I find it weird that all this conversation just assumes that Sanders is hurting Clinton by staying in the race. By staying in the race Sander is keeping young people who traditionally have very low voter turnout engaged in politics. Voter turnout for the university aged is 30% in a good year. The Bernie or Bust people aren’t largely people who would have voted Clinton if Sanders hadn’t been around to draw them away, they are largely people who wouldn’t have voted at all if Sanders hadn’t been there to draw them in.
I’m not finding a lot of good stats - just scattered mentions in articles here and there - but to use an example you can find figures like youth accounting for 18% of Nevada democratic primary turnout rather than the 13% they accounted for in 2008 (when, if you’ll recall, Obama was also mobilizing youth vote). If you look at the turnout numbers, that 5% isn’t just a shift in demographics, it’s extra people voting who wouldn’t have. Sanders took 8 in 10 of those voters. If even 10% of those who wouldn’t have come out to vote get a taste for voting from being energized about sanders, that would be a 0.5% edge in the election for the democrats, which on a national level is the kind of edge that translates to a virtual automatic win.
Sanders is not sabotaging Clinton’s campaign, he is campaigning to win. Obviously if he beat Clinton for the nomination that would “greatly” hurt Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency, but if he doesn’t win (and it looks very unlikely that he will) then he is almost certain helping her.
Clinton, on the other hand, is sabotaging her own chances drastically by viewing Sanders and his campaign as her enemy. Maybe Clinton felt like she had to call Sanders supporters stupid children in order to beat Sanders (though I can’t imagine how it helped her at all) but by doing so she hurt herself in the general. Maybe establishment democrats felt it was somehow important (again, why?) to them to paint Sanders supporters as violent in Nevada when they were not violent, but it alienated people who would have been democratic voters had they not done it.
At this point, Clinton could be talking about how she really learned something by from the Sanders campaign. She could be saying Sanders is an important voice in American politics. She could be praising the passion of his supporters and saying that their ideas are very important to the democratic party. She could be saying that she was so happy to see how many young people were coming out to vote for Sanders, because it’s so important for young people to vote, and that she understood why they supported Sanders and she wouldn’t let them down as president.
This approach would get her votes. Instead, we see petulance and punishment of people who dared to disagree with her. Less from her and more from her supporters, but it still stings, and she could be setting a better tone.
I’m not saying, “Be nice because being nice is nice.” I’m saying she’s running one of the shittiest campaigns I’ve ever seen and throwing votes away for no fucking reason - it’s just spite against a person who dared to disagree. And somehow this is Sanders’ fault. Well, I agree that if Sanders’ hadn’t run then we wouldn’t have seen how Clinton chose to surround herself with stupid, spiteful people run amok who would rather throw youth votes away than string three nice words together. But why did she surround herself with these people? Why is she playing along?
With hindsight we can see Clinton had the nomination in the bag the whole time. All she had to do was act like it and campaign for the general instead of campaigning against her own voters.
