Hillary Clinton Makes Acceptance Speech: ‘Bernie Or Bust’ Is Over, Where Will Bernie Sanders And His Supporters Head Next?
Hillary Clinton has made her acceptance speech, officially acknowledging the Democratic party’s nomination of her candidacy. Whilst Hillary Clinton’s nomination has been in the bag for a good few months, her rival Bernie Sanders’ campaign has continued and in the latter stages, without their candidate. However, there’s now no possible way for Sanders to clinch the party’s nomination, marking the end of the Bernie or Bust movement. So where will Bernie Sanders and his supporters head next?
According to Guardian, Hillary Clinton focused her acceptance speech on her Republican rival, Donald Trump and tearing his candidacy to pieces. Because of that, the Democratic candidate wasn’t left with an awful lot of time to unite her party and crucially entice the Bernie Sanders supporters that she’s lost. However, Clinton knows that she’s going to be hard pushed to attract both disenfranchised progressives from her own party and Republican voters who can’t see themselves voting for Trump.
So what is next for the Bernie or Bust movement? According to NBC News, Bernie Sanders all but abandoned his own campaign when he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton and urged his supporters to do the same. The move was seen as Sanders’ departure from his own political revolution, one that many of his supporters found difficult to stomach.
That being said, Bernie supporters were happy to hear that their candidate planned to continue to push a progressive agenda within the Democratic party. However, it’s now being reported that the independent senator from Vermont plans to leave the Democratic party following the 2016 presidential election and resume his status as an independent. Many of Sanders’ supporters will then be left within the Democratic party but without a credible voice to lead them.
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With the death of the Bernie or Bust movement, many of Sanders’ supporters are likely to either return to political inactivity or turn to a third-party candidate, which is likely to be the Green Party’s Jill Stein. However, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Hillary Clinton. The former Secretary of State has already accounted for the fact that she’ll never be able to win over many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters, which is why, as aforementioned, she’s now turning her focus to moderate Republican voters instead.
Whether they’ve been left supporting a candidate they know has no chance of winning or pushed out of politics altogether, Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party appears to have abandoned supporters of Bernie Sanders, and quite frankly, that was her only choice.
How @HillaryClinton and @POTUS are trying to save the Democratic establishment https://t.co/vjJIxGrNxd pic.twitter.com/5LlqrKyhAZ
— POLITICO (@politico) July 29, 2016
Of course, the ideal situation for Bernie supporters would now be for the candidate to run against Hillary Clinton as an independent. In fact, he’s even been invited to take Jill Stein’s spot on the Green Party ticket. However, Sanders has already endorsed Hillary Clinton, multiple times, making a platform for his candidacy against her all but non-existent. Instead, Sanders is likely to continue appearing at events in support of Hillary Clinton before the presidential election and then fall back into his spot as an independent senator from Vermont.
The Bernie or Bust movement is well and truly over, but it was Bernie Sanders himself who dealt the final blow.
[Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images]
