I didn't hear anything about Democrats suppressing Bernie Sanders voters.
Were you paying attention to both the 2016 and 2020 Dem primaries? I followed both closely and have a massive library of instances stored in my memory. I'm not going to go into too much detail, because it's not important to anyone that doesn't have a need for the establishment candidate to be legitimate, but look into the voter roll purges in Brooklyn during the 2016 primary and how they were found to be illegal and where places like Arizona cut their polling locations to around a 1/3 right before the primaries. These are some of the things I was talking about.
A lot of those Bernie Sanders voters online were just actors meant to sow discord because Foreign adversaries know that Bernie Sanders was the weakest candidate. Bernie Sanders has great ideas but he sucks at promoting them. The thing you have to understand is conservatives have spent decades selling the narrative that Socialism = Communism. Boomers are scared stiff of Bernie Sanders so of course they would vote for Trump. The thought of sharing is just that toxic to them after years of believing a certain narrative.
This is just nonsense. His policies routinely poll favorably among the public and he was the one who brought the conversation and spotlight to things like student debt and healthcare. These aren't pie in the sky ideas or radical proposals or even Socialism, but Social Democracy. He can label himself as a Socialist all he wants, but these are found in most Capitalist societies and are the bare minimum required for a stable society under Capitalism.
You also have the Cuba and Venezuelan community that lived through a twisted version of socialism or heard of it from those who lived it. (Though a lot who fled were the wealthy middle and upper classes so they are more likely to be conservative). So Bernie Sanders was a shackle to Joe Biden in Florida, he didn't mean to but the association along with Trump's aggressive ground game in the Latinx community made Biden lose Florida
That's what the current establishment narrative is, but that's not what the numbers show.
www.nytimes.com
Scrolling down to the race and ethnicity poll we can see that whites were the overwhelming majority who voted. And that the overwhelming majority of them went to Biden. And that while Biden still took the Hispanic vote, Bernie did take a significant chunk. You can scroll a little further down to race and age to see that Bernie took sizable margins from younger black and Hispanic voters, showing that there's a major age split.
Scrolling down to Household Income we can see that hardly any of the voters were under $30,000. If the average household income is $30,000 then that means who even bothered to show up was the wealthier members of society. Not exactly surprising given that this was at the height of pandemic fear and lots of polling locations were severely understaffed or outright abandoned in poorer districts.
Scrolling further down to "Which of the following best describes the area where you live?" we can see that it is overwhelmingly urban and that the majority are suburban. This is incredibly telling as to which demographic was most interested in the primary outcome and of course Biden walked off with the lion's share.
Scrolling down to the final and perhaps most important poll that is "Which is more important to your vote in the Democratic presidential primary?" we can see that the choices are basically "Do you want things to go back to normal?" or "Do you want a revolution?". And the majority who voted were those that wanted things to go back to normal and the overwhelming majority of those went to Biden. This is perhaps the most telling of what types of people vote for Biden.
Putting those together and we can say that Biden's constituency in Florida is predominately wealthy white suburbanites who want to keep the status quo. And where Bernie made significant inroads were Hispanics. One thing to note is that this is where Bernie's campaign was in the middle of collapsing, so there was likely a major depression in turnout among his supporters during the height of pandemic paranoia.
Of course that doesn't get into who those Hispanics were buuut
One of the most notable early results on Election Night came from Florida's heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade county. President Donald Trump lost it to President-elect Joe Biden by just 7 points, after losing it by 29 points in 2016.
www.cnn.com
we can see that this was a nation wide surge. Particularly interesting is the Bronx, AOC territory, where Biden had the worst margins since 1992. And that's not an area I would call being scared of Socialism.
Overall, Biden won on a wealthy white suburban vote. Bernie Sanders won heavily with a minority, particularly Hispanic, coalition towards the beginning of the primary. Both Trump and Bernie lost white voters while making gains in minority voters. Biden had losses in every demographic sans white suburbans relative to Hillary Clinton. Hispanics went heavily for Hillary in both the primary and general while she lost white men in particular. Bernie of course had a rural white majority in 2016 that fled in 2020.
Going by the Dems' ideas on race and politics this would lead to things being less Trump and Bernie being good with minorities and more that Biden was utterly repellent to anything that wasn't a white wealthy suburbanite. And it would also make absolutely no sense that these demographics wildly swung between several candidates with starkly different ideologies and backgrounds. Hispanics would have had to effectively go from a airbrushed and polished faux progressive establishment type, to a "radical" "socialist" working class hero, to a bombastic shooting from the hip conservative billionaire. And the Dem rationale for all of these various demographics swinging so wildly is getting increasingly ridiculous with entire swaths of two time Obama voters suddenly turning racist and minorities being "religious conservatives" that just suddenly decided to vote against their interests.
However, you can rectify this by applying something that the Democrats bend over backwards to avoid, which is to apply class analysis. I've already done a fair amount of that above, but needless to say Bernie and Trump are working class heroes while Biden is a bourgeoisie favorite. It's also rural vs urban as well. Rural got redder while urban got bluer. Said in other way, the working class rural Ds went R and the suburban Rs went D.
Who are predominately the poorest classes in the US? Non-whites. Who have the suburbs generally voted for in recent history? Republicans. Who does revolution appeal to more? Those currently being oppressed by the system. Who does "going back to normal" appeal to more? Those who are currently benefiting from the system. Who does "Make America Great Again" appeal to more? People who have a problem with the way things currently are. Who does "Nothing will fundamentally change" appeal to? People who think things are fine the way they are.
This isn't hard for people who don't have an emotional bias towards Democrats being the heroes of the working class and oppressed. The Democrats built their narrative around anti-populism and "returning to normal" and subsequently dropped the Progressive pandering Hillary tried and drew a clear line between them and "Socialism" and Progressives. And their reward was the suburban Reaganites that the weird tangents in this thread were alluding to. It was ultimately hardcore suburban republicans that gave Biden the victory.
Meanwhile, Trump, being the political idiot he is, decided to try appeals to establishment normalcy with the whole law and order gimmick that Mr. Omnibus Crime Bill himself was naturally going to fulfill better. He failed to realize that people voted for him because he brought chaos to the system and they wanted him to burn it down.
And this is further supported by the fact that the Dems lost seats in the House and may or may not gain any in the Senate. It's pretty clear to me that these new Rs that voted D only did so to remove Trump and don't have any actual allegiance to the party as of now. If these wealthy suburbanites want things to stay the same then getting Trump out is more important than party allegiance as the GOP failed to quash the populist rebellion in their party.
This then completely kills the narrative that Bernie, "Socialism", BLM, and Progressives hurt Biden and the Democrats in any way. Those that would be opposed to those were Biden's strongest demographics. He would have lost in the same way Hillary did without them. The narrative that the insurgents in the party are what is hurting the party is already a very self-serving narrative for Dem leadership as it is. So of course they're going to jump to that to explain their poor showing, rather than admit their strategy is wrong.
Because the Democrats ultimately align with the Bourgeoisie materially, politically, and culturally. They can't disguise their profound hatred and disgust towards the poor and working class, they refuse to admit that the current system isn't working for the constituents they're supposed to serve, and their policies over the last several decades have been highly destructive to said classes. It's only natural they would take advantage of the current populist surge to juxtapose as defenders of "normalcy" and try to ditch the Left for these wealthy Republicans.
Which also is why it's equally hilarious that Progressives sold out to these guys and think they're going to push them left.
No, the Democrats are the bad guys this time around. There's no way even the mediocrities that plague the party can be this ignorant. They know exactly what they're doing and the messaging has been very clear and explicit that they are firmly opposed to making any changes. Enough so that suburban Republicans felt comfortable enough to defect. And the consequence is losing the demographics they claim to serve.
And that spells major trouble for the Democrats going forward. The new Republican gains aren't guaranteed to hold, but they likely permanently lost those that fled them. It depends on whether the GOP can suppress their new working class base or whether a more competent populist can take Trump's place or Trump somehow manages to rally if he decides to run again.
news.google.com
www.cnn.com