The Never Bernie Apocalypse is Coming

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These Democrats are feeling Berned out.

Democratic donors and party insiders are warning that large swaths of their voters could stay home — or even defect to Trump — if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders snags the nomination.

“I’ll still put a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on my car, but a lot of people won’t,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a Democratic think tank not aligned with any candidate. “They’ll say ‘I don’t like Donald Trump, but I don’t like Sanders either. We survived four years of Trump, maybe we’ll survive another four years.’ They’ll stay home, vote third party, or vote for Trump.”

An insider working with Mike Bloomberg’s campaign agreed: “I think that there is a very real ‘Never Bernie’ sentiment amongst both the donor class and moderate, centrist Democrats, or what I would call regular Democrats. Bloomberg and Pete [Buttigieg] and [Joe] Biden, who represent the heart and soul of the party — their supporters are not as apt to support someone like Bernie.”

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Among insiders there is near-universal belief that Sanders’ card carrying socialist credentials could create enormous problems with suburban and older voters — both of whom tend to be wealthier than the general population. While millennials are evenly split between socialism or capitalism, only 39 percent of Generation Xers and 32 percent of Baby Boomers held favorable views of “socialism,” according to a November 2019 Gallup poll.

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