storyteller
Veteran
Just gonna repost this; the amount of Bernie voter defections falls in line with typical Primary voter shifts. Comey's Letter, Russian Propaganda, Gerrymandering, Poor campaign decisions by the Clinton team all played roles in this and three of those are outliers compared to the typical election...I was a "vote your conscience if you're in a clear blue state only" guy; but focusing on fighting and alienating potential allies while the Republicans stack the odds even more in their favor is ass backwards.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/5458...voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/5458...voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds
A more important caveat, perhaps, is that other statistics suggest that this level of "defection" isn't all that out of the ordinary. Believing that all those Sanders voters somehow should have been expected to not vote for Trump may be to misunderstand how primary voters behave.
For example, Schaffner tells NPR that around 12 percent of Republican primary voters (including 34 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich voters and 11 percent of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio voters) ended up voting for Clinton. And according to one 2008 study, around 25 percent of Clinton primary voters in that election ended up voting for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the general. (In addition, the data showed 13 percent of McCain primary voters ended up voting for Obama, and 9 percent of Obama voters ended up voting for McCain — perhaps signaling something that swayed voters between primaries and the general election, or some amount of error in the data, or both.)