I went from an unabashed Bernie Sanders supporter to someone who rolls his eyes at him now. I had followed Bernie for years before 2016 and was glad that someone was there to help move Hillary further left. I didn’t think he had a real chance and the fact is that he never really did.
The exact moment Bernie was done was March 15th. He had a huge surprise win in Michigan the previous week and the idea was he could follow it up with a big week in other Midwestern states and show some staying power. Instead he got swept. This made it obvious that Michigan was a glorious fluke and that he would never be able to come back. I knew this because of math & demographics.
But then Bernie lost his mind.
I don’t share the school of thought of some that it was calculated. I don’t waste my time worrying if he is a Russian plant, where are his taxes, all that stuff. I don’t need to - I just think he came closer than anyone thought possible (including him) and as a result he failed to lead when he really had to. I actually think Jeff Weaver was the main instigator of the worst things to come from the campaign, but at the end of the day Bernie hired him and he was in charge and he is responsible.
I didn’t hold him responsible for some of his most ardent supporters for a long time. That all changed with Nevada state convention. The facts showed one thing and Bernie and Weaver helped promote an alternate reality to what actually happened. They fanned the flames by encouraging conspiracy theories instead of stifling them. They let me down. And it happened in mid-May, two full months after he was stick-a-fork-in-him done.
All that time Hillary could have turned her attention to Donald Trump. Instead she, despite having the nomination all but sewed up, had to spend money, time and energy against someone who was already lapped and be respectful so as to not alienate his supporters. Even in California which was never going to Bernie (math and demographics) which his supporters screamed about.
His supporters turned the logistical clusterfuck of having over four dozen elections with a myriad of rules exclusive to each of them into conspiracies against Bernie. Instead of realizing that these events are what happens in such cases, and that sure Brooklyn was a mess but Brooklyn went to Hillary overwhelmingly and even if those affected voted for Bernie 100% he still loses the state. (I use Brooklyn as one example, they screamed and still do about a lot of dumb things.)
They became insufferable. They were screaming about how things were rigged, screaming about superdelegates that would never decide the race, screaming about conspiracies, screaming #NeverHillary. When he should have been uniting us to beat Trump, he was wasting everyone’s time. A basketball player fouling when his team is down by 35 points is not a warrior competitor, he’s an asshole wasting everyone’s time. The fact that even now many of his followers still cling to discredited conspiracy theories, blaming his loss on malfeasance when there is zero evidence of this, and whatever mistakes were made weren’t disenfranchising four million Hillary voters.
Sorry, but election results are not illegitimate just because you do not like the outcome. Bernie ignored the south, never appealed to minorities - especially blacks - and generally didn’t do well in big, diverse states while winning smaller, whiter states. Math and demographics.
I just had to block someone on Twitter just last week because they said I was brainwashed that Russians hacked DNC servers even though it’s kind of indisputable. A non-zero number of Bros still fly that flag, the same flag that Trump desperately wants to see fly. When you have the same goals as Trump, maybe you need to check yourself.
Fortunately I can vote for Elizabeth Warren who has just as liberal bonafides and ideas and she has the distinction of not letting me down with inaction that directly helped Donald Trump get elected.
Should he win the Democratic nod against all of my wishes, he will get my vote in the general election because Bernie - with all of his flaws and blind spots - is still better than Donald Trump. And I am in a state that will almost assuredly have zero chance of deciding the nominee because we vote very late in the process. But I’n done with him and especially his fan club.