One of your opponents has the answers I like,” he writes. “He is aiming at preserving our children’s future directly. He is not popular with the Democratic establishment because, unlike all the other candidates, he is not pandering to the industries accelerating Earth’s Climate Crisis, the end of the world as we know it. He is truly fighting for the USA. His initials are BS. Not his policies.”

Judging by media coverage and the comments of party luminaries, you might think Democrats are bitterly polarized over Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. Last month, Hillary Clinton declared that “nobody likes” the Vermont senator. Last week, James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, said he was “scared to death” of the Sanders campaign, which he likened to “a cult.” Since the beginning of the year, news organization after news organization has speculated that Sanders’s success may set off a Democratic “civil war.”

But polls of Democratic voters show nothing of the sort. Among ordinary Democrats, Sanders is strikingly popular, even with voters who favor his rivals. He sparks less opposition—in some cases far less—than his major competitors. On paper, he appears well positioned to unify the party should he win its presidential nomination.

So why all the talk of civil war? Because Sanders is far more divisive among Democratic elites—who prize institutional loyalty and ideological moderation—than Democratic voters. The danger is that by projecting their own anxieties onto rank-and-file Democrats, party insiders are exaggerating the risk of a schism if Sanders wins the nomination, and overlooking the greater risk that the party could fracture if they engineer his defeat.

Although political handicappers sometimes presume that centrist Democrats are hostile to Sanders, the Quinnipiac poll suggests that Sanders enjoys widespread affection even outside his ideological lane. Among self-described moderate or conservative Democrats, Sanders boasts a net favorability rating of 43 points—far higher than Biden or Bloomberg fares among the “very liberal” Democrats who compose Sanders’s ideological base. Ninety-eight percent of Warren supporters, 97 percent of Buttigieg supporters and 92 percent of Biden supporters say they would back Sanders against Donald Trump. Only among Bloomberg supporters does that number dip to 83 percent. Overall, Sanders voters are significantly more likely to say that they won’t back one of his rivals in the general election than the other way around. Sanders’s critics within the party may resent his supporters for threatening to stay home in November. But most Democratic voters, including most centrist ones, have little problem with Sanders himself.

By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.

Sanders was the clear leader in a recent straw poll of union members, she said, which was a major factor in the decision.

The union represents 19,000 teachers and other educators in Las Vegas and is the largest teachers union in Nevada. The Clark County School District is the fifth-largest school district in the country.