Will Sanders' Supporters Ultimately Back Trump?

[_moksha]

Will Sanders' Supporters Back Trump?

It not like they could actually do a viable write-in vote for Birkenstocks or Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. So, will they back Trump in answer to Hillary?

[_The CCC]

It varies from highly doubtful to outright no.

[_just me]

I know people who will vote Bernie over Trump, but they will vote Trump over Clinton. I wouldn't call these people Bernie supporters, though. They are independents who are waiting to see who the choices end up being.

[_AmyJo]

There was a time I was a Bernie supporter. At least I could tolerate him over Hilary. But for being a Jew dammit why is he anti-Israel? He's lost the Jewish vote already.

I also liked Trump initially until he kept opening his mouth with rascist and bigoted statements. He has a hair-pin trigger I cannot trust for someone running our country. And though he may be a very bright businessman he lacks in jurisprudence and diplomacy, and intellectual depth.

He also is the only contender going up against Hilary in November with any serious clout. Sometimes I wonder if he was placed there just so people will vote for her to insure she'll be the first female president. Then there are those who will support Trump so she doesn't become president.

I don't believe all the polls. They were wrong about Trump in the first place doing as well as he has. They didn't predict he'd become the GOP nominee until he did. I see him as sailing past Hilary in November and becoming our next president. I still don't trust him. I trust her even less.

She does appear to be more stable though, I'll give her that.

[_The CCC]

I know people who will vote Bernie over Trump, but they will vote Trump over Clinton. I wouldn't call these people Bernie supporters, though. They are independents who are waiting to see who the choices end up being.

I'm not a member of any political party. I do like some of Bernie's idea's. However the very thought of a Trump presidency turns my stomach.

[_EAllusion]

I don't believe all the polls. They were wrong about Trump in the first place doing as well as he has.

Trump has ever-so-slightly underperformed his polls. They've predicted his performance in elections on average quite well. Perhaps you mean that you don't trust prognosticators who gave Trump a relatively small chance of winning the nomination. Though, everyone was given a relatively small chance of winning the nomination in the then crowded field, so any victor would've been an unlikely victor.

[_EAllusion]

I think posts like this represent the real danger of Trump. Because he's got the nomination, his views are already normalizing in the eyes of large body of people. He campaigned as a fascist and a buffoon. That's not hyperbole. He's promising to commit horrific war crimes. But, partisanship is so strong that this is now within the range of acceptable discourse in the country. As awful as anyone might think Clinton is (I'm with you!), she's not in the same league as Trump in what she represents and comparing the two is extreme false equivalence. Even if he doesn't win in November, the damage is done. There's some who think that if he suffers a catastrophic defeat in November, that'll serve as a rebuke to future Trump's - people who have, unlike this one, a clear ideological focus. I'm not so sure that is even true.

[_EAllusion]

I saw this posted by a libertarian writer elsewhere. It's a plea to everyone who would not normally vote for Clinton, including hardcore libertarians, to vote for her to rebuke Trump:

This sort of brazen banana-republic goonishness is why I won't even consider voting for, say, Gary Johnson, unless Hillary's polling ahead by 20 points in my state, and why you shouldn't either.

I'm picking up a troubling sense that decades of partisan slagging on Clinton have made it hard for a lot of people who care about freedom, on both the left and the right, to support her. Well, get over it, babies. You've been underestimating how well our democracy does in fact protect our freedom. Maybe you're convinced that it hardly protects our rights at all. That's understandable. Under normal circumstance, if you want things to get better, you've got to draw attention to how bad things are, not to how well our democracy does work, considering. But it does work pretty well, considering, and that's a huge blessing that we take for granted at our peril. Just take a look at the way this would-be despot threatens to censor the political speech and expropriate the property of perceived political opponents. We're as rich and free as we are because that kind of stuff happens here a lot less than it might, and a lot less than it does in some other place, and one of the reason that's the case is that we've historically considered it WAY out of bounds for potentially powerful political figures to threaten to stomp the crap out of the rights of their rivals.

Decent institutions aren't magic. Good black-letter rules help, but they don't make institutions work like algorithms make computers work. People following the rules, even when nobody's looking, is what makes institutions work. People sticking to the spirit of the norms that underpin the rules, even when the rules technically allow this or that sort of bad behavior, is what makes institutions work. Healthy political culture makes them work. Well, Donald Drumpf is waging an onslaught on that culture. The man's straight ebola to the American body politic. And we're the immune system, people. We have a job, as American T-cells, and that's to reject this virulence, and protect our political culture, such as it is, with the greatest possible collective force. The best way to do that is to help Hillary Clinton win this November in a momentous landslide.

Don't like her? Hate her? Get over it, babies. Fighting for freedom and justice right now means limiting the damage this thug is doing to the norms that make everything else possible. It means scrambling to preserve our sort-of-shitty but also pretty good institutions. Hillary Clinton is basically a living manifestation of America's prevailing political culture. Plenty shitty--warmongering, more than a touch corrupt--but also a competent, reasonable, relatively decent public-spirited creature of America's one non-imploding establishment political party. If you like freedom or social justice, or anything else this side of Satanic chaos, your job is not only to vote for Hillary Clinton, but to stand up and say that you're going to, loud and proud, in a way that communicates that you expect other decent Americans to do the same.

Maybe you're a libertarian and you're really in to just how outrageously dumb voters are, have recently unlocked the mysteries of the political universe with your iron grasp of the logic of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, believe that voting is complicity with state violence, and that Hillary Clinton's just the worst kind of transactional log-rolling technocrat. Awesome. You know what? You're right. Vote for Hillary Clinton. Or maybe you're a progressive who thinks Citizens United consolidated the grip of the oligarchs and everything's rigged against the people and the powerless, millions of whom suffer as we speak, and that Hillary's in the pocket of problem--that she is the problem. Correct. Hillary Clinton is the problem. Vote for Hillary Clinton. Fox News devotee who would rather blind yourself with the sharp end of an anti-Planned Parenthood picket than vote for HilLIEry? I get it. You love America. So vote for Hillary Clinton.

There is no partisan or ideological divide on the urgent necessity to maintain a baseline level of decency in our political culture. At this point, a crushing landslide for Hillary Clinton is the best we can do to protect it. This isn't just a practical act of political self-defense. It's a symbolic act of cultural assertion. Now is not the time for tender conscience and expressive individual participation (or non-participation). Now is the time for grudging but resolute solidarity and powerfully expressive collective participation. We need to put our individually insignificant pebbles in a pile and build a mighty wall against comb-over authoritarianism. Heave your pebble with double-hot hatred at Hillary next time. We need to suck it up, come together, and do something for our country. Nobody said fighting Ebola's fun.

I'm not sure a landslide Trump loss even undoes the damage here. We've got a large body of authoritians that aren't going to go away, a public increasingly tolerant of their views, a completely broken Republican party, and political opportunists around every corner. These are dangerous times.

[_just me]

Link, EA?

[_ajax18]

I think a lot of union members of the rust belt who have been financially hammered by NAFTA, TPP, and outright illegal immigration will come to understand that Trump is the only candidate who supports their interests.

Trump has moved the GOP even further to the party of working class men and women rather than the party of big businessmen and financial elites. This is ironic since Trump is among those elites but he's shown very clearly that his heart lies with common working people and he puts Americans first.

People remember that WJC, who Hillary wants to put in charge of the economy, signed NAFTA, the results of which even Bernie Sanders admitted have been catastrophic to the American worker.