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A growing number of Bernie Sanders voters are threatening to leave the Democrat Party should former vice president and front-runner Joe Biden continue on to become the Democrat nominee for president in 2020. Should their threat become a reality, it would likely assure President Donald Trump’s reelection in November.
After their first one-on-one debate — which focused on the coronavirus response, potential climate policies, and Social Security — neither Sanders nor Biden could claim a decisive victory, and Biden made no significant gaffes. Unless the political status quo changes quickly for Sanders, Biden will easily claim the nomination by the time the Democrat convention rolls around this summer.
And that’s not sitting well with the far-left Bernie Bros.
“We will never — NEVER boost or support Joe Biden or defend his abysmal record and terrible policy positions,” said Henry Williams, the executive director of the far-left Gravel Institute, which backed 89-year-old Mike Gravel’s brief presidential bid last year before switching to Sanders. “We will tell people, as we always have, to vote their conscience and to make decisions based on the interests of all the world’s oppressed people.… I do expect a massive exodus from the Democratic Party.”
Somewhere around 12 percent of Sanders’ supporters in 2016 went on to vote for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. The disaffected Sanders voters were likely a large factor in Trump securing victories in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In 2020, they could again be one of the deciding factors in a Trump victory.
But the 12 percent of Sanders voters who chose to vote Trump may not be the worst of the problem for Democrats. The real problem could be the Sanders supporters who choose to stay home on election night or support a third-party candidate, rather than support a Democrat who doesn’t share their “progressive” vision for America.
Many Sanders supporters, who tend to be quite young and Internet-savvy, seem to be willing to risk four more years of Donald Trump rather than sell out their ideals for a more “moderate” Democrat such as Biden, who many Bernie Bros consider collaborators with the GOP and against the cause of socialism.
Bret Stephens of the New York Times says that hard-core Sanders supporters are angry young men who see “more moderate Democrats not as kindred spirits or potential converts but as sell-outs, even traitors — the proverbial enemy within.”
In 2016, Sanders supporters rightly accused the Democrat establishment of rigging the nomination process against the Vermont senator in favor of Hillary Clinton. This year, some of Sanders’ most vocal supporters have resorted to harassing Democrat officials outside their homes with bullhorns to avoid the same thing happening again. On the night prior to the Nevada caucuses, Sanders supporter Maria Estrada livestreamed her protest outside the home of the state’s Democratic Party chairman.
“I want assurances that there isn’t going to be any shenanigans going on tomorrow,” Estrada loudly proclaimed. “The Democratic Party does not control what happens.”
The Sanders wing of the party is truly threatening any cohesiveness the Democrats currently have. To illustrate the potential fracture, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the darling of the far-left in America and a vocal Sanders supporter, said recently that there was no left-wing party in the United States.
“The Democrat Party is not a left party,” AOC said at an event celebrating Martin Luther King in January. “The Democratic Party is a center, or center-conservative party.”
“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for all, not even a floor vote that gets voted down, we can’t even get a vote on it,” AOC complained. “So, this is not a left party. There are left members inside the Democratic Party, that are working to try and make that shift happen.”
While we can observe a methodical leftward move of the Democrat Party, it’s not happening fast enough to suit the Bernie Bros or AOC. Far-left pundit Krystal Ball of The Hill detailed how the Democrats simply assume the far-left’s vote instead of earning it.
“The left is going to get blamed if Joe Biden loses, no matter what. And by engaging in this whole unity thing from the beginning, ‘and of course we’re going to vote for the nominee,’ no matter who it is, you’ve just stripped yourself of power, of leverage,” Ball said.
So, in the mind of many Bernie Bros, the only way to move the Democrat Party further leftward at greater speed is to withhold their votes from more moderate Democrat candidates. Only then will their influence over the party be firmly established.
“The moment you take [the possibility far leftists won’t vote Democrat] off the table is the moment they can take you for granted,” Ball concluded.
In the short term, the Democrat schism is probably good news for Donald Trump and the Republicans. But long-term, it’s bad for the country’s politics. Right now, it’s difficult to imagine the Democrats more left-wing than they already are. But the Sanders and AOC wing of the party want more. They want budget-busting programs such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for all, and they don’t want them decades from now — they want them now.
And if the Democrats and the media move even further left than they already are, the GOP will not counter that by moving right. They’ll be dragged right along, ever closer to the socialist/globalist abyss that awaits.
Photo: AP Images
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects, with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected]
