Sarah Silverman Democrats

Meet the Sarah Silverman Democrats

While “Bernie or Bust” grabs headlines, the vast majority of Sanders delegates are actually okay with Clinton.

By Michael Grunwald

Florkime Paye is one of those millennial voters who fell hard for Bernie Sanders. She was inspired by his rumpled realness, his sixties activism, his call for a revolution to empower the 99 percent of Americans who don’t have SuperPACs. As a black woman, a Liberian-American in Minneapolis, she was delighted to hear a candidate give voice to such unapologetically liberal political and racial values. By contrast, Hillary Clinton struck Paye as a conventional poll-tested pol, a calculating cog in the big-money system that Sanders threatened at its core.

So now Sanders wants her to vote for Clinton? The leader of the revolution says she should support a Wall Street-backed creature of Washington, just because Clinton happens to be a Democrat who happens to be facing Donald Trump?

Actually, yes, Paye is totally fine with that. She’s sad Sanders lost, but she recognizes he lost. She’s worried the Bernie-or-Bust dead-enders could help elect Trump, and she doubts they would dream of taking that risk if they had dark skin.

“If they really believed in what Bernie’s been fighting for, they’d want to make sure we don’t end up with a president who doesn’t think my life matters,” Paye says. “We have to recognize who the real enemy is.”

The big early story of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was the chaotic Feel the Bern rebellion, the NeverHillary lefties who booed and heckled Clinton supporters—including staunch progressives like Elizabeth Warren and even Sanders himself. But polls show the vast majority of Sanders voters will back Clinton in the fall, and as suggested by the raucous applause Tuesday night when Sanders formally turned his delegates over to Clinton during the roll-call vote, that seems true among the delegates here in Philadelphia as well. They aren’t providing dramatic TV footage like the holdouts with anti-Clinton placards and hey-hey-ho-ho drum circles, but they’re heeding their first-choice candidate’s advice to back the Democrat who agrees with them on most policy issues and isn’t Donald Trump.

You can call these Sanders-to-Clinton converts the Silverman Democrats, following the lead of comedian Sarah Silverman, a former Sanders supporter who said from the podium on Monday night: “Can I just say to the Bernie-or-Bust crowd, you’re being ridiculous.” Many of them share Silverman’s disgust for purists who refuse to back a potentially unreliable Democrat over an openly hostile Republican—purists who, as Paye noted, often seem to be privileged white guys.

“Some Bernie-or-Bust folks just can’t imagine how bad things could get,” says Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, an African-American Muslim who was one of the few Sanders supporters on Capitol Hill. “They can’t relate to the internment of Japanese-Americans, or segregation, or getting targeted for who they are. But I think 80 percent of us realize we have to do whatever we can to beat Trump.”

Sarah Knowlton, a 23-year-old with a nose ring from tiny Walkerton, Ind., is another passionate Sanders delegate, a waitress who dropped out of college because of debt, a feminist who has worked at an abortion clinic. She’s heartbroken about the primary, but she says voting for Clinton in the general will be a no-brainer, because she sees Trump and his running mate, Indiana governor Mike Pence, as vile reactionaries. She says she’s still upset that her “little-ass hometown” made national news when a local pizzeria said it wouldn’t cater a gay wedding, a controversy that prompted Pence to push a law allowing discrimination against gays, and she thinks a Trump-Pence administration would take that kind of culture war national.

“It’s sad, because victory was right at our fingertips and none of us are excited about Hillary,” Knowlton says. “But come on. This isn’t a tough choice.”

As Sanders himself said after getting booed at a Tuesday breakfast with California delegates: “It’s easy to boo. It’s harder to look your kids in the face who would be living with Donald Trump.” After all, Trump wants to repeal Obama’s health reforms, Wall Street reforms, and climate reforms, while Clinton wants to expand them. Clinton supports abortion rights, gun control, a higher minimum wage, and paid family leave, while Trump does not. And beyond policy, Trump has questioned Obama’s citizenship, attacked a judge’s Mexican heritage, mocked a disabled reporter, and made a litany of sexist comments over the years. Many Silverman Democrats are suspicious of Clinton’s ideological commitments and outraged by the recent Wikileaks disclosures, but they’re still bewildered that any Sanders voters wouldn’t do anything they could to prevent GOP control of Washington—especially after their hero helped secure an unusually progressive Democratic platform, and then asked them to back his former rival.

David Ball, a California film producer who served on the convention’s rules committee, is currently working on a sequel to the Night of the Living Dead. And he says the current battle inside his party reminds him of another horror movie.

“Bernie created Frankenstein’s monster, and now he can’t control it,” Ball says. “It’s scary, because this could end up with Trump in the White House.”

It could, because 2016 may be less about persuading swing voters than firing up the base, and even if most Sanders voters pull the lever for Clinton, it will matter a lot whether “most” means 80 percent or 90 percent. It will also matter a lot whether the holdouts are Obama voters whose votes Clinton will need to replicate the Obama victories, or whether they’re one-off protest voters who would never support a Democrat to the right of Sanders. In Philadelphia, most traditional Democrats in the Sanders camp said they would reluctantly support Clinton, while most of the Bernie-or-Bust types seemed like newcomers to the party.

David Berg, a vegan-eating, fedora-wearing, tongue-pierced bus driver and social justice activist in Salt Lake City, says 2016 was his third Democratic convention, but his first as a delegate on the inside rather than a protester on the outside. He cited a litany of reasons why no left-winger with a clean conscience could vote for Clinton, from her support for corporate agriculture to her friendship with Henry Kissinger to her vote for the war in Iraq, so he’s backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Then again, he voted for his former mayor Rocky Anderson for president in 2008 and 2012, and for Ralph Nader in 2000, so he’s not exactly a reliable Democrat. In fact, even though he described Trump as a “racist piece of shit,” he said a Trump presidency could be good for the Sanders revolution.

“Nothing could to more to get ordinary people engaged in politics,” he said.

Berg says that he loves Sanders, but Sanders doesn’t get to tell his fellow revolutionaries where the revolution goes next. Eric Sterling, an environmental activist from Illinois who had reworked a Clinton campaign “Love Trumps Hate” sign into “Redacted Emails Trump Love,” said that even though he thinks Clinton would be much better than Trump, the revolution isn’t about compromise.

“Bernie revved us up into a political frenzy and now he expects us to drop it?” Sterling asked. “That’s not going to happen.”

In any case, Sterling said, Clinton will probably win, and he isn’t interested in “helping her pad the margin.” That kind of talk unnerves Silverman Democrats like Ellison, who warned that progressives can’t afford to sit out the general just because they’re bitter about the primary. Politics, he said, is like sports, where you have to shake off the inevitable losses because tomorrow there’s another game, but some political newcomers in the Sanders movement haven’t had the chance to learn that every game isn’t the Super Bowl. At the end of the day, he said, they face a choice between a flawed Democrat who’s been an advocate for women and children and a dangerous Republican who’s been an advocate for himself, and they need to choose.

“People put their heart and soul into Bernie, and it’s not easy to face the fact that the other side got more votes,” Ellison said. “But, you know, deal with it.”

So what happens to the Sanders revolution after the Sanders candidacy? To the Silverman Democrats, the answer is exactly what Sanders has said: Pushing for Sanders-type politics at the federal, state, and local level. Pete Gertonson, a retired mail carrier in Lewiston, Idaho, will hold his nose and vote for Clinton, because he thinks Trump could be “the end of civilization,” but he’ll put his energy into his leadership of the Nez Perce County Democrats. He says he’s already been appointing Sanders supporters as precinct captains, and one of the plans to run for city council.

“The revolution,” Gertonson says, “is about the grass roots.”

Florkime Paye wants to keep the revolution going, too, not by waiting for another revolutionary to support for president, but by running for office herself. She said watching Sanders taught her liberal idealists can campaign on liberal ideals.

For now, though, she’s going to vote for Hillary Clinton, because elections are about choices, and while she won’t get her first choice, she thinks it’s a clear choice.

“Every election matters, but wow, this one really matters,” Paye says. “I don’t feel like I have the option of sitting it out.”