Bernie or Trumpers is such an insignificant portion of whoever ended up voting. And even more paltry in comparison to the number of black voters he could have picked up with better messaging and rhetoric. He got 43% of the democratic primary vote. I refuse to believe any notion that suggests massive crowds of people would have up and walked out of his rallies had he communicated social justice reforms more succinctly like he did in that video. Saying that is essentially also arguing that the far left is more incompatible with civil rights reforms, which again, I don't buy.
Yes, if Bernie had bothered to learn how to talk to a core Dem constituency, he could have done better. It likely would have cost him votes w/
his core constinuency, but that's a trade he had to make because his core constituency wasn't big enough. But that's different than just "talking more forcefully", that's putting in effort he never did to overcome the fact that he had lived in and represented the most rural, third most white state w/ the highest proportion of black residents incarcerated in the nation.
The problem is that a number of (white) people on the right and as we've seen, on the left, freak the fuck out when anything involving minorities is discussed. It overrides everything else for them. You can talk for 30 minutes about economics, jobs, healthcare. But spend 5 talking about BLM and that's all they're going to focus on. It actively upsets them. They cannot disassociate it from their own identity and experiences and talk about it in a rational manner.
Bernie actively and deliberately chose not to set those people off by just going full economic populist all the time and skirting those types of strong talks.
I'm actually not sure it was "Bernie or Trumpers" here so much as it was "Trump First, Bernie Second", if that makes sense? The WV primaries were filled w/ a lot of Trumpers throwing votes his way (cause it was late in the process and the GOP primary was over while the D one technically wasn't. I think this has been part of the toxic stew and crossover we've seen before/after the election.
