In DC the Sanders people are putting out a warning.
If billionaire capitalist Mike Bloomberg gains the Democratic nomination, or if they think the nod was stolen from them as they believe it was in 2016, they could split off from the Democrats into a third party.
They know, and they want lots of their fellow Democrats to know, that would ensure a Trump victory by splitting the anti-Trump vote into two parties and two candidates each with about 20-25% support.
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Third parties have denied presidencies before. Ralph Nader went a long way to keeping Al Gore out of office in 2000. Thanks Ralph, we owe you. Ross Perot’s Reform Party kept George Bush the Elder from being reelected in 1992. But the most serious example was in 1912.
Much like today’s Dem warning, but in a GOP context, the progressive (not like today’s “progressives”) wing of the GOP under former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt left the GOP and ran for president under the “Bull Moose” Party. The Republicans nominated incumbent President William Howard Taft. Ironically, Taft was Roosevelt’s hand- picked successor.
They split the GOP vote in the fall thus electing Woodrow Wilson, only the second Democrat to be elected since the civil war started over 50 years before and the worst president in the history of the United States.
If Sanders were to pull a Teddy, he could take Warren votes with him and would probably be a good bet to take major Democrat bastions like CA, IL, and NY in the Electoral College. Those states could also, given the split Trump opposition, fall to the GOP for the first time in a generation.
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The conventional Democrats would be crippled and would barely muster just over 100 votes in the Electoral College. It’s a doomsday scenario for the Democrats, maybe in the House and Senate too, and Sanders knows it.
He leaves them with two bad options: lose with him or lose without him. That may launch a scenario DC Democrat pros have been talking about for a while: give Sanders all he wants. Give him the nomination, watch him get clobbered in the fall, maybe taking the Democrat Congress with him, then blame him and hard-left for it all and purge them from the party.
Not a bad idea at all.
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