What I can’t get over and, frankly, is far more heartbreaking is a victimhood narrative that’s creeping into the Sanders campaign. Wild claims about people “throwing shade” and the Democratic Party rigging the system against him.

It’s one thing to shed light on the money-driven reality of our election system. It’s quite another to blame all of the ills that befall you and your supporters on a rigged reality. That’s a lame justification for losing.

Bernie Sanders is not a victim. He is a man from the homogenous state of Vermont who has spent decades in a well-paid job in Congress.

...he hasn’t had to deal with negative advertisements – from the left or the right – and, until now, he has largely escaped the crush of negative media coverage that so engulfed Clinton, Trump and former Republican presidential candidates.

Sanders’ supporters aren’t victims either. Nor are they based on the groups most Americans consider disenfranchised minorities in this country – people who are genuinely victims of a rigged system or people who can feasibly lay claim to being victims.

According to exit poll data, Sanders supporters overwhelmingly skew young, white and male, many of them college-educated. Bernie Bros do exist in droves. Clinton’s supporters, by comparison, encompass vast numbers of everyone else – including blacks, Latinos and women, many of them poor and marginalized.


Coincidentally, those are some of the same minority groups Sanders professes to support.

Anyone who is really a victim of a rigged system – black people who get chewed up and spit out by the criminal justice system, women still fighting for equal pay – wouldn’t dare threaten to stay home in November if Clinton gets the nomination. They wouldn’t dare let Trump take the presidency.

Yet, according to a McClatchy-Marist poll, 25 percent of Sanders supporters nationwide said they would not support Clinton in the general election if she becomes the nominee. Real victims couldn’t afford to do that.