“toxicity of his supporters”
For the trillionth time: Bernie Bros are a myth. When people talk about “Bernie Bros,” they’re mostly referencing Bernie supporters on Twitter, which doesn’t have the same norms as offline interaction and moderated forums. People are more abrasive and confrontational in general. There’s a greater tendency to dogpile just because of the nature of the platform.
Every campaign has a tiny fringe of supporters who are toxic, including Warren’s. It is remarkably consistent from campaign to campaign—about 3 percent to be exact. That tiny fringe is larger in Bernie’s case because his supporters are young and more online. It seems like less of a problem for Biden because his supporters are mostly old and not on Twitter, but if I had to I could easily find a few.
Here is a sample of Biden supporters calling Lucy Flores a liar and a bitch for talking about how Joe touched her inappropriately and it made her feel uncomfortable.
It’s easy to take a few screencaps of random Twitter accounts with 10 followers saying some hateful, sexist or racist stuff and then make it seem like a pattern. It’s especially easy if there are multiple trusted media outlets doing
A Harvard grad student analyzed nearly 7 million tweets to arrive at that figure of 2 to 3 percent
The idea of the “Bernie Bro” is a hackneyed political attack first workshopped by the Clinton campaign in 2008—the “Obama Boys”—then deployed in 2016, then again by the Clintonite consultants who went to work for Warren, then by billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg and Bret Stephens and MSNBC and every other mainstream outlet that tries
Katie Halper did a good thread about it:
I also wrote about it after that New York Times piece about “Bernie’s Internet Army” dropped.
That piece used as a source Candace Aiston, a Warren supporter, a notorious troll who says stuff like “Bernie supporters all have little dicks” and then plays victim when Bernie supporters predictably dogpile her and send pictures of her with corncobs photoshopped on her eyelids.
It also quotes Sady Doyle, who made an unhinged claim that columnist Liz Bruenig created an alt account to send her death threats. The Times reported on the death threat as if it definitely came from a Bernie supporter, when there was zero evidence it actually did, but then they left off the part about where she accused a journalist of trying to murder her baby.
But yes, do go on about the “toxicity of Bernie supporters.”
You talk about Warren’s supporters as if they were a monolith. Some Warren supporters went to Biden, but the ones who were genuinely about progressive politics went over to Bernie. It’s not a hard choice.
At the same time, a huge swath of Warren’s supporters were just Clinton supporters like Doyle and Aiston who backed Warren purely for shallow “Not another old white man” reasons. They have a grudge against Bernie held over from 2016, so when given a choice between a genuine leftist and a reactionary like Biden, they chose the not-Bernie candidate.
It’s hard to imagine people making political choices for such petty reasons, but people do it all the time. A lot of the same people who supported Warren in 2020 would hate her guts now if she had run against Clinton in 2016.
Warren failed as a candidate because she couldn’t pick a lane. Period. When she was ascendant in the polls, the Clintonites advising her told her that she needed to position herself as a sensible alternative to Bernie, then steer a middle course between the center and the left.
Her path to victory, or so she thought, was to try and contest the progressive lane by punching left, which she did with all this ginned up nonsense that you reference about the call script and claiming Bernie said a woman couldn’t be president. Voters could see that for what it was: A smear. It hurt her credibility just like that stuff about not having a SuperPAC—and then almost immediately getting a SuperPAC almost entirely funded by a Silicon Valley executive (who also funded the campaign of Joe Arpaio.)
She should have contested the progressive lane by hitting Biden on the one thing she was uniquely positioned to hit him on: the bankruptcy bill. The could have actually gained on that. If she had done that and hewn more closely to Bernie’s version of M4A, she’d probably be in the lead right now. I guarantee you that zero Bernie supporters would have a hard time choosing between her and Biden.
If Warren’s supporters want to fight for the progressive cause, then fight for it. Don’t be a bunch of deadenders lobbing bombs at the only progressive left in the race.
