Why Bernie or Bust Will be a Bust
On July 26, the Democratic convention officially nominated Hillary Clinton for the November presidential election. Some Bernie Sanders supporters were outraged by the announcement, and have since created the movement they are calling ‘Bernie or Bust’.
Members of this movement, dubbed ‘Bernie or Busters’ online, refuse to vote for Clinton in the November election, and are instead voting mostly for green party candidate Jill Stein. Sanders and Stein share many of the same policies regarding Sanders’ political revolution.
The Bernie or Bust movement has gained a large following; their Facebook Group has almost 22,000 members, all of whom refuse to support Clinton in November. The description of the group reads “This is for people who support Bernie Sanders with no compromise. We do NOT go soft on pointing out Hillary hypocrisies. We make a point of pointing out the vast differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The slogan VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO is not welcome in this group. This is for hard-core Bernie Sanders supporters, this is for people who want an economic and political revolution.”
While the Bernie or Bust movement has a large following, history shows that it will be almost impossible to keep Clinton or Trump out of the Oval Office by voting third-party. No third-party candidate has ever won the presidential election, and the closest a third-party has ever come to the White House was in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt left the Republican Party to join the Bull Moose Party he created. Roosevelt came in second place with 88 electoral votes, losing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson.
Sanders’ political revolution would greatly benefit our country. Over the past years our economy has gone downhill, putting us trillions of dollars in debt.
While supporters believe that Sanders’ political revolution is the best option for our country, Stein is not the candidate to deliver that revolution. Stein has lost seven elections ranging from town elections to the 2012 presidential election, where she only received 0.4% of votes.
Running against a well-known politician and someone as famous as Donald Trump, Stein doesn’t stand a chance. Both candidates have most of a major political party voting for them, while Stein has to rely on a smaller party and a select few Bernie Sanders supporters.
To speak mathematically, even if 80% of Sanders supporters voted third-party, there would not be enough of a following to give Clinton’s campaign a real threat. While Sanders and Clinton were neck-in-neck during primaries, Stein would not have gained enough of Sanders’ supporters to vote for her to overpower Clinton’s (or more importantly Trump’s) massive following.
The upcoming elections are no longer the time to attempt to implement a political revolution. It’s the time to keep the greatest threat to America’s government and economy out of the White House, and that is not Hillary Clinton — it’s Donald Trump.
Trump’s idea of “Making America Great Again” is to build a wall to keep Mexican immigrants out of America because they are supposedly taking the hard-working American’s jobs. However, large amounts of the construction workers Trump uses to build his hotels are immigrants from Mexico. He also claims that he would run America like a business, but do we really need a man who will let his business fail yet still brag about his success?
Trump often boasts about his financial success in Atlantic City; however most of his casinos have gone underground. But while his businesses are tanking, Trump is prospering. He uses little of his own money, relying mostly on his investors. He also transferred his personal debts to the casinos instead of dealing with it himself. So when his casinos inevitably went underground, the downfall of his failure in Atlantic City fell on his investors.
If Trump intends to run this like a business, how can we as a country expect him to act differently than he does with his businesses? Will we, the people, be the ones dealing with the aftermath of his failed presidency? From what he’s shown us in the past through his failed casinos, I can only assume we will be the ones left to mend our broken relationships with foreign nations as well as the people within our country.
Trump would not even attempt to implement one-eighth of the policies that Sanders intended to implement during his presidency, while Clinton would implement many of the policies, some slightly different than Sanders would have. As a Republican, Trump held issues of immigration and same-sex marriage as being of higher importance than free education or trying to pull America out of a recession.
While Sanders would have made a great president, it is time to accept the fact that he is no longer a candidate, and it is time to turn to our best option to keep Trump out of office. While I wish it could be Stein, it’s Clinton, and that is something that these ‘Bernie or Busters’ need to accept.
