Unless a switcheroo happens at the Convention this summer, Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee. Therefore as long as you are voting, you are free to vote for the policies you want and not for the strategy you think will make Trump lose. In fact, it would be very smart of you to do this because how often do you get a chance to vote for what you want without any bad consequences? Your working theory was that Biden was the one to defeat Trump and now, according to your theory, you have that in the bag, so as long as you have a vote at your disposal, you might as well use it to give Uncle Joe a sign of the sort of policies you would actually prefer, because left to his own devices (or those of any other candidate the democratic operatives who gave you Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton and John Kerry and Al Gore and Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale would permit you to vote for in November should they have second thoughts about the presumptive nominee's capacity for fulfilling his duties), "things are not going to fundamentally change for anyone."
If you vote for Joe Biden (who has already won without your vote) you will basically give him permission to make adjustments to social security and Medicare to balance the federal budget on your back and not the back of the shirking 1%, to veto Medicare for All, to privilege fossil fuel corporations and pharmaceuticals and financial and insurance conglomerates and the prison industrial complex over people as he has done throughout his career, and as he is already accumulating obligations to resume doing if -- I mean when!-- he wins the election in November. You can count on years more of debt and insecurity and the same policies and behaviors that have given us global warming continuing into what's left of the livable future. But Bernie Sanders is still on the ballot. You don't have to worry about him winning any more, but bear in mind that the stronger Bernie's showing in the remaining primaries, the louder the message that in exchange for trusting the experts on who is going to defeat Donald Trump, in return for doing our part in the voting booth in November, we'd like to see some crumbs trickling down our way.
Okay, vote for Joe in the General if that's your plan. Vote for Bernie in the Primary. What do you have to lose?
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* Note: this piece adopts the cynical view that the very credible allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden that have been raised by Tara Reade will, for reasons of political expediency, continue to be ignored and when push comes to shove (i.e., when raised by Trump in the general election) be actively rejected by what would otherwise be a necessary critical mass of mainstream public feminist opinion makers, let alone the media.
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