I have come to the conclusion that Hillary does not need the votes of DU zealots [View all]

[CajunBlazer]

I am sick and tired or hearing, "Hillary has to earn my vote", "If you don't let Bernie win, we will never vote for Hillary in the general election", "Hillary might have won the nomination, but now she has to have our votes to win the general election. I'm paraphrasing of course, and perhaps exaggerating, but you know the type.

Now to be clear - this isn't coming from all Sanders supporters, just the most active zealots who are probably on DU just to support Sanders and after the nomination is secured we will probably never see them again.

The answer that I want to give to these Bernie zealots is, "If you feel that way, go away; we don't need you or your votes." Before I get all kinds of messages saying stuff like, "Are you crazy, you need to be nice to these folks, Hillary needs ever vote she can get", let me first say this - Hillary really doesn't need their votes. Let's have a reality check:

1) Most of these people will never vote for Hillary anyway no matter what we say, many have already admitted that if Bernie isn't the nominee they will vote third party or not vote at all.

2) Even if they would ever consider Voting for Hillary, we still don't need their vote.

Consider this, take the number of total active members of DU. I have no idea but let's say 10,000. Now remove those who have not been active in the current debates and/or have been sitting back observing the food fight. Now remove the Clinton supporters, Now remove the the majority of Sanders supporters who will easily support Hillary in the general election. Some subset of those remaining are the Sanders zealots. Now deduct from those zealots those who would have voted third party if Sanders had not entered the nomination contest and will now surely return to their roots. Now scatter those remaining zealots among 50 states. Now remove all of those zealots who reside states which will not be battle ground states in November.

What do you have left? A few former Bernie zealots in each a few battleground states whose votes "might" make a difference. Now let's test that situation. Let's say that Hillary were to have a worst case scenario similar to that of Al Gore in 1992 when Florida was the deciding state and hung in the balance. After all of the challenges and legal battles, Gore was said to have lost by a little over 500 votes (not that I ever believed that). If you don't count the Florida Bernie zealots on DU who will vote third party regardless, there is no way that the remaining Bernie zealots in Florida would be numerous enough to affect even that close of a contest one way or the other.

So while I don't advocate going out of our way to tick off Bernie zealots, if they confront us I am all for telling them, "Look I can't tell you how to vote, that is something you need to decide for yourself. But please understand, I can't be overly concerned about what you ultimately decide".