If Bernie Does Not Win Primary, Will His Campaign Work to Defeat the Democratic Nominee?

[vsrazdem]

17. No, but right wing talking points don't help.

http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/

Sanders effect on all voters
Of course, there’s also the argument that Sanders undermined Clinton among all voters, not just her own. The argument has numerous prongs:

Sanders’ prolonging of the primary campaign past the point he was eliminated diverted resources from Clinton and fueled distrust of her.
Sanders did not work hard enough to get Clinton elected.
Sanders’ focus on the Democratic National Committee’s alleged rigging of the nomination fueled distrust of Clinton.
The first allegation is easy to disprove because it assumes, as do other arguments, that the non-Sanders universe did not have a vigorous primary challenge of Clinton. Sanders admitted that after the April 26 primaries that he was mathematically eliminated (the Democratic Party practice of allowing formally unpledged superdelegates to vote for a nominee makes such determinations inexact) and was only staying in the race to influence the party platform, eventually dropping out and endorsing Clinton two months later, a couple of weeks after she clinched a majority of delegates. This is typical behavior for eliminated candidates:

In the 2016 Republican primary John Kasich was eliminated in March and Ted Cruz was eliminated on April 19, but both stayed in the race in the hopes of making it to a brokered convention until after Trump clinched the nomination on May 3. In both cases they stayed in the race to deny Trump the nomination rather than affect the platform.
In the 2012 Republican primary both Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich stayed in the race well after they were mathematically eliminated. Paul was more like Sanders in that the impetus for staying in was to affect the platform, but Gingrich was merely attempting to deny Romney the nomination.
In the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton herself was eliminated from winning a majority of pledged delegates sometime in April. However, she stayed in the race through June, endorsing Obama after he clinched the nomination on the last day of the primary season.
So, Sanders behaved exactly as many other eliminated primary challengers, including Clinton herself. Blaming a loss on normal behavior is disingenuous and, in this case, hypocritical.

The second allegation is also easy to disprove. Sanders fully endorsed Clinton at the convention. He campaigned for her regularly and told his supporters not to support third parties. Contrast this behavior to Cruz, who in a primetime convention speech told his supporters to vote their conscience (a rebuke of Trump that led to boos in the convention hall) while Kasich didn’t attend the convention, never endorsed Trump, and wrote in John McCain for his vote. Trump has a far better case that Kasich and Cruz let Clinton get too close than Clinton has a case that Sanders cost her the presidency.

The third allegation is more serious than the other two, so it requires a bit of unpacking. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails disparaging Bernie Sanders and his supporters, asking if there was a way to thwart him in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries, calling him a liar, and generally being dismissive of his campaign. However, Sanders never walked back his support of Clinton. The blame here really belongs on a) the parties behind the disclosure and b) the inept leadership of the DNC, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Moreover, Sanders was never going to be the reason people attacked Clinton as crooked. She has been a national figure since the early ‘90s, and her husband’s administration was constantly hounded by investigations and people in and adjacent to it going to jail. Republicans had known for decades that the best way to go after Clinton was by attacking her ethics. And Clinton indulged these critics by engaging in dubious if not illegal behavior like using a private email server and soliciting donations from foreign governments for the Clinton Foundation. Ultimately these decisions were her own, knowing that if she did run for president again she’d be attacked like her husband was, and had nothing to do with Sanders.

So I don’t see any compelling reason to think that Sanders somehow cost Clinton the election among people who didn’t vote for him. He behaved no different than past defeated candidates for nomination (and was certainly more supportive than the candidates that Trump beat) and refused to turn himself into a victim after the DNC hack.