To Sanders supporters FROM a Sanders supporter: please stop saying Bernie should've got the nom.

[Ken Burch]

131. Bernie wasn't mathematically eliminated on Super Tuesday.

Most people hadn't even had the chance to vote yet.

And it would not have led to anything good for any of the party's demographics OR our chances of victory in the fall for the choice of nominee to vanish at that moment.

And withdrawing then would have permanently surrendering in the fight for the agenda his supporters(and most of the party's rank-and-file) want on economic issues.

Why should everyone have been forced, from that night on, to settle for voting for the least-progressive(progressive, but still the least in that regard) in the race? Making the rest of the primaries a coronation couldn't have increased our vote in the fall...and neither could a convention with no debate or the safest and most innocuous platform possible? The voters didn't reject us in the Upper Midwest because we weren't similar enough to the GOP.

We never do better as a result of the nomination being settled early. 1984 proves that. 1988 proves that. 2000 proves that. So does 2004. In each of those cases, the preferred candidate of the party establishment was imposed early...and in each case, doing that and making our platform as bland as possible led to disappointment. In each case, we could have done MUCH better in the fall if our strategy had bene a passionate and unapologetic call for real change.

While he made strategic mistakes, Bernie honestly and sincerely sought the presidency-and was fighting for his principles, principles shared by millions. There HAD to be an anticorporate pro-economic justice candidate in the primaries.

His campaign was about the issues of the day. If the party had added that agenda to the anti-oppression agenda(or even honored majority opinion among all demographics in the party and put a "No TPP" pledge in the platform), we would have won solidly. And this could have been done without nominating Bernie.

And, with the Clinton campaign utterly unwilling to negotiate on the platform before Philly, staying in was the only way Bernie could get any of what his supporters(and the majority of the party)wanted on economics into the platform.

But this is all off of the point:

We're DONE with the 2016 election now. And in this thread, I called on Sanders supporters to be less divisive and to find a better way to communicate with other Democrats and other progressives. I posted it in GD so it would have the greatest impact. Why couldn't you just accept that my intentions really ARE that straightforward and honest? Why were you so obsessed with disrupting this thread and making what you had to know were false accusations about my purpose in starting it?