Senate Intel Committee Confirms the Obvious: The “Or Bust” Movement Was Fake

Bernie Sanders got an impressive 14 million votes in 2016. He ran a fairly successful campaign, the outcome not withstanding. When the race came to an end, and he endorsed Hillary Clinton and spoke to her credentials in Philadelphia at the Democratic National Convention, the attention of Democrats turned to making sure as many of his supporters as possible voted for Clinton. There were serious fears that the #DemExit and #BernieOrBust movements would kill Hillary Clinton. Polls suggested this really wasn’t a big issue though- 90% of Sanders supporters supported Hillary by that point, meaning close to 13 million of the 14 million “BernieCrats” were already in the Democratic column. When Clinton narrowly lost the 2016 election though, questions rose anew as she struggled with the same demographics in the general election as in the primaries. Some even suggested the polls may have been wrong about Sanders supporters, because it “felt” like the “or Bust” crowd was bigger than they said.

Recently, the Senate Intelligence Committee cleared all of that up for us. We in fact learned that Russian Bots not only helped spread the Trump message on Facebook and Twitter, but also did so in the primary season on the behalf of Bernie- or more succinctly, against Hillary Clinton. In neither case did the Senate Intelligence Committee say Russia colluded with the campaigns of Trump or Sanders against Clinton, but rather that they acted to harm Clinton’s campaign throughout, by posing as supporters of Trump or Sanders and attacking Clinton in targeted ways to divide her off from Sanders’ backing Democrats and voters who traditionally would be Democrats. In short, Russia was anybody but Clinton, and that included Bernie.

What is the lesson to be learned here? There is much more unity of opinion on the left than we think. The so-called deep divisions on the left are as much a creation of anti-progressive and liberal forces as they are genuine divide- and the Democratic Party should not indulge their worst behavior. While there will be fights over how socially liberal or how economically progressive the party should be, and how far we should let moderates stray in different regions of the country, 90% of activists who supported either Clinton or Sanders are in agreement that the Democratic Party should stand up for the less fortunate and should defend the rights of the oppressed, regardless of their primary support. It is not time to back the bus up over our base, or change the very identity of the Democratic Party- it’s time to get back to where we were in 2008, fighting in every corner of America to make our message heard to all people- because our message is better.