To be clear, I don’t buy that there’s any real tightening in the race between Clinton and Trump. But TPM Reader BL still has a point …
I agree that the shift in the polls, though it may not prove durable, should not be dismissed out of hand. Quite possibly, we are seeing the readiness of a large swathe of white Americans to vote for literally anybody. Under these conditions, the future course taken by Bernie Sanders becomes more important than ever. His supporters, in my view, have seriously damaged Clinton, not by supporting Sanders, but by flooding social media with claims that she is corrupt. By doing so, they have amplified her negatives. Nonetheless,Clinton is still virtually certain to become the nominee. If Sanders really supports her, she should win. If he withholds real support, he greatly increases the chances of a very close election and of a political catastrophe of unfathomable dimensions.
Sanders may be leading a ‘movement’. He’s already succeeded at nudging Clinton to the left, though we shouldn’t lose sight of the degree she’d moved before Sanders got in. But his biggest supporters online have been far more driven by destroying Hillary Clinton either as weird convoluted psychological payback for things that happened decades ago or out of the old puristic, sectarian-left self-actualization performance art.
Destroying Hillary Clinton really doesn’t count as a movement.
