Trump's MAGA supporters and Twitter Bernie Bros have this ugly tactic in common

[progressoid]

96. That bullshit is tiresome.

The same thing happened to Obama too - Democrats ended up voting for the Republican nominee. But we don't hear about them because Obama won.

Wapo said 12 % of Sanders supporters voted for Trump. Compare that with 2008 when 17 % of Clinton supporters voted for McCain.

Of course if Obama had lost in '08 we would likely have been blaming the Clinton supporters who defected. And that would be pointless as well.

A more important caveat, perhaps, is that other statistics suggest that this level of "defection" isn't all that out of the ordinary. Believing that all those Sanders voters somehow should have been expected to not vote for Trump may be to misunderstand how primary voters behave.

For example, Schaffner tells NPR that around 12 percent of Republican primary voters (including 34 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich voters and 11 percent of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio voters) ended up voting for Clinton. And according to one 2008 study, around 25 percent of Clinton primary voters in that election ended up voting for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the general. (In addition, the data showed 13 percent of McCain primary voters ended up voting for Obama, and 9 percent of Obama voters ended up voting for McCain — perhaps signaling something that swayed voters between primaries and the general election, or some amount of error in the data, or both.)

For whatever reasons, people switch their vote to their opposition. It's happened before and it will happen again.