Some Sanders fans would rather back Trump than Clinton

Hillary Clinton has tagged Donald Trump as “divisive” and “unpredictable.” But those words could just as easily describe the state of the Democratic race these days.

A Nevada state party convention in Las Vegas Saturday devolved into chair-throwing, shouting, and death threats lobbed at a top party official. The Nevada Democratic Party hit back with accusations that disruptive Bernie Sanders supporters have a penchant for “actual violence” and blamed the Sanders campaign for letting the event get out of hand. On Twitter and other social media sites, vitriol from supporters on both sides ratcheted higher, and many Sanders backers say they will shun Clinton come November.

Every presidential primary creates divisions, but the hostility among Democrats in 2016 sounds like combatants digging in for battle rather than contemplating how to join forces to defeat their common enemy.

Sanders forces are increasingly bitter that the Vermont senator is still winning races but can’t catch up to Clinton, who has an advantage among party leaders and “superdelegates.” Clinton backers, meanwhile, are growing impatient with Sanders’ insistence on staying in the race despite the long odds against him. The conflict has some Democratic insiders worried that their party won’t be able to unite behind Clinton.

Sanders supporters are embracing social media hashtags such as #BernieOrBust and #DropOutHillary. Many say they will write in Sanders on their ballots in November, vote for a third-party candidate, or abstain from voting altogether. Trump gleefully is stoking the anger, repeatedly saying that Sanders is getting a raw deal from a “rigged” Democratic nominating process.

Counting only pledged delegates, Bernie Sanders needs about 105 percent of the remaining delegates for the nomination.

At least some Sanders backers say they’d prefer the former reality TV star to the former secretary of state.

“I definitely will vote for Trump,” said George Massey, a Sanders supporter from New Brunswick, N.J. “I get that Trump is a blowhard, I understand that he just says whatever comes to mind that day, and you can’t believe everything that he says. But Hillary has proven that she can’t be trusted. Trump is a roll of the dice. I would prefer to roll the dice.”

“It saddens me. It really, deeply saddens me,” said Patty Maher of Ypsilanti, Mich., a lifelong Democrat from a family of lifelong Democrats who has always voted for her party’s nominee. But this year, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Maher will write in Sanders’ name. “I’m just done with the Clintons completely.”

The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway is that, in the end, the 2016 race will play out like the one in 2008. That contest, too, was a bitter, bruising primary fight, and Clinton stayed in until the very end. So-called “PUMAs” — for “party unity, my ass” — vowed they’d never vote for her rival Barack Obama. But in the end, the New York Democrat encouraged her followers to back Obama – and for the most part, they did.

But there are signs that the rift that’s developed in this topsy-turvy campaign may be deeper than 2008. A March Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed one-third of Sanders voters couldn’t see themselves getting behind Clinton. Exit polls from the West Virginia primary earlier this month indicated close to half of Sanders supporters in that state would vote for Trump in a general election matchup with Clinton.

Diehard Sanders supporters are drawing up plans to mobilize in the streets of Philadelphia, where Democrats will hold their nominating convention this summer. Currently, five of the nine groups that have filed for protest permits during the convention are pro-Sanders organizations, according to city records sent to the Globe, carrying titles such as “March on the DNC 2016” and “March for Bernie.”

“The only way that Sanders supporters are going to get in line is with the active encouragement of Senator Sanders and his top staff, and to date I haven’t seen that,” said Jim Manley, a consultant and former spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the state’s most powerful politician and Senate minority leader.

Sanders did little Tuesday to comfort party leaders looking for an easy turn toward unity. His response to the Nevada brouhaha carried a defiant tone. He critiqued the Democratic establishment broadly and the Nevada state party’s handling of the convention more specifically. “The Democratic Party has a choice. It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change . . . or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big-money campaign contributions, and be a party with limited participation and limited energy,” Sanders said.

Turning to the criticisms directed at his campaign, including claims by the Nevada Democratic Party that Sanders supporters have a penchant for violence, Sanders retorted: “That is nonsense,” adding that “[i]t goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.”

In interviews, Sanders supporters listed several reasons why they can’t bring themselves to get behind Clinton: her past support of trade deals they feel have decimated the working and middle class, her hawkish foreign policy positions, her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state, and the hundreds of millions in corporate money she has taken as a candidate.

Many Democrats remain hopeful that the healing will begin as soon as Sanders bows out of the race. Sanders has said he will support Clinton if she is the nominee.

”People right now, they’re very intense and passionate about their commitments. Once the dust settles a bit, they’re going to start thinking about Donald Trump as president, and I think that’s going to be a very powerful push toward voting for Hillary,” said Col Owens, a Democratic Party official in Kenton County, Ky., and a Clinton supporter.

These optimistic Democrats also point to Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is widely expected to endorse Clinton as soon as Sanders concedes. She would play a pivotal role shepherding Sanders voters, who share her progressive views, to the Clinton fold.

And the cold hard math of the matter is Clinton has won more states — clocking victories in 23 to the 19 Sanders has won before Tuesday’s votes. Overall, Clinton has earned more than 12.5 million votes versus less than 9.5 million for Sanders, according to a tally by Real Clear Politics. Some polling supports the Democratic talking point that Trump will help unite Democrats as well: A CNN poll earlier this month found that Sanders supporters favored Clinton over Trump 86-to-10.

“I’ve been saying for awhile that Bernie is the first presidential candidate that I actually felt wasn’t the lesser of two evils since I’ve been voting,” said Patrick Flanary of Louisville, Ky., who voted for Sanders in Tuesday’s primary. “Nonetheless, I do feel that if in a general election it’s Trump versus Hillary, I will definitely vote for Hillary because I think Trump doesn’t stand for anything I stand for.”

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Trump Takes on Wacky Warren



Liberals everywhere are totally freaked out about Donald Trump's presidential nomination. Since liberals first instinct is to find an authority figure to explain it all to them, they've sought out nutty Senator Elizabeth Warren. who's taken to bashing Donald Trump. Trump, an avid user of social media, is probably as sick and tired of seeing Elizabeth Warren on his Facebook feed as the rest of us, so this week he fired back:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is not reining in his attacks against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked Trump if “he had been chided by any Republicans” for his Twitter war with the Democratic senator, the presumptive nominee said, “You mean Pocahontas?” Trump earlier this week fired off insults on Twitter, calling the senator “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”

In March, Trump attacked Warren for saying she was part Native American while a professor at Harvard.

“You mean the Indian?” Trump said then when asked about Warren.
Trump's response is indicative of a new way of doing things on the right. For better or worse, he's not interested in winning rigged policy fights with people who, for decades, accused Republicans of things like 1) throwing grandparents out in the cold 2) hating the poor, and 3) wanting children to starve. In the past, Republicans offered the sort of tepid, lukewarm responses that lent credibility to those notions. In writing Warren off as "Pocahontas," Trump is treating her ideology with the total lack of respect it deserves.

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Trump's Secret? Religion

The relationship between crowd and leader  tells us a lot about the charisma of the leader, which is reflected in the enthusiasm of the crowd, and the way that enthusiasm is—or isn’t—expressed by the crowd. The dynamic give-and-take between charismatic leader and enthusiastic crowd had its first modern incarnation in the city of Fiume (now Rijeka) on the Adriatic coast after the First World War.  The city was taken over by a ragtag army following Italy’s greatest war hero, the decadent poet-warrior Gabriele D’Annunzio. I wrote a book about the 18 months when Fiume held out against pretty much the rest of the world.  D’Annunzio’s exchanges with the crowd were clearly based on Catholic rituals, reminding us that political ritual owes a lot to religion.  That remains true today.

I think Rush is right when he tells his listeners that Trump’s popularity has little to do with political issues. Yes, immigration is an important theme, but the main thing about Trump is himself.  He excites a lot of people, there’s a sort of magic at work at his rallies, and his followers are wild about him.  He’s the only candidate who is really charismatic; nobody goes to a Hillary or Bernie rally because they expect to be thrilled and inspired.

Which leaves me with two strong convictions about this election.

First, Trump’s incoherence on issue after issue matters less than it would for the others.  His crowd wants him, not necessarily his platform.  They want the anti-pol.  His chances of success depend on his ability to retain the magic he’s shown to date.

Second, although I’m talking about an intensely emotional and in many ways irrational phenomenon, it is driven by real and very rational contempt for the current ruling class.

Yes it’s funny that a man who doesn’t much care about religion is in large part a religious leader, but it’s quite a common historical phenomenon.  And sometimes such leaders are triumphant.

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How Wendy's is Handling the Raise in the Minimum Wage

Fast-food workers have engaged in the #FightFor15 for quite a while now, but one chain has a different way of ensuring that labor costs remain low without having to raise the cost of a product. Wendy's plans on installing self-service kiosks at over 6,000 locations to replace cashiers. This is in response to laws mandating higher wages.

Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.

It will be up to franchisees whether to deploy the labor-saving technology, but Wendy’s President Todd Penegor did note that some franchise locations have been raising prices to offset wage hikes.

McDonald’s (MCD) has been testing self-service kiosks. But Wendy’s, which has been vocal about embracing labor-saving technology, is launching the biggest potential expansion.

Wendy’s Penegor said company-operated stores, only about 10% of the total, are seeing wage inflation of 5% to 6%, driven both by the minimum wage and some by the need to offer a competitive wage “to access good labor.”

Yikes. Kiosks, of course, do the job of a human at the cost of $0 per hour.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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