More Clinton supporters are enthusiastic than those backing Sanders, but the media won't tell you th [View all]

[Her Sister]

The strange silence about Hillarymania: Clinton fires up voters more than Bernie does, so why is no one talking about it?
More Clinton supporters are enthusiastic than those backing Sanders, but the media won't tell you that
AMANDA MARCOTTE

long article from salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/29/the_strange_silence_about_hillarymania_clinton_fires_up_voters_more_than_bernie_does_so_why_is_no_one_talking_about_it/

On top of that, most journalists who echo the Sanders enthusiasm narrative spend a lot of time on social media, and if you do that, then it’s safe to say that it looks like Sanders is inspiring a lot of enthusiasm. There is an explosion of memes and chatter about the “revolution” and sharing every single story they can find that says something positive about Sanders’s chances.

But if you dig in, it also becomes quickly clear that much of the online enthusiasm isn’t really pro-Sanders so much as it’s anti-Clinton. There are thousands, probably millions of social media messages which are more about using Sanders as a cover to harass women and their allies than as legitimate advocacy for the candidate. Remove the mansplaining, harassment, and gotcha trolling, and the amount of Sanders traffic isn’t quite so awe-inspiring in volume.

The online boors aren’t the majority of Sanders supporters, to be clear. On the contrary, this poll and others show that the majority of Sanders supporters are pretty chilled out. But this small percentage of angry men (and a few women) are really loud online and their anti-Clinton vitriol contributes to the false notion that Sanders has the wind at his back.

Clinton isn’t a meh candidate, in other words. She inspires passion, both in her haters and in her supporters.

If you give it a moment’s thought, that Clinton would be such an inspiring figure to her supporters makes perfect sense. She has spent two and a half decades in the spotlight, enduring huge amounts of sexism as every single man in the country who feels threatened by smart women or powerful women projects all his anxieties on her with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But she hasn’t stopped striving. She eats haters for breakfast and keeps smiling, all while more haters are telling her she doesn’t smile enough.

For supporters, especially female supporters, who are sick to the teeth of all this sexist nonsense and sometimes wonder how they are going to keep on fighting another day, Clinton’s resilience is the stuff of legends.