The bad news is that I can't make up the minds of those who will not. It isn't just that I will not have the oomph in me to urge my Bernie brothers and sisters to join me in voting for the candidate the party picked to deprive him of the candidacy (for I presume that the donor-approved candidate will not be Bernie Sanders in this scenario, and as with Hillary Clinton in 2016 I will not have it in me to do anything but cast my lonely grudging vote), it is that even if I suddenly became convinced that voting for blue no matter who was the only moral stance in order to defeat Donald Trump for a second term, I cannot transmit my particular moral stance under these circumstances to those transgressed against Sanders supporters who will be turned off to the democratic machine in perpetuity if establishment dems succeed in subverting the process to deny a Sanders nomination.
You may have my vote, but my vote will not make up for the scores more who are participating in the democratic primary today only for Bernie Sanders who will drop the party in droves like a moist, tepid coronavirus infected potato if Sanders wins the plurality of voters coming into the convention but is thwarted by superdelegates on a second ballot, or if manipulations of the machine are successful*. They will do this not because they are bad people but because the modicum of trust in the process that they permitted themselves in order to participate in hopes of seeing Bernie Sanders' platform to victory this time will once again have been squandered by an elite who thinks they know better than voters what's best for them.
Hear me now: It will not be enough for you and me to sort of agree that Biden, let's say, is arguably not as bad as Trump. We simply do not control the will of those who will be out the door for good before we can even poll them on their feelings on this Would You Rather scenario.
You can throw candidates at primary voters to diffuse Bernie Sanders' support, you can put the delegate selecting process behind closed doors as in Iowa, you can purge democratic voters from the polls in selected precincts as New York democrats did in 2016, you can capriciously close and change polling places in immigrant, latino, black and student communities at the last minute like Texas is doing, you can plaster the airwaves with negative ads, you can float the idea of hand picking someone like Nancy Pelosi (who hasn't even made a single campaign appearance) on a second ballot if Bernie Sanders comes into the convention with a plurality but not a majority, you can suppress or subvert the vote to make it bend to your donors' will, but you cannot then scold and chide the voters you've lost in the primaries to play along in the general. It is not cynical to think that defeating Bernie Sanders was the game that Pete, Beto, Amy**, Joe and Liz have been playing all along, even if it means a second term for Trump. I don't think the donors particularly care, but it's a bit shocking to see stated so plainly in the pages of the New York Times that the democratic establishment just may agree with them.
But to the willing Democratic faithful, the Biden voters in South Carolina for instance who jumped on board at the urging of Congressman Clyburn, who are motivated first and foremost by a desire to see Donald Trump lose and who are perhaps sincerely persuaded that a Bernie Sanders nomination is an obstacle to this goal, I don't think you've thought this all the way through. In your scenario, Bernie Sanders turns off middle American voters like a switch because of his socialism and drives them into the Trump camp handing him a second term. But you are overlooking an essential fact. A lot of those imagined better-dead-than-red turned off voters in Middle America are already in the Trump camp because to them Joe Biden is socialist. Yes, if you succeed in stopping Sanders at the convention you will have the donors on your side. Yes you will have the small and dwindling number of Democratic party faithfuls. Yes, you might even have me. But that will not be enough to achieve your ultimate goal. With a dud candidate like Joe Biden, you may not even win the popular vote this time. On the other hand, if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, it will not be because some Democratic establishment official directed voters to support him. It will be because Bernie Sanders' message got people up off their overworked asses across the country and crucially in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania that the democrats have forgotten about and need in order to beat Trump, out into the streets, into the voting booth to vote for revolutionary change for working Americans, the poor, the disaffected, the despairing and the disenfranchised. You will have back voters who left a party and system that has demonstrably not worked for them for a long time, you will have those who never thought it could work for them, and those who desperately need the kind of change that Bernie Sanders is urging. This is not politics as usual for them, this is an emergency. And you will probably vote for Bernie Sanders too, because when it comes down to it, Medicare for All, the cancellation of student debt, free public college for all, a green new deal, money out of politics and into the hands of working people is probably a small price to pay to stop the absconding of America by Trump and his enablers. And if you give them down ballot candidates to vote for, you will have the house and maybe even the senate as well.
Alienating the impassioned, motivated, hopeful and growing throngs of voters who are only in it for Bernie Sanders is a very bad way to start a campaign. And if you give me Nancy Pelosi or Mike Bloomberg instead of Bernie, I will be with the exiters.***
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* I am premising conditions for an uptick in voter apathy on shenanigans of the party, but let's be real for a moment. If partisans of the democratic party, for whatever reason, actually prefer a standard issue democrat-- and a less than gently used one this time apparently-- over a rejuvenating movement of the future to go up against Trump in November, they are making the same old mistake, demonstrating yet again that this is a party that couldn't pick what hole to wipe on the toilet.
** While I have your attention, I keep hearing this argument that thanks to the voluntary departure from the campaign of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar (among others who did not even bother to be memorable at the moment), if Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard smell the coffee and follow suit, the remaining field will be exclusively straight very old white men. I'd just like to remind people that it is insulting to erase the aspirations of Bernie Sanders' overwhelmingly youthful, diverse, rainbow coalition with a dismissal of the only candidate among all the above who is speaking to their dreams as being merely old, white and male. Piss off!
*** And by the way, read this. And listen to this:
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