You suggest?
I'm in my 50s, have been voting since I was 18, and politically active my entire life.
And yes, a candidate's supporters make all the difference in my vote. No one supports a candidate in a vacuum. Obama would not be president if his supporters did not recognize each other and form a movement. Nor would any right wing candidate. be successful. It's you who has a sloppy, lazy understanding of democracy.
To repeat: I have always like Bernie Sanders as a senator (and representative, I've been supporting him with checks for a long time). I admire his views and his stances. I think he's idealistic and a little out of touch with younger people, especially. But I think he's honest and wise.
However, the movement that has built up around him is none of these things. It is full of people like you. Snotty, self-righteous, passive-aggressive (or just aggressive so often around here), and insistent on the truth and righteousness of your candidate and the venality and lack of substance of any other candidate, usually expressed in overtly misogynist terms that closely resemble the smearing of Ms. Clinton by the far right.
Here's how close I came -- I even discussed this on DU as I did it. I've been a registered independent since the 1990s, although generally I vote and donate to democrats. I live in New York, so HRC was my senator, along with the execrable Chuckie Schumer, with corrupt albatross Cuomo at the governor's chair and a deeply corrupt assembly in which the Dems are worse than the Rs, who are also terrible. I not only voted for Obama twice; I predicted his presidency in 2004, worked my ass off for him in 2008 (including direct canvassing in Indiana and North Carolina, two crucial states we won), and gave him every penny I was legally permitted to send ($5K). I sent him less in 2012 and didn't work for his campaign, which by then I had begun to grow disappointed in (but I still voted for him of course).
I also did my time in Zuccotti Park, unlike most of the faux-gressives supporting Bernie around here. And I voted in every midterm election, definitely unlike most Bernie supporters I meet.
This summer, as Bernie came out of the gate, I decided to re-register as a Democrat JUST SO I COULD VOTE FOR BERNIE against Hillary in the New York primary. I knew HRC would win both our primary and the general in New York, walking away. So I felt this was a safe protest vote against the problems I most certainly do have with HRC's relationship to Wall Street and the military/surveillance state (I personally don't find her any more dishonest or shrill than anyone else, or whatever misogynist bullshit people throw at her and not male politicians). I was proud to vote for Bernie as a symbolic gesture. I had no illusions that he would win.
He's still not gonna win. But he has acquired the vocal support of the kind of progressive I don't like, the ones who made a lot of noise for Obama and then didn't come out to vote in the midterms, the ones who find themselves always dissatisfied with good outcomes that aren't perfect, the ones who idiotically insisted on Elizabeth Warren running, the ones who churlishly supported Nader in 2000, the ones who live and die by political correctness and crazy conspiracy theories, the ones who listen to insane progressive talk shows like Thom Hartmann and think they are any more truthful than Rush Limbaugh, and the weird bro-culture progressives who have managed to support Bernie while being not even slightly introspective about their misogyny.
They are all over DU. They are here shouting down anyone who criticizes anything Bernie says, or praises Clinton or defends her against Republican-style blanket accusations of dishonesty and corruption. They are banning people from groups, and screaming about conspiracies.
So yes, I do look at the company a candidate keeps as a strong indication of how he or she is actually going to perform, what accountabilities her or she will feel if in office, and what political message his or her candidacy is intended to sell. It is remarkable to me that I seem to have misjudged Sanders all these years as a real old-school lefty progressive New York candidate who happened to live in Vermont. Turns out he's a demagogue, and his demagoguery appeals to people who are as fascist in their basic personalities as many Trump supporters are, caught in the same cult of personality right-or-wrong perspective that always fails eventually, and convinced that a socialist with a Brooklyn accent who has never accomplished anything particularly substantive in his years at the margins of federal politics (as much as I admire his anti-war votes, he never won anything) is either more qualified or a better option to be president of the US than a two term senator and 6 year secretary of state who has broadly the same progressive social values but represents a much more diverse set of views held by many more Americans than Bernie's (polls aside, no Americans are not going to decide they're actually socialist in the next year, that's progressive fantasy that worked really well for Presidents McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry, right?).
So, with no due respect because none is due, I say pfffft. Yes I do look at the supporters of a candidate in deciding whether to back her/him. Anyone who doesn't is stupid. No candidate gets anything done without a constituency. A candidate *is* his/her constituency once in office. You Sanders folks love to assert that you don't support Ms. Clinton because her constituency includes people you don't like - bankers, traders, CEOs, whatever conspiratorial views you have, these are American citizens too -- so you're calling the kettle black from the inside of a pot of judgment anyway.
Bernie almost had my protest vote in the New York primary. His supporters made me rethink that and decide to vote proudly for our first woman president, as much as I don't like some of her views. I like her supporters better.
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& Rec !!!
