Lol. Not even Warren
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is feeling the Bern.
The freshman congresswoman plans to endorse Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president at a rally in New York on Saturday, the Sanders campaign told NBC News.
Another member of "the squad," Rep. Ilhan Omar, announced on Tuesday night that she is endorsing Sanders. The other two members are Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
In case its not obvious, Sander is NOT the DNC. He is notably the "protest vote" for those who want to pull the DNC left, a group that Trump has helped grow, but that is still marginal. Its a wing of his support, not his actual support (see below)
"The fierce loyalty Bernie Sanders inspires in his supporters is creating a dilemma for the Democratic Party.
For a sliver of Sanders’ base, it’s Bernie or bust. They may detest President Donald Trump, but they didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton and they’re not sure they’ll back the Democratic nominee in 2020 if Sanders isn’t on the ballot. They’re willing do whatever it takes to push the party to adopt his ideas.
“Sometimes things have to get ugly before they get better,” said Melissa Mallaber, a 46-year-old social worker who attended Sanders’ rally in Pittsburgh on Sunday. “There’s such a thing as necessary evils in life to restore the balance.”
Small Margins
Such disaffected voters who are hostile to the Democratic establishment appear to be only a narrow slice of the Vermont senator’s base.
In 2016, a portion of them backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the general election. While Stein barely got one percent of the vote overall, that amounted to 132,000 ballots across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three pivotal states Trump won by a collective margin of about 77,000 votes. Sanders rallied in all three states last weekend.
"It’s a pretty small minority of his support," said Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal activist group Democracy For America. "But when you’re dealing with an election that was as close in terms of raw votes in 2016, every vote matters. And so that matters."
