario the other pledged delegates rather than the superdelegates put Biden over the top. Sanders will still be pissed, but less likely to go rogue. The Bernie bros will also be pissed and likely not turn out on Election Day.
Biden somehow turns things around and ends up with the plurality of delegates with Sanders coming in second place. In this scenario I think Bernie will admit defeat and go on to campaign for Biden.
Your link has been shortened and thus is broken. I believe this is the article you meant. It has only-Biden at 8% and only Bernie at 3% (and both being more conservative than the average Democratic voter).
However, I also note that they specifically say they are limited by not having anyone under 30 in their group.
3.5 months is an eternity in politics (the gap between the convention and election day). No matter who the (D) nominee is, the Bernie Bros will vote for him/her.
Do you mean plurality?
Superdelegates are not involved in the first round of voting at the convention. If Sanders wins the majority of pledged delegates he almost certainly wins the nomination before the superdelegates get involved. Now Sanders’ pledged delegates could legally vote against him in that first round. That is the only way your hypothetical makes any sense. Since Sanders has a pretty important role in selecting the people who are his pledged delegates a revolt of that type is partly on him.
To contemplate the outcome of that really depends on why Sanders chosen delegates revolted against him. If they all suddenly have new cars bought by a Bloomberg controlled company…chaos and mayhem. If he is discovered to have been keeping kids in cages in his basement, I am betting a lot of his primary voters will be happy that delegates are pledged not bound.
The same way they reacted in 2016: By mostly supporting whoever the Democratic nominee is. Yes, there were a few Bernie-or-nobody voters, and even a few Bernie-or-Trump, but their numbers were vastly amplified by Russian propaganda.
Nope.
If there are shenanigans at the convention and the person who wins the most delegates is not awarded the nomination (most likely Sanders), not only will you lose a whole bunch of Sanders voters, but you will also lose a whole bunch of other people who actually care about silly things like democracy and party integrity.
It’s bizarre to me that people actually think everything will go smoothly if the delegate popular vote winner is screwed over by a backroom deal in favor of a senile old man who can barely speak coherently, or a billionaire moderate republican. What a sick party the Democrats have become, wow.
I voted for Pete and now live in a purplish state, but I won’t be voting for the Democratic nominee if they didn’t win the most delegates in the primary process. Simple.
I am ok with 4 more years of Trump in this scenario. If Biden somehow were to eke out a win, he would accomplish next to nothing as president anyway (Supreme Court justices? Lol keep dreaming, Majority Leader McConnell will still be a thing), and the subsequent midterms would be even more disastrous for Dems due to massive disillusionment among younger voters, since, you know, their chosen candidate was robbed 2 years earlier. A republican even more awful than Trump would beat the dithering, barely-functioning old man in 2024, and in just 4 short years we will be back to where we started.
If Trump is reelected, OTOH, the Dems would be heavily favored to win the Senate in 2022. They could even impeach the imbecile a 2nd time if they wanted to.The next recession is inevitably coming up soon too, so might as well have Trump take the blame for it within within the next few years. Idiot Americans always pin the blame on whoever is occupying the White House during a recession, so better that it not be a Democrat. An actual decent YOUNG democrat who learned the lessons from 2016 and 2020 would then be nominated in 2024, and win the presidency.
4 more years of Trump would lead to better outcomes in the longterm than a pretender being nominated by a brokered convention.
These are the kind of rationalizations you will hear a lot if the Democratic establishment’s plan to screw over Sanders continues.
Sanders supporters will mostly support whoever the nominee is because every major democratic candidate is superior to Trump, but 2016 will have nothing in common with what happens in 2020.
In 2016 Sanders lost both the delegate count and the popular vote. Most Sanders voters accepted this fact.
The scenario in 2020 is that Sanders wins the majority both the delegate count and popular vote, but is denied the nomination because the democratic party wants to maintain good relationships with wealthy individuals and corporate backers who do not like Sander’s policies.
Also add in Bloomberg, who is a moderate republican with a history of behaviors that alienate the democratic base basically buying the election and bribing the democratic party to do it, he embodies what Sanders is fighting against. Whats the point as democrats of even having primary elections if we’re just going to nominate whoever a billionaire republican tells us to nominate after he hands out his bribes?
Its not going to be the same thing. Sanders supporters will support the nominee but after 2020 they will vastly amplify their efforts to create an independent grassroots mobilization effort to take over the democratic party, since 2020 will perfectly embody everything Sanders and his voters rail against. The will of the people being ignored in favor of what the monied class wants.
Bernie has already proposed that very scenario and said that, “Alot of people will be very unhappy.”
So the better question, seems to me, is what will Bernie say to keep his revolution from turning into a revolt.
Will he throw his support behind Biden, or will he grouse loudly about being robbed by the DNC apparatchiks.
As he’s said time and time again, he will throw his support behind anybody who wins the Democratic nomination (if it isn’t him), so there is really nothing to worry about. Right?
The same shit as 2016. It was rigged, the DNC conspired against Bernie.
They won’t vote for Biden. ‘What has he done to EARN my vote?’ ‘The lesser of two evils is still evil’
If by “shenanigans” you mean following the rules as they were set up far ahead of time, then Sanders supporters would be the ones blasting a hole through democracy and party integrity.
I.e., they’d be acting like Republicans. Why should anybody want that or approve of it?
I asked this in another thread, but will also put this here:
With the way delegates are allocated, is it possible for one candidate to receive a plurality of delegates, while another has received a plurality (or even majority) of popular votes?
You’re not a Bernie supporter, you hate Bernie supporters. You don’t speak for us. Granted I can’t speak for the endless millions of them too, but I can try to explain my view.
2016 was different. The DNC maybe put their thumb on the scale, but Bernie still lost the election. He didn’t get as many votes or as many delegates. Bernie never connected with black voters or voters over the age of 50, and as a result he lost the election. In 2020 Bernie will have the majority of votes and delegates, but will be denied the nomination because wealthy interests do not like his policies and those wealthy interests tell the democratic party to overrule its voters and nominate someone they like instead. Its a totally different scenario.
What will happen likely is Bernie and his voters will say ‘the democratic party is corrupt and beholden to the interests of anyone who pays them, but it beats another 4 years of Trump’. They’ll vote for the nominee, and then in 2021 start massively building their grassroots movement again because it’ll make them realize there is still a ton of work to do to rebuild the democratic party.
As I said earlier, if Sanders wins both the popular vote and delegate count, but the DNC nominates whomever a moderate republican (like BLoomberg) tells them to vote for after he hands out his bribes, that is going to create a massive revolt within the democratic party that made 2016 look like a joke.
What if in 2024 Charles Koch writes the DNC a check for 2 billion dollars to nominate Harold Ford Jr as the presidential nominee after someone like Warren wins the popular vote and majority of delegates in the primary? People aren’t going to passively put up with that.
Isn’t that the case to date when looking at popular vote totals for Sanders and Biden?
Bernie has the delegate count but Biden the popular vote count:
I think the vast majority of Sanders supporters will vote for Biden just as they did for Hillary. Sure, some defected last time but I think fewer will this time, just because of what Donald revealed himself to be. If you’re comfortable of a second term of Donald and the loss of democracy because you’re unhappy that Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, then I guess you get the government you deserve.
The odds of Democrats filling Supreme Court seats are much better if Biden gets the nomination. For one thing, Biden is likelier to win. For another, downballot Democrats will fare much better with Biden leading the ticket than Sanders. With Biden, we might get a Democratic Senate. With Sanders, much less likely.