Sabato Opinion Column tells Hillary to quit blaming Sanders

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Some prominent paras -

Moreover, when Sanders said “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails” at the first primary debate, he unilaterally disarmed himself of one of the strongest arguments against Clinton: that her (and her husband’s) history of dwelling in that gray zone between legality and impropriety made her vulnerable in the general election. Sanders might have won if he hammered home the message that Clinton was unelectable. Based on the CCES data, 36% of her primary voters described themselves as liberal and 9% as very liberal — surely some of them were voting for a candidate that they thought was most likely to win in November than the one they best aligned with politically.

Sanders admitted that after the April 26 primaries that he was mathematically eliminated (the Democratic Party practice of allowing formally unpledged superdelegates to vote for a nominee makes such determinations inexact) and was only staying in the race to influence the party platform, eventually dropping out and endorsing Clinton two months later, a couple of weeks after she clinched a majority of delegates. So, Sanders behaved exactly as many other eliminated primary challengers, including Clinton herself. Blaming a loss on normal behavior is disingenuous and, in this case, hypocritical.

The second allegation is also easy to disprove. Sanders fully endorsed Clinton at the convention. He campaigned for her regularly and told his supporters not to support third parties. Contrast this behavior to Cruz, who in a primetime convention speech told his supporters to vote their conscience (a rebuke of Trump that led to boos in the convention hall) while Kasich didn’t attend the convention, never endorsed Trump, and wrote in John McCain for his vote. Trump has a far better case that Kasich and Cruz let Clinton get too close than Clinton has a case that Sanders cost her the presidency.

The third allegation is more serious than the other two, so it requires a bit of unpacking. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails disparaging Bernie Sanders and his supporters, asking if there was a way to thwart him in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries, calling him a liar, and generally being dismissive of his campaign. However, Sanders never walked back his support of Clinton. The blame here really belongs on a) the parties behind the disclosure and b) the inept leadership of the DNC, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In 2008 and 2012 Barack Obama won with potentially durable majorities, and all Clinton really needed to do was get the same voters to back a Democratic candidate for a third time. However, faced with the prospect of a crass and corrupt Republican nominee, she tried to broaden the Democratic electorate as much as possible instead of trying to consolidate Obama’s base, ignoring states in the “Blue Wall” like Michigan and Wisconsin and diverting resources to areas she didn’t really need to win like Arizona and Georgia.