For Sanders Supporters, the Choice Facing Them in November Presents a Serious, Difficult Dilemma

For anyone who was hoping there might be a real chance of a Bernie Sanders presidency, last Tuesday’s results were crushing—and remained so, even after his modest gains this past Saturday in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska. After Sanders’ Michigan win defied the polls, his fans went into 3/15 hopeful that the pollsters no longer mattered, that their underdog candidate would defy projections once again to come out on top. At least three states seemed attainable. But on the day, Sanders didn’t win a thing. He actually under-performed: both the Clinton and Sanders camps knew Florida and North Carolina were off-limits to Sanders, but neither team expected the senator from Vermont would come away from 3/15 without a single win to his name. They were wrong, and Hillary Clinton made a clean sweep, in the most devastating moment of her campaign. As Nate Silver said, it’s now “really hard” to see a path to victory for Sanders.

Sanders has defiantly declared that he’ll fight until the convention, but mathematically he’s reaching a point of no return. It’s going to be tough for Sanders to fill the yawning delegate gap separating him and Hillary Clinton between now and June 14th, when the final votes are cast. And so, at July’s Democratic convention, it is likely that Clinton will be declared the Dem nominee. At that point, Bernie Sanders supporters will be faced with a difficult decision.

Bernie Sanders supporters are by and large progressives. (That’s discounting the likely overstated number of Sanders supporters who also like Trump. For what it’s worth, you can be sure many Clinton supporters are also old-school conservatives who’d be just as happy voting for John Kasich or Marco Rubio, but nobody wants to talk about that.) They are young people who want to see the world changed from an increasingly toxic one into one based on peace and democratic socialist values. They are working men and women who are tired of fighting a rigged system. They are people who have been offered a better world by Sanders, and had their eyes opened to how deeply compromised his Democratic opponent is.

There’s a big difference between the average Clinton supporter and the average Sanders supporter. Clinton insiders have privately (and cynically) admitted that Clinton relies on “low-information voters” to win, whereas the Sanders campaign rather relies on voters who are informed, about possible alternatives to the current American norm, and about how corrupted contemporary politics is. Throughout his campaign, Bernie Sanders has been as much teacher as presidential candidate, and one of his favorite subjects has consistently been Hillary Clinton.

If you intend to vote or have already voted for Bernie Sanders, you do/did so knowing his rival voted for the war in Iraq and intervention in Libya, has supported destructive trade agreements, has suspect ties to Wall Street, and accepts money from private prison lobbyists. You know she opposed gay marriage until three years ago and praised the Reagans on their approach to the AIDS crisis; you know she referred to black youths as super-predators and supported measures that exacerbated systemic racism; you know she supports fracking and isn’t nearly committed enough in tackling climate change. And you know probably because the Bernie Sanders campaign helped make you aware of it.

It would be hard for many to be alert to those truths and find it easy to still vote for Hillary Clinton—and, by association, everything she represents. The general election, which could come down to Clinton and Trump, is set to challenge the idealists. This should be the time Sanders voters start asking themselves a tough question, and they need to come up with an answer between now and November: If Hillary Clinton does become the party nominee, are the Sanders supporters going to be able to forget everything they know and give her their vote?

Of course Donald Trump isn’t preferable to Clinton. Donald Trump has the potential to be the most dangerous president of all time, terrible for working people, disastrous in foreign policy and immigration, and utterly appalling for state finance. He is according to a recent report the sixth-greatest threat facing the global economy right now. Out of the two, the most sensible option is clearly Hillary Clinton. But that still doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a great option, especially not to ardent Sanders supporters who know so much about the former Secretary of State’s less-than-perfect record.

Bernie Sanders supporters don’t make up a small portion of the electorate. The senator’s received more than 41% of the vote so far in predominantly pro-Clinton territories, and should compile additional wins in more favorable states approaching on the calendar. By July, Bernie Sanders will at this rate likely fall short in terms of delegates, but he will probably have taken just under half of the popular Democratic vote. It’s a significant chunk that the Clinton camp is going to come to rely on.

You have to wonder how many of these voters, knowing what they know now, will in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton in November. Thirty-three percent of Sanders supporters already insist they won’t check the box marked HRC. You can understand why: their vote for Bernie Sanders during the primaries is a vote for him as much as it’s a vote against the establishment, a vote cast in protest at big money interests corrupting the nation and its politics. It’s a vote against the likes of Hillary Clinton. The general election will, to a good deal of Sanders supporters, be a choice between two evils, and their only option to save themselves from Trump will be to vote for the very person that many of them have come to regard as an enemy.