Delaware Liberal

The suggestion that most Sanders-supporting progressives will refuse to vote on November 8 if Sanders isn’t the Democratic nominee defies all logic. Sure, there may be a few disgruntled Bernie-backers who will either skip the polls or pull the level for presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, but ask yourself: considering the stakes involved, do you honestly believe that the folks who have been attracted to Sanders’s message would, in essence, concede the election to whichever radical from last night’s debate wins the GOP nomination? Remember the nonsensical “PUMA” movement in 2008? The idea that large numbers of Clinton supporters would actually refuse to vote for Barack Obama in the general election was laughable—and the idea that most Sanders supporters will throw a tantrum in the event the Vermonter is vanquished is just as silly. [...] To accept the premise that most Sanders supporters would go on a general-election strike if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination is to accept the right’s premise of progressive irrationality. In order to buy the idea that the “Bernie or Bust!” movement is real, one would have to believe that most Sanders supporters: * are unmindful of the importance of the United States Supreme Court, US District Courts of Appeal, and US District Courts, and the judges appointed to each division; * are perfectly willing to allow a situation whereby a Republican President, Republican House and Republican Senate are finally in a position to obliterate Obamacare; * would have no problem with four years of nothing being done to stem the bloody tide of handgun violence; * would give the Christian right the opportunity to reinstate coathangers as the only reproductive option for women facing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies; * would tolerate a Republican president fomenting a culture of racial and religious intolerance; * would ignore the prospect of the GOP gutting President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and successfully sabotaging the 2015 Paris climate agreement; and * would gamble on the idea that a Republican president could be thrown out of office in 2020 in favor of, presumably, Democratic presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren. In other words, to buy this idea, one would have to buy absolute absurdity. Members of the progressive family are simply having an argument over who will be the best individual to lead the country into the next decade. Yes, the language in this argument is sometimes raw, crude, personal. However, does anyone really believe that at the end of the primary, the progressive family will not set aside its differences and come together?

Even if Clinton rips off a bunch of big victories in a row and seems like the inevitable nominee, it’s pretty unlikely that Sanders will concede because he’ll have all the money he needs to keep campaigning. And I don’t think he really set out to win this thing at the beginning, so he’s not quitting just because he realizes that he won’t be nominated. He’ll want to keep hammering home his points and gathering delegates for the convention. A long campaign will be painful, but 2008 showed there can be important upsides. The more states the two campaigns organize, the more work they’ll have done in advance of the general election. The more the country is focused on the differences between Clinton and Sanders, the more they’ll be focused on their messaging and values and the less they’ll be focused on the messaging and values of the Republicans. It’s true that some feelings will get hurt and some bitterness will result. It’s not cost-free to have an extended contested nomination, and the eventual nominee will get wounded. But, even here, some of Obama’s worst vulnerabilities were old news by November precisely because they’d been hashed out in the winter and spring. As long as the process doesn’t leave the nominee underfunded, it’s probably not a problem to have a long primary season.