In a sign that the Democratic Party has not quite recovered from the defeat of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, Fox News Insider is reporting that a group of Bernie Sanders supporters is preparing to bolt the party. Depending on how serious the effort is, the move to create the “People’s Party” could be damaging for the long term prospects for the Democrats as they attempt to regain power.
Sanders supporters have long-standing grievances
Sanders, an independent socialist senator from Vermont, mounted an insurgent campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the choice of the Democratic establishment. Sanders eventually lost, but many of his supporters believe that the Democratic Party establishment rigged the game against their candidate. A number of hacked emails that showed up in Wikileaks, showing Democratic National Committee members plotting ways to undercut Sanders, would tend to buttress that belief.
Ironically, the hacked emails that demonstrate DNC malfeasance has fed into Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she was robbed of the election by a conspiracy that included Russian hackers working in concert with Trump campaign officials.
In effect, the Democrats are roiled in dueling conspiracy theories, pointing fingers at one another and others to find blame for their loss of power.
The People’s Party looks to the future
In the meantime, the Sanders supporters who are advocating going third party accuse Hillary Clinton supporters of focusing on the past by chewing over excuses for her defeat in 2016. The People’s Party claims that they are looking toward the future.
The future, if the plans for the third party start to take off, starts in 2018 with running candidates in the midterm elections. While such efforts have tended to fall short in the past, the move has every potential of splitting the liberal vote and redounding to the benefit of the Republicans who are keen to maintain their control of Congress.
Farther in the future, the People’s Party would almost certainly like to run Bernie Sanders as their candidate for president in 2020. The problem is that Sanders will not only be in his late 70s, and thus even more incredibly old for a presidential candidate, but has also shown no inclination to run again, particularly since a third party candidate.
Still, a victory for these liberal schismatic rebels may not so much consist of actually winning elections as it will punishing the Democrats. To be sure, none of them are particular fans of Donald Trump. But Trump is an honest enemy from the point of view of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Democratic establishment, in their opinion, stabbed them in the back and that is something that can never be forgiven.