Why I’m #NeverBernie

4 min readJan 30, 2019

With the 2020 presidential election just around the corner, the Democrats are already announcing their bids. Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Julian Castro, and Peter Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, have all announced presidential runs. And, if the rumors are true, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is set to announce a 2020 presidential run.

This set off a firestorm on social media with the hastag #NeverBernie trending on Twitter. And I was one of the many flamethrowers.

I didn’t always have such strong negative feelings towards Sanders. In fact, I paid very little attention to him during the 2016 primaries. I thought that Sanders’ positions were appealing enough but, being passionate about Hillary, had no intention of voting for him. I figured that Sanders was a quixotic flash in the pan — mounting a challenge to push Clinton more to the left on certain issues or, at worst, angling for an eventual position in her cabinet — who would quickly step aside once he lost the primaries.

Then Sanders supporters made death threats against Nevada’s Democrat chair after she invalidated their caucus votes in accordance with party rules. And Sanders initially refused to apologize for the behavior of these (mostly white) men.

Then Sanders refused to suspend his campaign after being mathematically eliminated — then took four long months to officially endorse Clinton.

By the time Sanders began to urge his followers not to waste their votes by writing his name in, it was too late. While many of Sanders’ supporters did cast their votes for Clinton, entirely too many of them backed Jill Stein of the Green Party (who never had an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning anyway) and more than ten percent of them defected to Team Trump. Some of them stayed home. These defectors siphoned off just enough votes from Clinton to give Donald Trump an Electoral College victory.

Once all the postmortems of Clinton’s DOA presidential run had been conducted, it became clear that Bernie had been an overlooked contributing cause of death. And now, more than two years since Black Tuesday 2016, Bernie Sanders still hasn’t accepted any real responsibility for his role in creating the crisis that America is experiencing right now.

Why is Bernie to blame?

First, Sanders is not a Democrat. When Sanders ran for president in 2016, he siphoned the money and resources of the Democratic Party away from Hillary Clinton, a woman who had been a Democrat her entire adult life while he maintained his status as an independent. Even more galling is Bernie’s attitude (and the attitude of his die-hard supporters) that he does not actually have to join the Democratic Party, that his habit of caucusing with Democrats (while simultaneously disparaging the party) absolves him of the very real responsibility of contributing to the Democratic Party. Raising money for the party and campaigning for lesser-known Democrats are just two of the things that Democratic politicians do to sustain the party. Bernie has never never been much of a team player in that regard.

Second, Sanders actively sowed dissension on the left. When it became clear that he would lose the primaries, Sanders and his surrogates and supporters began relentlessly pushing “the Democratic primaries are rigged” narrative, intensifying voter apathy and political cynicism.

Last, but most importantly, the overt sexism and racism of his supporters — and Sanders’ refusal to address it in any meaningful way — disgusted me. More than that, it was the sense of aggrieved entitlement that undergirded those attitudes that was so off-putting. Sociologists found that many white Sanders supporters agreed with the statements that white people are discriminated against. And the Sanders’ supporters I’ve interacted with online keep decrying “identity politics.”