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By the Numbers: How Sanders Hardcore Loyalists Helped Elect Donald Trump Bigly
Totally by the numbers: so maybe we don’t do that again.
So I’ve had more and more Bernie Sanders’ supporters ask me recently, when confronted by the basic fact that the choices of the candidate’s supporters in the last election — after he lost the nomination — played significantly in electing Donald Trump, just how that can be?
I know that not everyone gets into the weeds with this the way I do, but I do believe that the stakes are so high in this election that — before Sanders’ ardent followers dismiss what they don’t want to hear — they need to find out if, just perhaps, they don’t want to hear these things because, on some level, they know it’s true. It’s hard when you are dug in around an ideological candidate to allow that he’s not all you’d hoped he would be. It is also dangerously self delusional not to acknowledge that no one person is the solution to it all: that Bernie Sanders has some epic vulnerabilities and liabilities, just as all the other candidates do.
Deciding that any particular criticism you internalize as the “deal breaker” for another candidate might not even be true. Or someone can look at your guy and do exactly the same thing. Some constituencies are more prone to that than others: Sanders supporters are decidedly more prone to defend…
